Goal of Business Analysts

Reduce waste and complete projects on time

Project delays are costly in three different dimensions:

* Project costs – For every month of delay, the project team continues to rack up costs and expenses. When a large part of the development team has been outsourced, the costs will start to add up quickly and are very visible. For internal resources, the costs of delays are not as readily apparent as labor costs are essentially ‘fixed’ costs.

* Opportunity costs – Opportunity costs come in two flavors – lost revenue and unrealized expense reductions. Some projects are specifically undertaken with the purpose of driving new or additional revenues to the bottom line. For every month of delay, a company foregoes a month of this new revenue stream. The purpose of other projects is to improve efficiencies and reduce costs. Again, each month of failure postpones the realization of these expense reductions by another month. In the vast majority of cases, these opportunities are never captured or analyzed, resulting in misleading ROI calculations. Of the two opportunity costs, the lost revenue is the most egregious – and the impacts are greater and longer lasting.

Improve project efficiency

Efficiency can be achieved in two somewhat related dimensions – by reducing rework or extra work needed in a project to fix errors due to incomplete or missing requirements and by shortening project length.

Rework is one of the largest headaches facing CIOs and it has become so common at many organizations that it is actually built into the project budget and timeline. Estimates of rework on typical projects ranges between 20% and 30% of total project budget. Rework impacts the entire software development process from definition to coding and testing.

One of the reasons for rework is that the requirements gathering and definition process is broken in most organizations and there is a huge disconnect between the business and technical sides of a project. While various technical solutions have helped make developers, coders and testers more efficient, very few solutions have been targeted at the business analysts who are tasked with delivering the requirements

Shortening project length produces two outcomes. For every month that a project can be shortened, the cost of the project resources can be avoided and released to work on other projects. This actually produces a double-whammy effect – savings on the current project and accelerating the start of future projects resulting in more project output. The other side of this equation is to achieve project benefits faster.

It does not matter whether the project benefits are based on revenue enhancements or cost reductions, shorter projects mean benefits will be reached faster. Similar to what was already discussed earlier for the line of business executives, being able to reap the project benefits earlier can produce very large returns.

Document the right requirements

Business Analysts want to make sure that they define the application in a way that meets the end-users’ needs. Essentially, they want to define the right application. This means that they must document the right requirements through listening carefully to ‘customer’ feedback, and by delivering a complete set of clear requirements to the technical architects and coders who will write the program. If a business analyst has limited tools or skills to help him elicit the right requirements, then the chances are fairly high that he will end up documenting requirements that will not be used or that will need to be re-written – resulting in rework as discussed above.

The time wasted to document unnecessary requirements not only impacts the business analyst, it also impacts the rest of the development cycle. Coders need to generate application code to perform these unnecessary requirements and testers need to make sure that the unwanted features actually work as documented and coded. Experts estimate that 10% to 40% of the features in new software applications are unnecessary or go unused. Being able to reduce the amount of these extra features by even one-third can result in significant savings.

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