Question: What information do you need in your job?
I have been talking to a lot of fellow Business Analysts in the past couple of years, and have some ideas of the kinds of challenges they face in finding information about their jobs. In this blog, the papers, and the Tip of the Week list, I have provided some answers to questions I am commonly asked.
I want to be more effective at providing you the information you need.
Because I want to help out more people, I’m asking you to help me by answering a couple of questions.
Please post your answers as comments to this post. You will see a comment link in the header of this post. Click that link to find the comment box.
Thank you!
Geri
- Assuming you are working as a Business Analyst, what kind of information do you need in your job? Where do you go to look for that information?
- If you are not working as a Business Analyst, but want to be, what kind of information do you need to prepare to be a Business Analyst? Where do you go to look for that information?
For clarification, imagine that there is somewhere a database of information you could access to do your job. What would you put in that database? While domain specific knowledge (insurance, finance) would be useful, I am more interested in finding out more basic information that any Business Analyst would need to know.
Survey answers below:
I’m not really a BA as I’m in charge of a couple of teams including the Information Technology Training Team. As the head of IT Education and someone who used to work in a number of IT organizations (so old that I used to do BA work with Yourdon, DFD’s, Struture Charts and Data Dictionaries)I have followed BA work fairly closely. I did just finish a project to gather requirements for a new Learning Mangement System for the company, gathering requirements and making recommendations for the purchase of the system.
The challenge that I have had in the past on a couple of projects and encountered again for this project is: How to gather the hidden requirements of a senior VP, who is the project sponsor, when they say that they are delegating to the project manager but do not allow the project manager to make any decisions without going back to the sponsor for approval. The sponsor will not identify any requirements up front and only looks at deliverables when it’s the hour before they are due. Then the VP changes anything that they want without regard to the end users and any gathered requirements form them. Working only from their point of view. I guess this is a question of how best to go after hidden requirements.
I think the main problem is not lacking information, but finding it easily. Most businesses I have been at – small or large – really have no organized document repository outside of electronic directories. So, if a co-worker says ‘you’ll want to look at the specs for xxx to give you background in writing your specs,’ it’s up to the user, who may never have been on that project, to find out where this document is located and what it may be titled.
Having said this, here are a few responses to your post. Mine are decidedly from the IT side.
– updated specs (many times, specs are not kept current)
– mapping documents
– standard templates (traceability matrix, use cases, etc.)
– chart and/or documentation of existing applications (including one’s own, if any of it has already been implemented)
– access to appropriate software to do job (Visio, Photoshop for mockups, etc.)
– glossary of business analysis terminology
Other helpful items:
– Directory of Primary SMEs per application and/or department
– Interview tips reference sheet
We also are testers where I work, so something documenting the different testing types would be beneficial, as well as test plan and test case templates. If you use automated testing, scripts should be available for re-use.
I would agree with Eve. I think the greatest problem with BA work is retention of information of previous projects information.
In addition, to the list Eve provided I would also include items such as emails, meeting minutes should be retained in some repository.
I would also want a tool that could show me the relationships between the various information source such as Microsoft Outlook’s journal function to show a time line of creation and a simple version history. Maybe a tool such as subversion or JIRA to retain the versions, decisions and issues for Knowledge retention.
An application I have looked at using is Personal Brain http://www.thebrain.com/ to contain all of this information and represent the relationship between the data/information.