Part 1: The Cost of Document-Centric Business Analysis
I had a great moment in a customer coaching session last week: One of the analysts recounted how a business partner thought the Reviewer’s Experience in Blueprint was “Cool!” (I am not adding the exclamation mark.) The reviewer was excited to break free from the BRD (Business Requirements Document). She was thrilled to not have to slog through a hundred page document in search of the things that mattered to her.
The switch away from a document-centric model is difficult to make. For example, I recently reviewed a delivery methodology with over a hundred documents, questionnaires, worksheets, and checklists, many of which belonged to business analysts. Agile methodologies claim to have the answer with their preference for working software over comprehensive documentation, however, as Bertrand Meyer points out in “Agile, the Good, the Hype, and the Ugly,” they have tossed out the baby and the bathwater, and the bathroom as well. Whatever methodology you follow, the data-centric approach in Blueprint allows you to pare down your documentation to the information you really need.
To obtain success, organizations need to change how they think about business analysis. Many of our customers continue to produce documents from Blueprint for review. When you listen to the reasons the story is often the same: stakeholders are not ready to make the change, analysts need the BRD template to help them do their analysis, documents are required for compliance, etc.
Whatever their reasons, many Blueprint customers have a continued reliance on documents. They do not receive full value from their investment in a tool that includes virtual collaboration, review, and signoff that can be tailored to the reviewer at any level of granularity. Reviews and feedback take too long, and effort to collate is easily lost. Duplication of work across multiple documents results in additional effort and lost productivity. The reliability of requirements is low because it is easy to miss problems in a hundred page document. The critical task of maintaining traceability requires more effort and is more error prone.
Reliance on a template also constrains how analysts use the tool for their work. Some structure and boundaries within Blueprint are important to guide analysis. Document template generation requires that analysts follow strict corporate guidelines which can prevent them from taking full advantage of Blueprint’s analysis capabilities and flexibility. The template makes it more difficult to change the configuration of Blueprint to adapt to the unique characteristics of a project.
None of this is to suggest that a document template is not a useful stepping stone to full adoption; a document template should simply not be the destination. Better business analysis requires us to move away from a document-centric world. The five steps you will need to take to make the change to a data-centric business analysis practice are:
1. Take the plunge: Don’t wait to make the change
2. Build an analysis framework: Build a framework in Blueprint for better analysis,
3. Know your data: Analyze your methodology for the information you really need,
4. Lead through collaboration: Use Blueprint’s collaboration features to lead the change,
5. Get visual: Model your requirements to make them easier to consume.
In my next blog post, I will show you how each of these steps help you break free from the BRD!
