Lecture Outline • What is Business Analysis • Stakeholders • Lifecycles • What are requirements • Transforming requirements • Finalizing requirements • Requirements communication • Managing Requirements Assets • Required skills for a Business Analyst Lecture Objectives The core of value in any business centers around Return on Investment (ROI). ROI is the weight of the business value or benefits, calculated as increases in revenue or decreases in cost, over the cost of implementation. When it comes to cost, most organizations focus on technology costs, and forego the other business-related costs, such as stakeholder involvement, in determining ROI. The objective of this seminar is to spread awareness about Business Analysis profession, how essential the role of Business analyst (BA) to most organization or government entity, and demonstrate how a BA actively focuses on reducing costs which can be measured in following ways: • Reduction in rework — if you help focus the team on the right requirements, then there should be reduced amount of unnecessary change. But many projects are plagued by change because requirements are not well understood. This kind of change is waste. BA can help. • Reduction in requirements churn —Stakeholders’ time are valuable, but without someone in the business analyst role, stakeholders might spend excess time in unproductive discussions. BA can help drive an efficient decision-making processes, document discussions, reducing the amount of time spent rehashing previous discussions. • Discovering more cost-effective solutions and Prioritize them – Prioritization ensures focus on value. Lecturer’s Biography Mr. Joseph Maarouf Abboud is an experienced Project Manager with over 20 years of success in leading projects in Information Technology, and business management. He has a Master degree in project management from University of Salford, Manchester, UK; PMP, PMI-ACP, and ITIL certifications in addition to a BS degree in Software engineering. Mr. Abboud is a Business strategist, he has planned and managed multimillion-dollar projects aligning business goals with technology solutions to drive process improvements, competitive advantage and bottom-line gains. He also managed projects for public and private sectors in USA, OMAN, Kuwait, and Lebanon, with key emphasis on Project Management, Business Analysis, Quality Management, and Risk Management

1. Business Analysis; its needs and benefits to Organizations
Business Analysis, presented by
Joseph Abboud
on 25th August, 2016

2. Agenda
Business Analysis needs & Benefits to Organizations – ( statistics)
What is Business Analysis
Value of Business Analysis to organizations
Who perform Business analysis and where a business analyst can be involved
What does a BA do? 3 examples
Stakeholders the BA deals with
Managing their conflicts
Lifecycles the BA deals with
Requirements:
What is a requirement
Types of requirements the BA handles
(Forming, Transforming, and Finalizing) of requirements
Elicitation, Analysis, modeling, etc…
Managing Requirements Assets

3. Business Analysis needs Benefits to Organizations
Inaccurate requirements gathering consistently ranks in the top three causes of project
failure; yet only half of organizations have the resources in place to perform this function
properly, according to PMI Pulse of the Profession® research.
In 2014, PMI reported the following:
• Inaccurate requirements gathering” was reported by 37% of organizations as a primary
cause of project failure.
• Poor Requirements management practices are the second leading cause of project failure,
second only to changing organization priorities.
This research clearly shows that Organizations that have mature business analysis practices
in place today are dramatically improving the probability of project success.
BUSINESS ANALYSIS FOR PRACTITIONERS: A PRACTICE GUIDE
©2015 Project Management Institute

4. Business analysis (BA) is the practice of enabling change in an organizational context, by
defining needs and recommending solutions that deliver value to stakeholders.
http://marketplace.pmi.org/Pages/ProductDetail.aspx?GMProduct=00101489201
Business analysis involves identifying needs, recommending solutions, and eliciting,
documenting and managing requirements. BAs help to shape the output of projects to
deliver the expected benefits.
http://www.pmi.org/learning/featured-topics/business-analysis
Business Analysis is the set of tasks and techniques used to work as a liaison among the
stakeholders in order to understand the structure , policies and operations of an
organization, and to recommend solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals.
What is it?

5. Business analysis (BA) is the practice of enabling change in an
organizational context, by defining needs and recommending solutions that deliver
value to stakeholders.
Enabling Change

6. Business analysis is the practice of enabling
change in an organizational context, by
defining needs and recommending
solutions that deliver value to stakeholders.
Defining Needs

7. Recommending Solutions
Business analysis is the practice of
enabling change in an organizational
context, by defining needs and
recommending solutions
that deliver value to stakeholders.

8. Deliver Value to Stakeholders
Business analysis is the practice of enabling change in an organizational context,
by defining needs and recommending solutions that deliver value to
stakeholders.

9. Value of Business Analysis
In order to appreciate and better understand the value
of business analysis, we need to reflect again on the
definition of Business Analysis, and eliminate its key
phrase.
1- What happens when an organization does not
enable change?
2- What happen when an organization does not
understand its needs?
3- What happen if it does not come up with a solution
to its needs?
4- What if the solution does not meet the needs of the
stakeholders?

10. Who perform Business Analysis?
Anyone who perform business analysis activities is a business analyst.
System analyst
Process analyst
Product manager
Enterprise analyst
Business architect
Etc…
So where a business analyst can be involved?
A- Strategic planning
B- Operational Analysis
C- Process analysis
D- IT/ Business System Analysis

11. Role of Business Analyst
Business Analyst works on requirements
every day!

12. What does a Business Analyst do?
Scenario One
A fictional AYZ company is losing customers due to
poor service.
Business Analyst approaches to understanding the
problem will be:
Getting feedback from former customers
Interviewing Customer Service team to get more
feedback on the complaints.
Possible Solutions:
AYZ may need to invest in training the Customer
Service Team.
AYZ may need to get customer service portal

13. Scenario Two
AYZ company has a slow growth due to lack of online presence.
Business Analyst approaches to understanding the problem will be:
Interview internal and external stakeholders
What feature are needed?
How will these features work?
What brand impression do we want to portray?
Possible solutions:
Development of web portal to meet the need of
all stakeholders
What does a Business Analyst do?

14. Scenario Three
Governments have as much problems as companies. Let’s say that a government department
needs to reduce budget while maintaining the services to public.
A Business Analyst approaches to understanding the problem will be:
Interview Stakeholders
Analyze public service offering
Possible solutions might be to:
Automate tasks
Simplify the processes
What does a Business Analyst do?

15. Stakeholders

16. Stakeholders
Who are they?
From the PMBOK® Guide:
Stakeholder: An individual, group or organization who may affect, be affected by,
or perceive itself to be affected by a decision, activity or outcome of the project.
So a stakeholder is anyone impacted positively or negatively by a set of requirements..
Taken from Seventh Morning online course

17. Stakeholders Needs Interests
A- Project Mangers
The job of a Business Analyst is to understand the
needs of an organization. The latter runs on people.
Thus understanding the personal needs of stakeholders
is critical to the project success.
Project Managers: PMs are judged by the success of
their projects. In general, the project is considered
successful if it is on time+ on budget + on scope.
How can a BA help them? Keep them aware of risks
and issues.
PMs worst nightmare? It is when a project goes out of
control. So you can help them by making the analysis
effectively and on time.

18. Stakeholders Needs Interests
B- Implementation Team
Implementation team: They need to do their work as
per the agreed requirements without any interruption.
How can a BA help them? By providing a clear and
complete requirements, on time, and on scope.
It is also helpful to schedule a meeting with them at
the beginning or end of the day only. “Staying in the
zone” without interruption make them feel great.
Their worst nightmare is the death march. (unrealistic
schedule or other work activities to make them
overwork)

19. Stakeholders Needs Interests
C- Quality Assurance / Testing Team
Quality Assurance / Testing Team:
Their interest lies mostly in:
a) High level of quality on the product/service they
configure/test
b) Being able to plan their work properly and effectively.
How can a Business Analyst help them?
• Engage them early in the project.
• Get them high-quality requirements on time.
Their worst nightmare is when the product or system is
released or handed over with poor or horrible quality.

20. Everyone wants his/her boss to be happy. Yet if you want him/her to be happy with
you, you as a Business Analyst need to address their needs.
Bosses job: Managing up and Managing down.
Bosses need to keep track records, and metrics.
How can a Business Analyst help them?
Just do your job effectively by making them aware of questions, issues, risks, and
also successes! This will help them make their managers aware of good as well as
bad news.
In doing so, BA helps the whole organization moves forward.
Worst nightmares? When a project goes awry and the PM cannot do anything to
handle it.
Stakeholders Needs Interests
D- Bosses / Management

21. Sponsors interest in mainly when a product meets the goals of the organization.
How can a Business Analyst help them?
a) By effectively managing the business analysis of the project.
b) By ensuring that the collected requirements really achieve the goals of the
organization.
Sponsors worst nightmare? When a project and product both fail.
Stakeholders Needs Interests
E- Sponsor

22. Stakeholders Needs Interests
F- Internal Users and Customers
These are the people who will be using the system to do internal and external
processes or transactions.
They are great sources of input for a Business Analyst, because they are usually the
most impacted by the quality of the final product, and therefore a BA should
consider them key stakeholders.

23. Managing Stakeholders Conflicts
Oftentimes, a Business Analyst finds himself /herself in a situation where he/she needs to solve
conflicts between stakeholders.
Categories of conflicts:
External – External
Internal – Internal
External – Internal

24. External – External Conflict
Stakeholders Needs Analysis is a tool that a Business Analyst use to solve conflicts between
stakeholders.
Posing the following questions, he/she will be able to solve this type of conflict.
A- What does each party say they want?
B- Why they want them
C- In their mind, what priority of their needs is? Do they have priority?
D- are the assumptions they made valid?

25. Taking place within the project team, this type of conflict is a little easier to solve than others.
The approach of a BA is the same; Perform a Stakeholders Needs Analysis.
One thing to bear in mind in this type of conflict is that all parties want to improve the quality of
the product or service. Meeting and negotiating the issue at hand might be necessary.
Internal – Internal Conflict

26. This is the toughest to solve type of conflict.
Here a BA should be the voice of the customer. Relying on facts and numbers rather than
opinions, a BA may be able to persuade the internal stakeholder of the customer’s needs.
Again, performing Stakeholders Needs Analysis is the tool.
Note: Negotiation is a topic unto itself. BA should be able to communicate extremely well to all
stakeholders.
External – Internal Conflict

27. Lifecycles

28. Lifecycles
Birth Life Death

29. Project Lifecycle
According to PMI: A project is “A temporary group activity, designed to produce a
unique product, service or result.”
Projects do not go on forever; they do have a
beginning and an end. Hence they do have life
cycles.

30. A product has a life cycle; such as this lecture!
Intro: Products’ idea originate where initial
analysis, concept development,
prototyping, market research etc are all
done.
Development is where the actual product
comes to live.
Growth is when you sell the product to new
customers.
Maturity phase will be reached (upon
improvement or feedback from customers)
Decline is the end of the product.

31. SDLC
It is the process by which systems are
created,
Operated, then terminated.
The development of software can be
managed
under two methodologies:
1- WATERFALL / Traditional
2- AGILE

32. WATERFALL

33. AGILE

34. Requirement lifecycle
Taken from Seventh Morning online course

35. Requirements

36. Definition of requirements
In the PMBOK® Guide – Fifth Edition, requirement is defined as “a condition or
capability that is required to be present in a product, service, or result to satisfy a
contract or other formally imposed specification.”
Example of a condition: A system needs to accept order from online requests so
more revenue can be realized.
Example of a capability: In order to get more revenue, the system must encrypt the
process (for security reason)
Requirements are formed, transformed, then finalized. Each phase encompasses
several steps to be completed.

37. Requirements have requirements, called attributes.
Part of the business analyst’s job is to help the stakeholders define the problem or opportunity
and determine what should be done to address it. The elicitation process helps facilitate this
work. Some stakeholders may not even know their needs.
Requirements Should be :
1- Clear (Sometimes a stakeholder thinks that he understand the requirement but actually do
NOT). Business analyst should communicate all requirements to all stakeholders, so if one is
not clear, he and the project will end up in trouble.
2- Complete : This means that the requirements should contain all necessary info for others
who depend on it, do their work.
3- Applicable: The requirement should be application to the solution a BA will be
recommending, and that the solution is applicable to the organization’s problem.
4- Prioritized: the sponsor should tell the BA about the priority of requirements.
5- Implementable : The requirement can be realized in tangible code or process ; that is
feasible.
6- Testable: If not testable, there is no need to implement it! The test team should be included.
Requirements

38. When forming a requirement, 3 points should come to the mind of a business
analyst.
1- Description of the requirement
2- Owner / Source
3- Rationale
Forming Requirements
Description: The system should be able to run a report on all the beverages sold
over a given timeframe
Owner: Product Manger / Joseph Abboud
Rationale: Need the report to report the metrics to his boss.

39. Forming Requirements
Description: The system should be able to run a report on all the beverages sold
over a given timeframe
What
should the
report look
like?
How many
columns
should it
include?
Does he
need a list
of every
sale
transaction
Does he
need a list
with
summary
details only
What “over
a given
time”
mean?

40. Requirement Types
Business Requirements
User Requirements
Functional Requirements
Non-Functional Requirements

41. Business Requirement
They are related to the business: “Why are we doing this project?”
Increasing
Revenue
Reducing
Costs
Increasing
Margins
Growing the
brand
Request
ID
Requirement
description
Rationale Source
Management
Expectation #1
The system will
cost less than
$100,000,
enabling the
product line to
achieve ROI of
18%
BR-1 system will cost
less than $100,000,
It will enabling
the product line
to achieve ROI
of 18%
Joseph Abboud /
Product Manager

42. User
Requirements
It is coming from the users to the users!
Business Analyst should always include the “End users” when collecting
requirements.
Example:
Requirement
ID
Description Rationale Source Parent
UR-1 The summary
report will list
each beverage
products
available for
sale by the
organization.
The list of
products is
critical to
understanding
the report
Martha BR-2
System will enable a
user to create
summary reports of
all beverages sold
monthly.

43. Functional Requirements
This type of requirement describes the functional needs of a product.
Business and User requirement describe WHAT the product will do, however a functional
requirement describes HOW the system will do it.
Requirement
ID
Requirement Rationale Source Parent
FR-1 The report will
list beverage
names in title
case
Makes it easier
to read for
management
and more
professional
looking
Walid UR-1

44. Non-Functional Requirements
Non-functional requirements describe QUAITIES which are required by the system.
Taken from Seventh Morning online course

45. Documents sources
1- Pre-existing requirements documentation
2- All stakeholders mentioned in previous slides
Tips: If some materials are vague, bring in an expert.

46. Forming Requirements -
Gathering requirements – 1 on 1 meeting
Elicitation skills are key to Business Analyst success.
Challenges:
Communication is oftentimes imprecise.
Some people don’t understand what they need until they see it!
Eliciting requirements can be accomplished in several ways:
1 on 1 :
• Business Analyst starts with the sponsor and move on to the next stakeholder he thinks
will help him greatly in understanding the issue at hand.
• Business Analyst defines his goals for the interview!
• Recap the purpose of the meeting.
• BA emails the notes to the stakeholder to ensure the mutual understanding.

47. Gathering Requirements
Group Meeting
Group Meeting has its own challenges. BA should take a colleague with him to take notes.
Note –takeer should record questions, answers, sources, and rationales.
Some people will not be give their opinion in front of others.
Business Analyst prepares his agenda, and email it to the group before the meeting takes
place.
During the group meeting the BA pose questions to the group in order to better elicit
information from all of them.
He asks open-ended questions.

48. Transforming Requirements

49. Transforming Requirements
Transforming requirements are arguably the most important work for a Business
Analyst.
It is here where he/she can show his true value.
The topic is divided into 3 sections:
1- Analysis
2- Diagramming
3- Modeling

50. “Generally, all analysis gets beyond mere description and into examination and
explanation.”
University of Richmond writing center
Analysis is a careful study of something to learn about its parts, what they do and
how they are related to each other.
Decomposition Analysis is a great tool that BA uses to analyze requirements. It
is about breaking a complex requirement into smaller parts to facilitate its study.
Transforming Requirements - Analysis

51. Example: “System will enable a user to create a summary report of all beverages
sold monthly.”
Report
Data-related
details
Columns
Rows
Headers
Timing and
delivery detailed
Presentation of
report

52. Additive / Subtractive Analysis
It is used when a Business Analyst tries to understand the role of a requirement in
its complex.
Request
ID
Requirement
description
Rationale Source
BR-1 Summary report will
list each of the
beverage products
available for sale in
the organization.
Joseph Abboud / Product
Manager

53. Gap Analysis
Gap analysis in short is the study of the current state, and foreseeing where the
product or process will be in the future. It is extremely tied up with ENABLING
CHANGE.
It is about understanding the current state:
Define the future state
Chart a path from current to future state
Taken from Seventh Morning online course

54. Transforming Requirements –
Diagramming / Notations
Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN): A diagramming technique used
as a standardized diagramming notation for business process analysis and
management.

55. Transforming Requirements –
Flowcharts

56. Taken from Seventh Morning online course

57. Requirement transformation - Swim Lane

58. Requirement transformation - Swim Lane +
Flowchart
Taken from Seventh Morning online course

59. Use Case is one way of modeling requirements. Used mostly to illustrate
concepts, simplify topics, validate requirements, etc…
Requirement transformation – Modeling –
Use Case

60. Finalizing Requirements –
Presentation
After a Business Analyst elicit all requirements, and transforming them, it is time to
share them in a professional manner with all stakeholders.
1- Presenting requirements
Tip-1: Attitude is key. Business Analyst needs to determine his attitude before the
presentation.
Tip-2: Audience / Stakeholders is the point, not the material.
Tip-3: Know the stakeholders / Audience (think about them when planning for the
presentation.
Tip-4: Monitor the audience. Are they keeping up with the materials or they getting
bored? Are they asking questions?
Tip-5 : Match the pace with the audience. If they look confused, slow the pace; if
bored speed up.
Tip -6: Strive for conversation not lectures.
Tip- 7: Convey info into graphics or anecdotes.

61. Finalizing Requirements –
Walk-Through
Business Analyst walks through all documents over a meeting with stakeholders.
(pick the key ones)
Lay down the rules, and ask for feedback from them all.
Give an overview on the subject (around 1 minute or less).
Example: Two months back the AYZ company management determined that they
need to launch a line of sports’ products.
One of the challenges they faced was the lack of system to track the sales.
So I started defining requirements, working with you to define what is needed to
create the tracking system.
Today I need to run through all the requirements with you to confirm that we are on
the same page.

62. Managing Requirements Assets

63. Managing Requirements
After the project is done, what are requirements sued for?
They are used for:
Product / Process training
Administrative purpose
subsequent projects

64. Managing Requirements – Change Control
Change Control manages changes to the baselined requirements.

65. Required skills for a Business Analyst
• Communication Skills: BA should have the skill to facilitate meetings, ask good
questions, actively listen to answers, and absorb what is being said.
• Problem-Solving Skills: No project is without problems. The entire project is a
solution to a problem. At the highest level, BAs facilitate a shared understanding
of the problems.
• Documentation and Specification Skills : While documentation or writing could
be considered a subset of written communication, it’s really its own skill set for a
BA. Here I include the ability to create clear and concise documentation.
• Analysis Skills : Business analysts use a variety of techniques to analyze the
problem and the solution.
• Visual Modeling : A close sister to many analysis techniques is the ability to
create visual models, such as work-flow diagrams.
• Facilitation and Elicitation Skills: BAs facilitate specific kinds of meetings. The
most common kinds of elicitation sessions a BA facilitates are interviews.

66. Thank
You!