COEPD – Center of Excellence for Professional Development Happy Learning
Business Analysis planning is about defining and planning of business Analysis approach, governance and monitoring. It describes how to improve business analysis performance and produces outputs that are the guidelines to other tasks.
- Plan Business Analysis Approach
It is about defining the appropriate method to conduct business analysis activities on a given initiative.
Input at this stage is Business Need that business analyst has understood from the stakeholders and the output will be BA Approach in the form of a document.
It consists of:
- Planning Approach – Defining preferred SDLC methodology (Adaptive or Predictive)
- Formalities and level of details of Business Analysis Deliverables – Deliverables of BA are defined and the efforts required against those deliverables are calculated.
- Business Analysis Activities – Describes the activities to be done based on the chosen software development methodology.
Waterfall model – writing BRD, FRD, SRS documents, RTM, user manual, designing UML diagrams, Testing planning and execution, etc
Agile – Defining Product Backlog, sprint backlog, planning meetings, product grooming meeting, Sprint retrospective, Sprint Review
- Timelines – It is about when will the BA activities be performed and their duration. Is it phase wise or iterative execution. When is the BA going to write BRD, FRD, use cases, or create Product Backlog, start iteration activities.
- Complexity & Risks – describes risks with respect to the BA activities. What if BA is not having the domain knowledge, what if he doesn’t get support from stakeholders.
- Acceptance – It is the acceptance of BA approach formally/ structured.
- Plan Stakeholder Engagement
Plan an approach to have an effective continued relationship with the stakeholders. It is to identify stakeholders, analyse their characteristics, define best collaboration approach.
Input at this stage is BA Needs, BA approach and Output will be Stakeholder engagement approach document
It consists of:
- Perform Stakeholder Analysis – Finding different stakeholder roles, their attitudes towards the project, decision making authority and level of power or influence, stakeholder location, communication Preference (Formal/ Informal)
E.g.
- Who will take part in requirement prioritization/ negotiation
- Who is the approver of BRD and other documents
- Who will attend the scrum review meetings?
- Status update email is to be sent to whom?
- Define Stakeholder Collaboration – A planned activity to ensure stakeholder’s engagement with the change initiative
- Stakeholder Communication Needs – What and how a stakeholder needs to be communicated through the project
- Plan BA Governance
It defines how decisions are taken about change control, reviews, prioritization, and approvals.
Input at this stage is BA Approach, Stakeholder Engagement Approach and Output will be Governance Approach documents for below 4 tasks:
- Decision Making – A stakeholder may be an approver or a reviewer of decision or be providing input to decision making.
- Change Control Process – It involves defining the process of requesting, documenting and authorizing change request – impact analysis and estimation of changes
- Plan prioritization approach – How the prioritization will be decided
- Plan for approvals – Plan to have an appropriate approval process for a change
- Plan BA information Management Approach
Comprises of the information that the business analyst elicits, create, compile and disseminate in the course of performing Business analysis.
E.g.: models, scope statements, stakeholder concerns, elicitation results, requirements, designs, solution options, requirements, designs, user stories, formal requirement documents, functioning prototypes, etc.
The purpose of this approach is to define how business analysis information will be stored, organized and accessed, level of detailing, relationships.
Input is BA Approach, Stakeholder Engagement Approach, Governance Approach and Output Information Management Approach
Following are the elements of this approach:
- Organization of BA information – BA information is organized for its effective use and accessed based on
- Access and usage need of stakeholders
- Size and complexity of change
- Level of Abstraction – Detailing of BA information is decided on stakeholder’s role and impotence of the topic
- Plan traceability Approach – BA plans the traceability approach based on
- Complexity of domain
- Organizational standards, requirements risk, regulatory requirements
- Costs and benefits of traceability
- Identify Business Analysis Performance Improvement
The purpose of this approach is to assess business analysis work and identify improvement areas, define performance measures, conduct analysis of data & take actions to improve.
Input is Performance Objective, BA approach
Output will be Business Analysis Performance Assessment
Following are the elements of this approach:
- Performance Analysis – Performance analysis is conducted to ensure effective business analysis work. This can be done through:
- Stakeholder interviews
- Customer satisfaction index
- Comparing with set parameters
- Assessment measures – Appropriate measures need to be identified to ensure effective performance analysis. Measure could be qualitative and quantitative.
- Analyse results – Actual measurement data is compared against the defined measures
Recommend action for improvement – Based on the gaps, preventive or corrective action can be taken
