Meeting Everyone's Needs: Business Analysis

Welcome back!

After learning about the life of a Sys Admin, we started this week by taking a peek inside the business analysis window and I gotta say, it's been fun so far!

Something that interested me were the four types of IT projects: 

First, being a migration project, which is the movement from one software to another. An example of that would be migrating a client's system from Salesforce to ServiceNow.

Second, an implementation project, which is implementing a software or add on of a software within an organization. An example of this type of project is implementing ServiceNow CSM plug in to an organization.

Third, an integration project, which is the integration of two software to create joint services. Example being combining ServiceNow & Salesforce. Kinda self explanatory right? Even if you happened to be confused, we went over several scenarios and determined which type of project should be used for each scenario given the information provided.

And last but not least, a feature enhancement project! A feature enhancement project involves enhancing bits and parts of an existing software. Enhancing Salesforce’s travel application’s search feature to create better searches for travel packages would be an example of this type.

After mastering project types and a variety of scenarios, we touched up on the role of a business analyst. Business analysts (BAs) are responsible for bridging the gap between IT and the business using data analytics to assess processes, determine requirements and deliver data-driven recommendations and reports to executives and stakeholders. BAs are responsible for creating new models that support business decisions by working closely with financial reporting and IT teams to establish initiatives and strategies to improve importing and to optimize costs. Using a Stakeholder Analysis will be very beneficial to see who holds the most power/influence over the project and to better communicate amongst all stakeholders to meet the scope's goals.

Also had a lot of fun creating user stories for our client. A user story is a simplified description of a requirement that tells us  who the user is, what they want, and why they want it. 

Some steps to consider when crafting user stories:

Step 1: Decide what “done” will look like.

Step 2: Document tasks and subtasks.

Step 3: Determine your user personas.

Step 4: Create stories as ordered steps.

Step 5: Seek user feedback.

Step 6: Draft stories that can be completed in one sprint.

Make sure the description of the requirement is clear and concise to get the point across.