Catch a buzz from seeing the big picture

From the very beginning of my career as a Business analyst, I have always felt a burning need to see the big picture. I mean, having received new requirements, I always started investigating the place of this new feature in the whole solution or system if it had been implemented. What does this new functionality impact, or how does it correlate or change other parts of the solution(a system)? On top of that, I was eager to see “general” requirements, business rules, user flows, data flows, and all entities and their connections beforehand. Only after all of these things are captured, modeled, and analyzed, I can say they are known and could be used for the decomposition to the User stories level.

Then, BABOK happened to me 😁 and thus this obtained the name “Strategy analysis”.

Why am I writing about this? Because in my practice I often face the fact, that this step becomes skipped and considered excessive, as all these things are obvious and aren’t worth spending time on them. Moreover, this might be considered a “Waterfall“ approach and be bypassed by the tenth road.

For that reason, I would like to talk about what Strategy analysis is, whether it relates to the specific development approach, and what the consequences are of omitting it.

To begin, I would like to look at the meaning of this activity. So, Strategy is a chosen approach to apply the capabilities in hand to reach a desired set of goals or objectives.

In other words, it’s a way we select to satisfy stakeholders’ needs with consideration of the context of the project. Consequently, Strategy analysis is the activity of understanding the need, the current and future states, the GAPs between them, context of all of them, to come up with solutions that bring value, choose the best one, and define a Scope.

As a result of this step, we can have such artifacts as Product vision, Product design, Product Roadmap, Delivery Plan, Product Scope, or others. You see, it’s familiar enough to each BA, but maybe with another name, for example, Design phase or something like that.

Here is a place to move on to the next point: Does it seem like belonging to only one of Agile or Waterfall? I hope, your answer is “No, it doesn’t “. Definitely, regardless of the development approach, there is a need to understand such things as Need, Solution, and Scope. Sometimes, if we are talking about large systems, the design stage might take a significant amount of time and this may make you think and mix that with Waterfall. To be clear, a team working with Agile will start development once the scope and priorities are known, and requirements for each feature will be detailed just before it is supposed to be taken into development. On the other hand, the team working with Waterfall will start development, when all features requirements are finished.

Finally, what if we skip this phase? As the big picture is not elaborated and not captured anywhere because it looks like to be obvious to everyone, we just start from the first feature that seems to be the first or even consider some dependencies or priorities off the top of our heads. What is further? Let’s see:

1. We don’t see the big picture and all functionality, that’s why each piece of work is isolated and there is no explicit connection to the other features. It impacts decisions to be made. It impacts the solutions to be selected. It impacts coherence to be created.
2. Working on the next features we incrementally discover the meaning and connections of ongoing parts with previous ones. More often than not, it pushes the changes to them. The more the scale of the project, the more changes and needs to review and rework what has been done. In the end, we might end up in a situation where we are drowned in the changes. Here I would stop for a minute to say that this statement doesn’t have its purpose to mark changes as something that we need to avoid at any cost. Changes, that appear as a result of a new vision of how to reach the goal with more value are a treasure, but not those which are a result of not understanding the product in a holistic way.
3. We face up to the fact that we are at risk of not meeting deadlines, we are forced to overtime, and the pressure is growing.

In contrast, paying appropriate attention to this stage supplies a team with a map, gives them the ability to make better decisions, feel comfortable and inspired, and proceed without wasting time.

To finish, I would like you to think about a trip without a planned route. Or to think about the difference between what you see when you are staying on the top of a mountain and seeing everything from the helicopter view or when you are at the bottom of the mountain.

I call you to use this step even for a small feature. I call you to look at the map before you hit the road. I call you to catch a buzz from seeing the big picture and your project itinerary.