A Day as a Business Analyst

  I work as a Business analyst in a Company which has a separate department to provides IT solutions for their own process improvements. Today my work started with a standup meeting where I was assigned to a small project. They gave me a document with some minimal information about the work they do and difficulties they are facing. After analyzing that document I got a mail to conduct an Interview with the key stakeholders to get more information and requirements.

Preparation of Key Stakeholders:

Here the project is to create a common platform between two departments hence, I’ve listed out the stakeholders as Managers of both the Departments, T.Ls and employees involved in that process. As the stakeholders involved in it are less in number I’ve chosen Interview technique to understand their process and elicit the requirements as well.

Interview with the T.L involved in the process:

He briefed out the process that they check the documents processed by the Production department and prepare a report which consists of the list of Errors they detected, The Employees who committed that errors and the relevant  comment. Excel sheets are using to prepare this Report and will be sent to the Production department through mails. The Production Department Tem leads forwards that report to all employees and asks for the explanation from their end. The employees send their comment to every Observation reported to them to their respective Team Leads. The Team Leads again consolidates all those comments with the help of excel and sent to the EQA team. EQA team go through those comments and depends on the explanation provided by the employee they prepare another report with Final Comment as Error or No Error or Suggestion but Corrections required or Further Discussion needed.

Difficulties identified:

Time taking to Prepare the reports every time using excel.

Maintaining data in for certain period is difficult due to huge data.

Report generation will be difficult.

Consolidating employee Comments every time is a tough task for T.Ls

Solution:

After noting down all the difficulties we had a meeting with the developer and came up with an Application based solution. With this application, the EQA department people can enter the List of Observations identified with their comment. The employees of the Production department also have an access to this application and check if any observations reported to them with their Employee id. An employee comment box also provided to enter their comment for respective observation. The EQA people can also view those comment and updated the final comment there itself. Report generation option also gives to take report based on certain criteria depends on requirement. Finally, a Demo session was conducted with the Team Leads and the Managers of Both  Departments with a Prototype.