ABSTRACT
At several points, this volume has alluded to business analysis as a role within the project management office (PMO). The business analyst is integral to project delivery and continuous process improvement — both among the customers served by the IT organization and within IT itself. In fact, changes within the enterprise and IT go hand-in-hand. Almost invariably, when new technologies are added to established or emerging business practices, those processes must change to reap the full benefit of IT enablement. Similarly, the IT organization must adapt itself to the additional products and services in its portfolio of deliverables. Within this grand scheme, the business analyst’s role supports the design, development, and implementation of change in a number of ways:
Documenting existing business processes and customer uses of IT Developing and documenting process flows in terms of a particular
technology-enabled solutions (i.e., functional specifications) Developing project business and functional specifications and assist-
ing in the drafting of technical specifications Working with the project manager to develop statements of work,
project schedules, deliverable descriptions, issue tracking documents, and management reports
Preparing test scripts and quality assurance scenarios for the testing and release management processes
Facilitating and supporting business process reengineering within customer departments and perhaps within the IT organization itself
Key to this work is gathering knowledge about how the enterprise serves its customers. As an outcome of this process, business/IT project teams can establish the particulars for reengineering and IT-enablement undertakings. Look around your organization and you will see that many of your colleagues are regularly engaged in the collection and analysis of customer business requirements. For instance, service delivery personnel must gather customer requirements for their SLAs and performance measures. Project management teams get deeply involved in the documentation of business requirements as part of the analysis and design phases of any project. Thus, the process of business requirements gathering is important to most of us in IT. On the one hand, the quality of this work determines how well you understand your customer’s need for and commitment to process change; on the other hand, the effort establishes the metrics for customer satisfaction in the delivery of the IT systems that will help to enable those process changes. By adhering to a set of thorough and accurate customer requirements, IT personnel will more properly align product and service delivery with their customers’ needs and expectations.
