Business analysis is an often undervalued discipline that can provide real business benefit when executed properly.
Focused mainly on business improvement, great business analysis can often have a direct impact on ensuring significant cost savings and/or improving profitability. What is encompassed under the header ‘Business Analysis’ and how can Finstech support your company to the benefits that this discipline offers?
A Business Analyst is usually associated with a project support, extracting, articulating & documenting requirements from stakeholders to be used to ensure the scope of a project reflects exactly what the business needs. In addition to
this, they can provide regular support to the developers & testers to ensure the requirements are understood by all parties correctly, and provide ongoing support to the project by becoming subject matter experts for the project outputs, explaining the objectives to stakeholders, performing demo’s of an application and selling the benefits to potential users.
Another aspect of Business Analysis is process improvement. In some organisations, particularly SME’s, people can be in the same position for a number of years and follow the same process for doing the same thing for the entire time they are there.
By working with the resources supporting a process in a workshop type environment, a Business Analyst can document the ‘As Is’ process so everyone understands what’s going on from end to end. By working alongside the process owner & the resources supporting the process, a good Business Analyst can skilfully facilitate conversation with team members to identify process improvements. In addition to this, they will ask questions to understand why things are done a certain way, and potentially suggest improvements to shorten the process, and document creating a ‘To Be’ process map or document. Implementation of these improved processes can also be handled by the Business Analyst or a Project/Change Manager.
In some areas, a Business Owner can know that a process needs to be improved or perhaps automated, but they don’t know how to do it. They may be aware of tools that are on the market that can be used to automate or digitise a process, but what is the best one for their business? Again, a Business Analyst can use their research and
documenting skills to collate a number of options, analysing each one against the needs of the organisation and present them back to the business in a easy to understand format.
At Finstech, we have years of experience in Business Analysis and can support your business in these areas to help you with project delivery or general business improvement. Have a look at our Case Studies page for some examples of how we’ve helped our clients improve their business.
