Business Analyst Community & Resources | Modern Analyst

As a BA (business analyst) approaching a new piece of work, who would you interview and what questions would you ask?

Guy Beauchamp — Sun, 08 Jul 2018 18:35:00 GMT

For any new piece of work a BA (business analyst) needs to know

1. who are the key stakeholders (i.e. those who can kill the project)

2. what are the key stakeholders specific and measurable measures of success (i.e. their objectives) and what VALUE for each objective MUST be achieved in order for the project to be considered a success (e.g. increase sales per order value by 5%)

3. what are the key stakeholders unmeasured measures of success (i.e. their principles that they would like to see happen but aren't going to measure and so the project cannot be assessed by them - e.g. an intuitive solution)

4. what are the key stakeholders high level requirements (i.e. what capabilities do they expect the solution to deliver - e.g. the ability to offer add-on sales during the order taking process)

5. what is in scope of the work in terms of processes, organization units, locations, data, applications, technology

6. what is the scope of the work in terms of time, money, project resources (people and materials)

7. who will the stakeholders nominate for determining further high level requirements and detailed requirements (e.g. subject or domain experts, middle management of operational teams, etc)

When faced with the user requirement "I want a flag to indicate premium customers" what questions would you ask?

Guy Beauchamp — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 20:47:00 GMT

The problem with the requirement as expressed is that it is a solution to a problem that you have not been informed about so you can't analyze whether it is a good solution or not. You will have to investigate the real requirement(s) behind the presenting requirement.

1. At what point in and in which business processes would the identification happen? Who will do it?

2. What will you do when you have identified a premium customer?

3. Now I understand why you want to identify premium customers, what other requirements would also help achieve this aim?

4. Now I understand your requirements in this area, which project objectives will they help deliver? I.e. is it in scope?

Why bother developing data models and why in Third Normal Form (3NF)?

Guy Beauchamp — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 20:33:00 GMT

Solutions are processes operating on data. It follows that any change to existing solutions will probably involve changes to processes and data requirements. Process requirements can be expressed in BPMN and many other process modeling notations. Data requirements (as opposed to database design requirements - these are logical requirements that the solution has which are relevant to data and have NOTHING at all to do with database design) model the logical data requirements. Logical data requirements should be expressed in notation that focuses only on the logical data requirement and not the solution that might or might not be used. E.g. classes in UML assume object orientated solutions. Logical data model requirements can be implemented on relational databases, object orientated databases, paper or in someone's head. They are not technology dependant: they just state the logical data requirements that must exit in order for processes to deliver the project objectives.

E.g. A requirement exists to be able to offer add-on sales during the order taking process. The order taking process will change to reflect this. The data requirements mean that items offered for sale also have to have relationships established that represent other items that could be offered as add-on sales for the original item. New data requirements will typically require new processes to maintain the required data logical structure. Modeling the data requirements in 3NF means

1. the minimum amount of data is stored the minimum amount of times.

2. logical inconsistencies are prevented by the data structure itself - e.g. it is impossible to offer a customer postage and packing as an add-on sale item as postage and packing are not related to sale items as add-on candidates.

3. business rules associated with the data will be propagated automatically to any process that attempts to create, read, update, delete (CRUD) that data and do not have to be endlessly repeated by all processes that use the data in the processing logic.

4. data requirements (unlike processing requirements) are relatively stable: while the process for order taking changes every year or so, the fact the company sells items and takes payment does not.

How would you prove that an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) was in Third Normal Form (3NF)?

Guy Beauchamp — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 20:25:00 GMT

Third normal form of an ER Diagram (ERD) boils down to every attribute depends on the whole primary key of the entity. Inspect the data model to verify

1. every entity has a business primary key (i.e. a key meaningful to the business, not to the database designers!).

2. no attribute in an entity will vary if the value of another attribute is changed (note: the primary key can not be updated once created).

3. no attributes could ever have null values.

4. there are no repeating groups of attributes in the entity.

There is a data modeler’s joke that you can use to lighten the interview (but not recommended for real world parties!): normalization was (in part) created by Ted Codd - a model is in 3NF when every attribute depends on the primary key, the whole key and nothing but the key - so help me Codd!

How would you control the scope of a project?

Guy Beauchamp — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 13:25:00 GMT

Every requirement (be it at high, medium or low level, every process step and control flow, every entity, attribute and relationship) must be contributing to one or more SMART objectives for a project. If a new requirement at any level is proposed it must be mapped to the objective(s) it contributes to. If it does not map it means either an objective is missing (and therefore a significant amount of analysis is also missing) or the requirement MUST be out of scope as it does not contribute to project success.

SMART stands for:

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Traceable and Time-Bound

What is the role of the Business Analyst (BA), at each point in a typical project or programme of work?

Guy Beauchamp — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 13:14:00 GMT

To consider the scope of the business analyst role it is helpful to consider the chain of reasoning that leads from the statement of a problem to implementation of solutions.

This chain involves 10 groups of users:

Owners

Strategists

Sponsors

Programme Managers

Project Stakeholders

Design Analysts

Solution Builders

Solution Builders & Business

Project Managers

Users

Click "Scope of the Business Analyst role" image for larger version