Adoption
The Business Analysis Assessment Framework
Evaluating an Organization's Business Analysis Capabilities
The Business Analysis Capabilities Assessment is a framework for evaluating the current state of an organization’s ability to execute a business automation effort from and end-to-end perspective.. The evaluation examines an organization’s capabilities from a wide-range of perspectives to help evaluate the system dynamics that contribute to any issues. In addition, the assessment examines a range of specific activities in order to provide insight into immediately actionable points of intervention.
The primary purpose of the assessment is to support organizations’ efforts to gain greater value out of their existing expenditures in business automation. The assessment draws upon existing knowledge derived from documented practices by various professional and standards organizations as well as years of pragmatic experience with Enterprise Agility’s own Business Solution Specification Framework. The BSSF is a proven approach that has been successfully followed by major corporations and which provide a formal framework defining how to relate business rules to other business specification elements.
The assessment focuses on the Solution Analysis effort that is the key responsibility of Business Analysts. However, in order to provide a comprehensive evaluation of how the Solution Analysis effort is impacted by other factors the assessment also examines: Stakeholder Alignment, Solution Analysis, Initiative Management, Communication and Resource Development.
The comprehensive nature of the Business Analysis Capability Assessment provides a framework that can be adapted to focus on the particular needs of each organization.
What is in the Business Analysis Capability Assessment?
- Stakeholder Alignment
- Solution Analysis
- Initiative Management
- Communication
- Resource Development
Stakeholder alignment is essential to ensure that the automation deliverable provides meaningful business value. A well aligned organization is able to identify how decisions made in the development of a business automation solution support specific business objectives.
Solution analysis is the key skill set of an organization’s business automation team. These skills provide an organization with the ability to describe a business level mechanism that supports the delivery of process improvements or enables new business capabilities via automation technology.
Reviews how an organization executes initiatives in order to assure that they deliver on-time and on-budget while balancing various conflicting demands. This involves the development of standard project plans, risk, issue and defect management, as well as the ability to link portfolio, program and project goals.
Effective communication between levels and within levels of an organization is important to ensuring alignment of views and to reinforce shared values. An organization that communicates effectively is able to minimize misunderstandings and promote teamwork by clearly identifying risk and recognizing achievement.
Reviews how an organization helps hire, retain and develop personnel with the skills required to support their business automation analysis efforts. This involves examining the skills required for various types of projects, creating job descriptions that incorporate these skill sets and providing training to develop targeted skills.