The BATimes published in late 2008 an article [1] about trends in Business Analysis (BA) and Project Management (PM) for 2009.The article highlighted the following points:
- Convergence of PM and BA roles
- Greater emphasis on requirements in project management
- Change in requirements approaches
- Increased use of “Agile” approach and techniques
- BABOK continuing to have an impact
- Business Intelligence (BI) continues to grow
- Less budget for conferences and training
Before any further comment on these statements, let’s turn back to the past and see how BA has evolved in the last half century [2].
In the 1960’s a software crisis started. This crisis has several origins. First, the computers were becoming more and more complex and powerful. As a consequence, software was becoming more and more complex. At this time, software engineers were not aware about business needs, needed to spend a lot of time learning new upcoming programming languages, tried to organize their development teams… Lots of projects failed, and finding solutions took a while. During this crisis, engineers understood that software development is a complex task, and figured out later that there is no single silver bullet that will address the issues faced in developing software. Still in the 60’s, the need for BAs in software projects became essential.
Defining the role of the BA has been a long process, and another crisis, in the early 2000’s, changed the industry. This crisis brought the generalization of IT outsourcing. Since then, the main trend regarding the organization of labor in IT projects has consisted of the elaboration of teams on vertical capabilities rather than horizontal. This means that instead of having a team of BAs, a team of developers, a team of testers, the idea of using cross functional teams in IT projects is now widely accepted.
Concerning the business analyst, we can find a good definition in the article “What is a business analyst” [3]. This article says that a BA is a communicator, facilitator, subject matter expert, designer, trainer, planner, manager… Indeed, the BA is in contact with all the participants of an IT project, going from the client to the final user, going from the project manager to the test manager. Back in the 60’s, nobody in an IT project developed the business side of projects. Development teams were all coming from engineering without business awareness. Today’s business analysts must be more versatile, keeping technical skills and being aware about commercial matters and business processes.
What about the future?
Back to our BATimes article [1], the skills required to be a BA have not change. The article just mentions a refinement in the role of the BA and the trend for emerging techniques.
In the last 50 years, the BA community has not been very well organized. Many techniques have been tried, experienced, combined, and tuned. The formal organization of the BA community started in 2003 with the creation of the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) [4]. With this institute, some BAs started working on the “Body of Knowledge” (BABOK), which gathers the commonly used techniques. We expect this book to be more and more utilized by the BA community. We expect in particular an increased use of “Agile” techniques.
On Agile projects the primary role of the BA is to facilitate clear requirements, rather than document them or elicit them. The Business Analysts becomes more people focused and he is more involved in understanding the drivers, values and context of the business requirements than the details of the requirements themselves. Communication and a clear transmission of the requirements to the development team become crucial.
So BAs will have to provide their analysis using more graphical explanations, and less text based documents. BAs will have to refine as well their system knowledge so as to be able to draw out functional requirements from the product owner and if necessary translate them into more technical language for developers.
We expect also for 2009 a growth of Business Intelligence needs.
Business Intelligence theory looks at certain factors to make high quality decisions. These factors include customers, competitors, business partners, economic environment and internal operations. Relying on this analysis Business Intelligence can help BAs focusing on true business requirements and anticipating how clients will use their data.
At CTP we keep abreast of the latest techniques concerning business analysis and project management in order to offer the solution that better fits our customer needs. That gives us an edge in the provision of top class advisory services to our clients.
References:
[1] BATimes, Trends in Business Analysis and Project Management to watch for in 2009, E. Larson and R. Larson, December 2008
[2] Businessanalyst.wikia.com, Business Analysis: a potted history, unknown author, March 2007
[3] Businessanalyst.wikia.com, What is a business analyst, unknown author, December 2006
[4] International Institute of Business Analysis http://www.theiiba.org/
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