Resources for Business Analysts

As I look back to the struggles I was having up to October, it’s amazing to me to think of the difficulties we were having with capturing a holistic view of the project space. We had our goals and objectives in our Vision document, our business requirements in the form of use cases, business rules and supplemental specs, our user interaction design in the form of wire frames, and process flows for those parts of the solution that involve process redesign, data dictionaries, a glossary and tons of other miscellaneous artifacts here and there. It was a mess and so difficult to get a good view of the whole picture, let alone be able to take different views of the same information.

But since we were able to use Holistic View, we’ve been able to enter all of these various forms of information, tie them together to take a whole view of the problem, the requirements and the whole solution: process as well as technology. We’re finally at the point where we can demonstrate to stakeholders, business owners as well as technology, just what it is that we’re trying to solve, what we need to solve it, and how we’re going to break that solution into its technology, process and organizational change elements. We’re able to have much better conversations with all the parties, to quickly move one element of an event flow from process change to technology, get an estimate from technology and make a better decision on cost versus benefit. It’s amazing to see the dynamics change in a meeting when we’re able to model a process and visualize which parts are manual, which parts are automated, and flip these with a mere drag and drop.

One of my favorite features is the ability to turn the system from black box for conversations with business stakeholders, to white box for technical design discussions. As you move from black to gray to white, it mirrors perfectly the different levels of discussion as we move from requirements to design to implementation. And that final, white-box view helps us automate outputs to update our application and business architectures.

We’re no longer having three discussions at once while all thinking that we’re talking about the same thing. We can visualize as well as create text documents. We can have more productive discussions of the boundaries of technology versus process, and, in the end, make better decisions. We’re going to have much better projects from now on.