Business Analyst Community & Resources | Modern Analyst

Difference between a Brainstorm and Focus Group

Linda Erzah, CBAP — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 05:08:00 GMT

If you work in new product development or have participated in maintenance projects, then most likely you have used either the focus group or the brainstorming technique. The brainstorming technique is used to produce ideas and increase creativity. For example, after you’ve defined your problem and are looking for the different solution options, you gather a few folks from your project team (mostly the development team) and ask them about what they think a solution could be. The result of these gatherings could be ideas/solution that are obvious, or the so-not-obvious-out-of-the-norm options. Brainstorming is a way to ensure that your organization remains innovative.

Focus group can also be used to gather ideas; however, focus group goes a bit further.

For example, focus group is used after the development of a prototype, in order to get an idea of how the market will respond to certain features of the solution.

During a focus group, you are looking to gather the attitudes (in forms of comments and feedback) about an idea, a solution or even a process. The participants of this meeting should be outsiders; meaning folks who are most likely to use/consume to product. The result of a focus group would be the answers or feedback you’ve gathered during the meeting. This feedback can be compiled and organized by themes to present to the sponsors.

Here are the main differences between the two techniques:

	Brainstorming	Focus Group
Purpose	Generate ideas	Improve existing ideas
Trigger	A need to solve a problem	A need to study an existing idea, solution or process
Condition	Problem exist	Idea, solution or process exist
Setup
Number of participants	6 - 8	6 - 12
Participant types	Heterogeneous	Can be homogeneous or heterogeneous
Person running the show	Facilitator	Skilled moderator
Knowledge of topic of discussion	Not necessary	In depth knowledge of topic of discussion
Guide	Develop criteria for evaluating and rating ideas	Create a discussion guide and moderator scripts
Game Time
Ground rules	Must have	Nice to have
Duration	Restrict time to produce ideas 1 – 2 hrs	1 – 2 hrs and sometimes over several days
Type of questions to ask	Progressive closed-ended to generate and build on ideas	Can be open-ended to generate qualitative data or closed-ended to generate quantitative data
Observers	No	Yes
Result	List of ideas combined to form themes	Report of findings Could be - bullet list of information learned - comparative analysis between to solutions - summary of response collected for each question

Business Analyst: The Neutral Convener

Linda Erzah, CBAP — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 17:36:00 GMT

Part of my job as a Business Analyst, it is my responsibility to facilitate business process analysis meetings with a group of very knowledgeable folks. As I stood in front of my audience, I couldn't stop thinking: "What if I don't understand what is going on here? What if I can't comprehend the issues at hand? What if i steer this group to an outcome that is completely irrelevant to the issues at hand?"

I was hired in the public health industry at the time and prior to that, I worked in the gaming industry, healthcare, computer software and hardware. I started out the meeting with the objectives and outcomes of the meeting and proceeded to asking them a high level question: "What is the objective for Activity #1" (We had already brainstormed on the various activies performed in the public health arena); which started a discussion in the room full of PhDs, Directors, and a few MPh. As I listened, it started to become clear to me what were the issues... Questions started forming in my head, I wanted to know more and dig more into what they were saying. I wanted to understand what this person meant by one thing and if that understanding was similar with others. I wanted to know what the accronyms spelled out and I wanted to know more...

They each had different knowledge and sometimes they called the same report with different names.

When they first arrived in the room, each person knew that they were in this group to bring out the commonalities of their business processes and work toward developing common set of requirements for future systems. But each had different knowledge and experiences (or at least they thought it was very different and very complicated than those of their counterparts)So each one came with their own understanding, definitions, acronyms, knowledge.. etc.
As their Business Analyst, I had confidence that I could lead them to a common understanding but how was I going to do that, not having a background in the public health? Let's talk about the difference between the vertical and neutral convener BA.

Have you ever heard of a vertical Business Analyst? This new term describes a Business Analyst who has specialized in one industry and has a solid background and understanding in the industry. Most recruiters, hiring managers and others have this concept that a good BA is the one that has specialized in a particular industry. The BA are being strongly encouraged to stick to a particular industry in order to become well acquainted with its culture, language, processes.. etc. Not having the please to stick to one industry, I can only speak of the benefits of the neutral convener role that the Business Analyst must play in defining, analyzing and modeling the business and/or requirements.

A neutral convener Business Analyst is defined as one who has no bias or stake in a particular subject or issue at hand. This person does not benefit from the outcome of a project or meeting. Their job is to guide, motivate, build a bridge, bring peace, listen, elicit information, and lead discussion to a desired outcome. This outcome can be based on a methodology or can be defined by the owner of the project or meeting.

With this definition at hand, the BA who is a neutral convener:

1. will help elicit full and candid information from stakeholders
2. will make participants feel free to be more candid with someone who has no vested interest in the project.
3. will maintain confidentiality, if a stakeholder requests it, while still integrating the stakeholder’s views into the recommendations.
4. will define, analyze and model a process based on complete and accurate information, strengthening the conditions for constructive dialogue.
5. will be effective in engaging diverse stakeholder groups and organizing constructive dialogue and negotiation processes. This can help provide an effective vehicle for subsequent discussions on the substantive elements of your project.

There are many other benefits to having a Business Analyst as a neutral conevener. Since some of the outputs of business analysis can be used as input to other processes such as training new hire, a BA with industry bias, will have difficulties relating to those who do not understand the industry, its culture, language and standards.

I still don't know what the benefits of being a vertical BA are. I challenge those in this position to comment on this blog and let us know the benefits of this direction.

Linda Erzah, CBAP
BAMentor

Why do web sites like Facebook thrive?

Linda Erzah, CBAP — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 17:35:00 GMT

With more than 150 million active users, Facebook has become one of the most visited and most used website out there. It started out as another lame social network that students could join and waste their time by checking up on their friends. Today, everyone is on it. And by everyone, I mean even my parents are on it. Can you imagine? Age doesn’t define who joins and networks. Businesses are strongly pushing to have some presence on the site and other entrepreneurs are looking for the next best applet to attract those users.

I mean, Facebook is the way to go.

But why did they do so well? Why hasn’t Myspace or other social networks like Hi5 gained the same kind of the popularity? Facebook unlike others has features that make users come back for more. They also take the time to listen to their users and take them seriously by quickly implementing what the users say they need.

Great Features
The goal of any social network is to connect people and provide them with a way to communicate. Myspace does that! Hi5 does the same thing! But Facebook does it as better. The difference between Facebook and the others is found in some of its features.

With Facebook the user doesn’t have to go look at what happened while they weren’t there. Facebook brings news to the users in their own realm.
Features such as alerts let the user know when their friend tags them in a picture or left them a wall message. Then you have news feed and live feed that give you a snippet of what friends are doing… etc. The key is to play on people’s desire to talk about themselves and to be in everyone’s business.
I know Mark Zuckerberg is a genius for implementing those ideas but I don’t think he woke up one day with dreamed up requirements to build those features.

Requirements from Users
Facebook, like many websites out there allows for their users to provide feedback on things that work and things that don’t work (which usually outnumbers those things that do work, by the way). I remember when Facebook came up with the ‘Status’ feature, which let users write about what was going on in their lives. Great idea, but this feature was limited and would only allow for users to complete the sentence “User is…”. So you couldn’t write any sentence that didn’t use the verb “to be”. Some users took it upon themselves to provide feedback either directly to Facebook or by creating a coalition using the group feature. They sent Facebook the message that it would be better to allow more than one verb to be used while updating status.

Turn around time to produce
It wasn’t long before Facebook turned this feature around. They still show the “User is…” but the verb can be edited. Now the user can write “User loves banana” if he wants. I am sure this little change could have taken 10 months to build using methodologies that I am not going to mention. But they didn't make it a 10 months project because they knew the users thought it was important so they made it their priority. Crucial, little decision can make or break a web site.

The last important thing is the ability to develop a feature as quickly as possible in order to keep your users coming. In order to thrive in a world where if you want to gain popularity you have to satisfy the population (what a concept), listening to and getting your requirements from the users is very important. The voice of the users will help you build features. It’s not always a matter of creativity. Developing listening skills to hear what is needed could mean life or death for a web site.