Digital transformation and technological advancement in business sounds great, especially when you know what exactly your goals and business objectives are. Therefore, it’s hard to expect for considerable changes in a business workflow without analysing your business needs properly, even if the best state-of-art technologies and smart solutions are applied. Regardless of your business scale, core activity and working environment, every company needs to carry out a careful study of its strengths and weaknesses, find out pitfalls in organization, realise which points require improvement or even radical change. We may offer your company to follow a set of key steps guided by our business analysis professionals and empower your business with a fresh perspective and a brand-new approach to running your enterprise. Generally, the process focuses around several major elements listed below:
- Communication with the client
- Outlining the technical requirements
- Interviewing the stakeholders
- Description of the business processes
- Building BPMN (business process model and notation)
- Data analysis
Communication with the Client and Stakeholders: Testing the Waters
The first and crucial move whose importance is often underestimated. Taking some time is necessary in order to dive into the project history, learn about the existing working business processes and operations, get introduced to the primary stakeholders to be engaged. Therefore, this stage involves deep communication with the client aimed at uncovering its business needs and expectations, revealing the central problematic issues and setting clear project objectives. This is an essential part of the project as before providing a solution we need to make sure that we are not targeting at the wrong problem.
Defining the Technical Requirements: Drafting a To-Do List
Setting a clear-cut list of specific objectives to be reached on your way to business enhancement is always a successful strategy. Once you’ve come up with a complete statement of scope, you are sure to know what exactly your project is heading for and what is to be expected from it. Also, the ability to envision each particular prerequisite for the business case makes it possible to outline a draft version of the business analysis plan step by step. This stage already involves reviewing the scope of technical requirements by the stakeholders and business case confirmation to move on to the next point.
BPMN: Formulating the Business Analysis Plan
As soon as the technical specifications are defined and approved in the course of collaboration with the team and the stakeholders, it’s time to move on to business process modelling - elaborating a graphical representation of each step necessary for the project. At Quintagroup we have opted for applying BPMN as a standard for business process modelling since BPMN, being based on flowcharting technique, is pretty comprehensible by both technical users and business professionals that makes it a great facilitator for the project workflow. What is more, BPMN diagrams are translatable into the software process components to ease interaction even further. The innovative BPMN Engine able to infuse an unseen workflow automatization into the processes can be another step forward to broaden the boundaries of project implementation opportunities.
At this stage it is important to bring the ultimate clarity to the process: define the deliverables list on the basis of the project scope, adopt the most suitable methodology, identify the participating stakeholders to assign to each deliverable creation and validation, set the deadlines. Thus, a credible and realistic plan meeting the required set of expectations is created and made possible to implement on all levels.
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Technical Implementation and Support
As soon as the solution design has been reviewed by the stakeholders and approved to be fulfilling all the requirements, a move toward the technical implementation of the project can be made. This stage includes working with the project team on team-building, customizing and software deployment issues. During this time a number of additional tasks may appear, for instance, engaging with the QA professionals on test cases to make sure they fully understand the business context, resolving new questions emerging in the process of design or implementation, updating and repacking the documentation and following up on requirement changes and so on. And it is always a pleasure to find some opportunities to resolve any additional needs of the business that do not require an increase in the technical scope.
Another side of this process is taking care of the business users team: it is crucial to the project success that the users of the provided solution should employ it as intended. Therefore, it is also needed to ensure that the end users understand all process and procedural changes and, if necessary, to update their knowledge on organizational skills that may have been impacted by the technical modifications.
Data Analysis: Assessing the Value Created
In order to fully appraise and realize the effect brought by the updates introduced to the business, one shouldn’t forget to keep record of all the changes that have been made and carefully evaluate the actual progress against the objectives set at the planning stage. A variety of data analysis tools such as Tableau, Qlik or Apache Superset can be applied for the purpose of data visualisation, analytics and discovery of the mind-blowing insights that might help in finding new ways, approaches or solutions.
This is but a short and very restricted description of all the opportunities and possibilities being opened up for a business due to conducting a thorough business analysis complemented by an efficient technical solution. Are you curious to learn more? Fill in this form to get in touch with us as quickly as possible!