How to Improve Business Profitability

The key role of the business analyst is to help businesses in improving processes, products, services, and software through data analysis. They act as bridges between the business and IT to improve efficiency. In other words, they are the communication link between the stakeholders and a project team.

The main focus is to keep the project on track by bringing in the required changes. Mentioned below are the steps to guide you to select the right approach to make the outcome fruitful.

Gather Information: Understanding the needs and deliverables of the project, is the key to a successful project. Be it the existing project or a new project, it is expected that the business analyst will start contributing and showing results from day one. Take some time to understand the requirements, get oriented to ensure an effective and confident contribution to the project. For both, the existing project or the new one, define the scope of the project, requirements, and objective as early as possible.

For the already running project, identify the history of the project so that you avoid repeating the work. Pick up the positive points, incorporate them into your strategy rather than starting the project from scratch by negating all the earlier taken decisions. This also helps you in understanding the current state of the project thus simplifying to define the required changes.

Get to know and engage with primary stakeholders to gather their vision and accordingly define the scope and objective of the project. Regular one-off meetings with stakeholders and subject matter experts should be incorporated in the weekly schedule to address the issues at an early stage.

Discover The Business Objectives: Along with gathering the information/scope and objective from the project and stakeholder’s perspective, it is equally important to get the business objective. This will ensure that expectations from both ends are addressed at an early stage and can bring them to a shared understanding of the objectives. While defining the scope of the project, consider communicating the business objectives clearly along with the project scope. Avoiding or skipping this step might lead you to solve a wrong problem.

Define Scope: The statement of scope should communicate business needs in such a way that participants from different teams can envision their contribution to the project and implementation.

The scope should clearly define the solution approach for implementing the required changes to be made for implementing the solution keeping business objectives intact.

As scope defines the subsequent steps of the business analysis process and tasks, it is important to take a sign-off from key stakeholders from both the business and technological sides.

Outline The Plan: Based on the defined scope, define a realistic plan keeping in context your deliverables, project methodology, scope, and other key aspects of the project. Keep the stakeholders in mind while outlining your deliverables as they will always be a part of the creation and validation of the deliverables. Ensure to set the timelines for each deliverable.

Detailed Plan: Define every step of the implementation plan. Communicate and review the information required to implement the changes. Ensure to get it reviewed and validated by all the key stakeholders on every step. Sequence your deliverables keeping in mind the project’s critical path, reducing doubts, uncertainties, and complexities of the project.

Support The Technical Implementation: A critical and significant part of any project is the implementation of technology, team building, and deploying software. By keeping the technical scope to the bare minimum, ensure the implementation and testing of the functional requirements with solution design, Engage the quality assurance team to understand the requirements from a business perspective. Make yourself available to answer and resolve the issues during the implementation and testing phases. Involve all the key stakeholders in the decisions made about the change.

Implementing Solution: The whole purpose of designing the solution is to help meet the business objective. Train the end user to ensure that they understand the process incorporated along with the required changes made. Emphasize the impact it will bring to the business. Assess the solution for effectiveness. This might bring new opportunities for improvement which will lead to new projects.

Conclusion: A business analyst links the development team, the project management tools being used, and the stakeholder to gather the requirements and implement the changes adhering to the business objectives