Business Analysis takes Nine Months

It takes time for the system integration vendor to figure out the complexities of the client's business to determine the real opportunities, challenges, and appropriate use of technology to enable achievable improvements in processes and employees’ work satisfaction.

Unfortunately, time is money for vendors so project budgets and company finances cannot afford long gestation periods for the business analysts to produce the specifications that enable software development to begin.

The vendor needs to move quickly through the business analysis because:

·        Developers can’t be scheduled far in advance with any reliability;
·        Project management is expensive; this is a fixed cost. So the fewer months that the project takes the less the cost per month for project management on a fixed price project.
·        For a fixed-price project it is more economical for the vendor to have five analysts for three months than three analysts for five months—or two analysts for seven months. 

But no increase in the number of analysts will compensate for the amount of Time needed to absorb, reflect, and fully align activity with understanding and opportunity.

But the longer the analysts are working with the client before developers arrive, the greater the depth of understanding, the greater trust level is achieved for effective communication, and the more nuance is gained on how to design new processes and align work with the preferences and potential of the client’s staff.

The longer time period of analysis, even with a skeletal crew, enables seeing a wider range of events that may occur infrequently, the more specialized processes are detected that are not reveals in requirements workshops or casual walkthroughs of the clients warren den of cubicles.

Options

Our preferred approach to enabling a longer time period for business analysis (with a small team) is to have analysts embedded with the client’s staff performing data readiness.  We strongly advocate taking a year or longer to go through the legacy databases and interfaces to assess the status of data that may need cleaning up and to determine how to handle missing relationships when older database designs will be replaced by modern relational databases.

As described in other papers, an internal project to assess and do the work to understand and fix deficiencies in existing databases can be done by internal staff with minimal outside support.  This makes it possible to spend a year gaining in-depth familiarity with legacy systems using internal, existing funds while working to obtain budget for the desired new solution.  The data fixing effort can include a business analyst who works with the lines of business to understand the procedures they have followed that may have inadvertently led to some of the bad or missing data. 

During the time the data readiness effort is underway, the Sponsor can have a team undertaking business analysis to document business processes, decisions, business rules; evaluate the activities that exist due to limitations of older technology, opportunities to streamline processes with technologies that enable best practices, re-define workload measures, and more.