Development of the Business Analysis

Introduction

It is common knowledge that no one thing was created as we know it now. All things went and keep going through some development process.

Professions are no exception and most of us remember from the school the story about labor history.

Let’s bring back that knowledge.

So, from the very beginning, some actions showed up which brought some value to people. Let it be a shoemaker, for instance. From the time of the first human beings, the need for shoes was significant and everyone wrapped their feet with animal skin. They did their best to survive. I would mark this time as “Survival”.

Then, it was noticed that the particular tribesmen did that definitely better than others. Thus, the division of labour started and the role of a cobbler was born. The craft of shoemaking was born. Each family, community, tribe and so had special people to do this work. Let me call this stage the “Emergence of craft”.

Over time, an abundance of exceptional experts has risen to prominence, establishing their own schools of the craft and developing distinctive techniques that have been handed down through generations. Consequently, a fresh wave of “Masters” has emerged, each boasting valuable knowledge and expertise uniquely their own. Many independent approaches and diverse “best practices” were being developed at this stage for centuries.

However, separate masters and their assistants couldn’t cover a growing demand, which led to the next stage: machines were invented, and Industrialization broke into everybody’s life. Mass production forced people to organize processes and start on unification and standardization. I would call this stage “Standardization”.

At this point, it seems that it’s the top of the development of any profession, but it’s not so. To win the customer’s attention and go up the market, podiatrists got involved in the design and engineering of the shoe and that meant the start of a new “Scientific” level. After the technological revolution, new horizons were opened up, including the potential for automating shoe production. In other words, development never stops, the further, the more.

The same way was gone by military affairs and people now study military science in Universities to become professional soldiers or military.

The same way was gone by management and there are now Management Systems Standards (MSS). In general, most professions could be named here.

To give more examples, we can recall such standards as IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) and GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) in accounting.

Applying to Business Analysis

Now I invite you to apply that to Business analysis. Where is it now? Let me share my reflections.

Although some small companies and project teams still don’t have the separate role of a Business analyst, which corresponds to the “Survive” stage, the vast majority of projects have already understood the benefits of having a separate role of a Business analyst. So, the first two stages are definitely passed.

What’s more, we also can tell that there are a lot of authors who have written their stories of success and try to find the proper way to do business analysis. Thus, “Software Requirements” by K. Wiegers and “Writing Effective Use Cases” by A. Cockburn are prominent representatives of that process. If you visit Amazon and search for “Requirements”, you will see a huge number of authors who provide you with their view of the best method to create the best requirements.

At the same time, we have had successful attempts to standardize all personal approaches. The most famous of them are:

IIBA — BABOK: A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge® (BABOK® Guide): 3

International Institute of Business Analysis™ | IIBA®

IREB — Requirements Engineering Fundamentals: A Study Guide for the Certified Professional for Requirements Engineering Exam — Foundation Level / IREB compliant

Home - IREB - International Requirements Engineering Board

BSC — “Business Analysis” by Debra Paul, James Cadle, Malcolm Eva, Craig Rollason, Jonathan Hunsley and “Business Analyst. Careers in business analysis” by Adrian Reed

Business analysis certifications | BCS

This proves that the “Masters” stage has been passed and the “Standardization” stage is being reached.

The next stage is to base the Business analysis on science. Here I see a noticeable movement: many authors try to connect and use scientific knowledge about memory, attention, and psychology in Business analysis work and techniques. A vivid example is Ukrainian Business analyst and BABOK ambassador Denys Gobov who cares about sphere development in the direction of science and conducts scientific research.

In my eyes, all of that explicitly demonstrates the general direction of Business analysis development as a profession and its speed. It changes the game and compels Business analysts to improve their hard and soft skills to keep up.

Thus, we have come to the Business analysts, to the question of how this lightning-speed development impacts them(BAs) as professionals.

First of all, if we look at Business analysts and their knowledge foundation now, there are a huge number of materials, books, and institutions such as IIBA and others that provide Business analysts with theoretical knowledge and practice sharing. On top of that, a growing number of courses and training appear allowing more specialists to find their feet and learn the ropes. In other words, now specialists have a wide range of educational options in comparison with those who started 15 or 10 years ago. That allows me to say that nowadays, Business analysts are not people who do their first step without any theoretical preparation or knowledge and who will be forced, if not to say have been forced considering all mentioned above, to learn further to be competitive at the job market.

What standards and their benefits are

Having said that the current situation makes Business analysts develop themselves to keep up with the general development of the profession, let’s move on to the standards. I am a CBAP, so all my thoughts further are based on the IIBA standards.

So, what are standards? Why are they needed? What are they useful for?

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, standards are a level of quality or a pattern or model that is generally accepted.

According to Collins Dictionary, a standard is a level of quality or achievement, especially a level that is thought to be acceptable.

That means, that standards are all about high-quality processes and as a consequence, effective results.

Besides that, I would point out such benefits of standards implementation:

1. Standards are not just theory not connected to the practice and reality. It is a myth spreading through the post-Sovit Union countries because of the Soviet Union education system when the theory wasn’t updated to practice on time when it was a reality that theory lagged behind the practice. Now we have another situation, Business analysis is a young profession and its first standards are created by practicing. IIBA is on track and makes updates constantly.
2. When you have your own approach to do your work and follow it all the time, it might limit you. Why? Because you use only your experience, only a certain set of techniques. Standards in comparison are based on the experience of a lot of professionals and consider a wide number of cases.
3. When you face a different project or its context that you haven’t faced before, you need time to make up with an approach, appropriate techniques and so on. Standards provide you with an understanding of how to tackle any situation. They give you all-purpose directions and guidelines that allow you to not spend time inventing a bicycle and not face problems that other professionals faced and considered them in standards.
4. Every day a BA faces a lot of distinct tasks, needs and issues, which all require different approaches. Using the only way to work on all types of needs and tasks is just not effective and sometimes might make you stuck. Standards provide you with a broad variety of approaches, methods and techniques so that you can select the most effective and efficient. When you know different ways to do your work, you can effectively manage them, you can combine them, can find out the most effective and efficient one. And unfortunately, you cannot, when you know and use a limited number of methods.
5. Standards might be eyes opening. You can find tasks that you never have thought about, but find them efficient when have tried them.
6. Standards might attract your attention to things you have heard about but didn’t see handy for your work, team and project.
7. Standards help to justify why some tasks or steps or techniques are needed, and what the consequences are if a BA skips them. It allows the BA to negotiate regarding their activities and contribute to the processes of their project.
8. Standards make the process of learning easier. It means, that a junior BA can find all tasks, steps, and rules in one place, where information is well-organised and it makes the learning process structured and efficient, less time-consuming in comparison with reading a lot of sources of Business Analysis materials and try to implement them chaotically. On top of that, there might be contradictions between different sources, so Standards save the junior’s time and allow them to learn and implement at a comfortable speed.
9. Standards make the process of teaching easier. Justification is too close to the previous one, so let’s skip repeating.
10. Standards help to define how to differentiate the professional level of each Business analyst and build a customized professional matrix for the particular organisation.

To summarize this part of my thoughts I would like to highlight that I don’t have the intention to devalue work not based on standards.

Each Business analyst, project, team, and organization has different approaches to work, different numbers and methods and techniques in use, and different goals. It doesn’t mean that some are better or others are worse. There is no wrong or right. It’s not black and white.

It’s just about what is more efficient.

In other words, if an organization needs to support some small system and make minor improvements from time to time, it’s efficient to have a business analysis role as a part of the specific specialist’s work. It’s not reasonable to hire an IT department of staff. On the other hand, if an organization is growing, it might be more efficient to hire a team of IT specialists and a Business analyst among them. In this case, it’s efficient to use a narrow range of skills and techniques as the environment allows them to be in the context daily and requires less analysis as many things are familiar. What’s more, quite often in such teams it’s quicker to use just words to complete a task. So the question about documented requirements seems to be ridiculous and doesn’t cause problems, as people work longer than systems change.

Finally, it’s quite different when we talk about a professional IT team that plays the 3d party contractor. The context here seems alien, needs vague and it’s not efficient to work the same way as at the first or second organization because too many things might go belly up and time and money will be lost. That’s why in this context more skills are required to elicit the root causes of a need and the need itself (not the consequences of a problem or something that is supposed to resolve this problem). The more techniques that should be used to analyze the need comprehensively, the more experience and expertise are required to put all details in the big picture and then go down to details, and then again go up to fully convey the idea and requirements. Additionally, all those elicited and structured things should be shared with all stakeholders including the development team. So, at this level, it’s efficient to hire professional people whose work is based on standards.