Review the Corporate Strategic Plan

Read all of the documents that you can find about the company’s strategic vision, mission, and plan (refer to Chapter 3). Often, the high-level plans are mentioned in the financial report. They may be available on an employee intranet system. What is the company mission? How is that implemented? Your project, no matter how small, should be traceable back to a high-level strategic goal of the organization. Investigate; ask questions, read, and try to find out how your work fits into the big picture.

Seeing things from the business perspective

Experienced BAs put themselves in the business stakeholder’s position and try to see things the way the business sees them. This is especially important for projects with an IT or software component. Business people often have a very different perspective than IT people, and until you can put yourself in their shoes, you will never be able to really connect with them.

One of the fundamental concepts with which many business people are not intimately familiar is that of a “project.” For many business areas, most work is done on a continual or ongoing basis. The same tasks are performed every day.

Case in Point

Each day, customer service representatives come to their desks, wait for their phones to ring, and then answer the questions that are posed. Most of the questions are ones that they have answered before. Some of the answers or problem resolutions may require a database search of a knowledge base or logging into a customer service system. A call log is updated. As each call is completed, the customer service representative has finished one task and is ready for another. When a rep is on a call, he or she is completely focused on that task. There is no multitasking in this role. At the end of the customer service representative’s day, after the last call is completed, he or she leaves work with a virtually empty desk. The customer service rep does not have to plan what will be done the next day because every day is basically the same. There really are no projects going on in this business area.

Suppose that Bill, a BA, arrives to discuss the development of a new customer service call logging system. Bill wants to schedule interviews with all of the customer service representatives to discuss their needs. When would be a convenient time? The customer service reps acknowledge that the call volume is low on Friday afternoon, but the rest of the week it is pretty steady. If Bill wants to meet with a representative, it means that customers calling in will have a longer wait. Making customers wait goes directly against the department’s goal of high-quality customer service.

This is only the first hurdle that Bill will encounter. Every time he has a question for someone in the customer service group, he negatively impacts their customer service goals. This makes the department less enthusiastic to see Bill as time goes on. In addition, if Bill’s project goes on for weeks or months, many customer service representatives may wonder what he is doing. Why isn’t he done yet? What is taking him so long?

Of course, this problem is easily solved when the head of the customer service department wholly endorses the project and lets everyone know that time spent with Bill will help the group reach a key departmental goal. This is one of the key success factors for all projects: management commitment.

Now take this scenario a step further. When Bill talks about implementing a new customer service support system, he will probably get a positive response since the old system has been determined to be inefficient or difficult to use. When the customer service representatives hear that a new system will be faster and easier to use, they will be very excited and anxious to start using it. This is when Bill has to break the news that the new system probably will not be installed for six months. He explains that he must thoroughly understand what they need and then make sure that the solution built matches those needs. Six months! Imagine what a customer calling in would say if a representative promised to answer his or her question in six months! That level of customer response is completely unacceptable to these business stakeholders. Some customer service representatives may feel that if it is going to take that long, why bother?

This reaction points out a fundamental difference between project work and operational work. Many business people respond to their customer needs immediately. Think about some of the business areas in your organization. Sales people take an order as soon as a customer wants to buy. The sales cycle may take a few weeks or even months, but during that cycle the sales person is constantly reacting to every customer need. The sale may include answering questions, preparing proposals, and delivering pricing and product information. The sales person is ready for the customer to request anything and then immediately replies. Think about the accounts payable or accounts receivable department.

When invoices arrive, the accounts payable clerk immediately logs them in, checks the due date, and makes sure they are paid on time. In the human resources department, a new employee is added to the system on the day he or she starts, if not before. All of these business people work on tasks as each task is received. They have been taught to respond to their customers as quickly and efficiently as possible. This approach to getting work done is very different from the way most IT projects are handled.