Enterprise Analysis (BABOK KA)

Business Capabilities are at the heart of an organization’s planning ecosystem. Capability mapping serves many purposes, two of which are critical. First, business capabilities are instrumental in setting priorities more quickly focusing on the most profitable initiatives first. Second, well crafted detailed capability-based roadmap allows agile project planning that is more accurate, less risky, and takes less time.

BABoK v3 techniques are a lot. There are not just 10, 20, or 30 techniques but 50 techniques, to be precise and that's not a small number!

The human mind can remember 5 to 7 elements at a time and anything more than that is hard to remember.

Then, how can one remember 50 techniques?

"Is it really possible to have a BABoK Techniques Mindmap?"

Many of you may wonder.

So, here's the Ultimate BABoK techniques mindmap which could save you 40 hours of your International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) exam preparation!

Whether you’re purchasing a package (also called commercial off-the-shelf, or COTS, products) as part or all of the solution for a new project or implementing a solution in the cloud, you still need requirements. Requirements let you evaluate solution candidates so that you can select the most appropriate package, and then they let you adapt the package to meet your needs.

Taking a product from an abstract idea to an item that’s widely available in the marketplace demands a hands-on approach to prevent things from falling through the cracks. A technique that goes back nearly a century, product lifecycle management (PLM) has for decades been used to improve the efficiency of product development and design.

In recent years, however, a growing number of organizations are realizing the capability of cloud-based PLM software to drive fulfillment benefits. There is a recognition that you can strengthen your supply chain management by deploying PLM from product conception to multi-faceted fulfillment. As your product approaches maturity, it necessitates changes to workflow, supply chain, and fulfillment processes as a means of attaining sales objectives and driving overall business strategy.

But before we get into that and how PLM affects fulfillment, first a definition of PLM.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Charts offer visualization and help to understand and comprehend things that would be more painful and time consuming to understand by reading free text. Diagrams help us design systems and processes, organize our screens, while facilitating a common understanding of the big picture. They help us make visible the invisible.

Αs a BA you can exploit a big variety of diagrams to help you communicate better and more accurate information concerning the requirements and the solution. Diagrams leverages the effective use of visuals and modeling techniques in helping organizations and individuals work from the 30,000 foot view down to the level of detail that is needed by those who are actually going to perform the process activities. Moreover a diagram can serve as a single point of truth navigating what should be done and saving time from questions deriving from ambiguous point may found in a text.

Business knowledge is simply knowing your business—its facets, strengths, weaknesses, competition, challenges, positioning within the market, and readily available solutions to its daily problems. Strong business knowledge should inform everything you do.  So, what you learn and hear in discovery should be filtered through your business knowledge. What you define in your requirements should also be informed by your business knowledge. As one business analysis writer puts it, “I’ve always been of the opinion that I’d like to know as much as I can about whatever I can because you never know when something you learned may come in handy.”^[2] The following four areas are the ones, specifically, according to BABOK, that you’ll want to apply yourself to.

One of the biggest challenges now facing business analysts is this: how do we successfully engage with stakeholders, elicit requirements, and have productive workshops and meetings, without actually meeting in person? The tried-and-tested methods of getting together in a collaborative space, using sticky notes and whiteboards, and bribing attendees with baked goods, are no longer quite so straightforward in a world where some or all of the stakeholders are on the far end of an internet connection.

There are several factors to consider when moving out of the purely physical realm as a business analyst.

With the massive shift to working from home we now see a plethora of tech companies flogging new employee surveillance tools. You can readily see their appeal to command-and-control thinkers. If you think, as they do, that managing employee activity is crucial, then to know who’s doing things and who’s taking the mickey is grist to their mill. But these tools will undermine performance and morale.

Think about it from the employee’s point of view. Your boss can see your emails, any documents you read or create, your appointments, who you talk to, and when; can listen to or read transcriptions of your calls. Your boss can see your computer screen, can monitor your internet use, the sites you visit and for how long. Your boss can even turn on your camera and watch you at work.

The intention of this article is to identify and specify the artifacts listed in the BABOK. These artifacts are listed within the Outputs section of the BABOK tasks. Outputs are described by a paragraph of text within each task. In this article I attempted to expand on these descriptions by adding detail to their content.

It is assumed that each activity produces a tangible output^[2] which is consistent with the layout of the BABOK. Those outputs are classed as artifacts with attributes. Each artifact’s attribute description is taken from the element description of the tasks that output that artifact. The BABOK element descriptions provide guidelines for activity that produces the attribute, without necessarily defining the information contained in the attribute.That information has been derived from the element description.

Artifacts are derived from the BABOK Output sections. Artifact attributes are derived from the BABOK Element sections. A useful addition to the BABOK might be examples or templates of the outputs.

Consider the situation where you are the business analyst who is planning project work according to the BABOK guidelines. The project manager wants to plan their time spent on business analysis activities. You produce a report of the BABOK that shows tasks that the project manager is expected to contribute to.

This article describes an analysis I performed of the Business Analysis Body Of Knowledge v3 (BABOK). The result of this analysis is a model contained in the Visual Paradigm modeling tool. This model captures 461 pages of the BABOK, from the Business Analysis Key Concepts chapter through to the end of the Techniques To Tasks Mapping chapter.

This final article in the Requirements in Context series discusses detailed requirements for a fully automated business activity. ‘Fully automated’ means that the business information system (BIS) is expected to perform the activity from start to finish without user involvement. A simple example is the system automatically posting a monthly fee against customer accounts. A more complex example is the system utilizing customer-specific pricing details to determine the amount charged for a purchase made by a customer.

Visual analysis models provide a powerful set of tools that let business analysts depict system information at various levels of abstraction. These models serve as an aid to understanding, as well as an aid to communicating. Alas, I fear that modeling is somewhat of a neglected practice. I believe modeling is an essential skill every BA should master. Here’s why.

Has society become so unimaginative in the products, services, organisations and societies that we choose to create? Have we started giving up on ‘inspiration’ and ‘excitement’ as values with the way in which we create schools, workplaces and organizational cultures? My personal belief is that Business Analysts are ideally and uniquely positioned by make an incredible and positive difference in the world.

If we look at the previously proposed process end to end, it starts with the customer journey. The journey is mapped to the internal business processes, systems, and data sources. For both the customer facing and internal parts of the journey user stories are created to document the gaps between the as-is and to-be states - effectively form the backlog for the change. For each story, acceptance criteria are prepared in a way that enforces the expected behaviour in the system. Ideally, those should be the scenarios that are likely to appear on the real life journeys and not the hypothetical future scenarios. These scenarios when implemented and tested feed back to the journey and underlying layers changing them as the new functionality is introduced.