As the Business Analyst insures the identified needs align with an organization’s vision, strategies, and roadmap, the resulting analysis serves as a foundation for understanding the gap between an organization’s current state/capabilities and the organization’s needs whose solutions may require enhanced technical solutions, improved processes, requisite organizational changes and/or strategic planning/policy development. Finally, the framework of Donald Houde and Houde Consulting is founded upon the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK 2.0); a self-described “…globally recognized standard for the practice of business analysis” written for the purpose of defining “the skills and knowledge that…a skilled practitioner (Business Analyst) [should] demonstrate.” The Business Analysis framework of Donald Houde builds upon the BABOK by initially detailing an organization’s:
This is realized through the execution of a process defined by prescriptive interview and facilitation techniques that incorporate a catalog of vetted questions associated with the appropriate descriptive metadata tags. This enables and supports a consistent, successful, efficient and effective elicitation phase that, amongst other features, provides the:
The body of work produced through the blending of BABOK’s foundational, but adaptive, practices and the Business Analysis Framework of Donald Houde and Houde Consulting has resulted in taking many initiatives, from idea through implementation and closure, along a successful, auditable and transparent path. Additionally, this blend has seen tremendous success at reenergizing and revamping existing projects by resetting their direction and moving them onto a track toward completion and ultimate success.
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A fundamental tenant of all types and sizes of organizations is that they must innovate and grow to avoid the risk of stagnation and the potential forfeiture of market share. When experts discuss strategies and vision for this tenant the conversation is often distilled to the simple phrase “The Only Constant in Business is Change”. Organizations must also evolve refreshed measures of success and interdependent business analysis requisite to realizing those advancing visions, metrics, objectives, and aspirations. If an organization is unable to apply fiscally responsible processes to its innovation and growth roadmap, a larger and larger gap will fracture the envisioned strategy from its attempted implementation.
When preventing or filling those gaps, Business Analysis (BA) fundamentally involves a set of tasks and techniques as a framework for collaboration among stakeholders in order to understand the structure, policies, and operations of an organization, and recommend solutions that enable an organization to achieve its goals and align visions with their
implementation. Beyond Business Analysis framing the accountabilities or responsibilities of the traditional role of Business Analyst, BA sets many of the guiding principles, procedures and best practices performed by an organization’s key roles and personnel. These key roles may include other expertise, such as, systems, process, project, product or QA analysts, enterprise or business architects, producers and developers, just to name a few.
Donald Houde, president and founder of both Houde Consulting, and the visionary data transformational alliance, Data To Inform, has designed, produced, and implemented a successful innovative Business Analysis management framework. A repeatable framework that effectively expands and builds upon processes, procedures and best practices native to time tested, scrutinized BA process standards. A framework that adapts proven Business Analysis leadership and managerial paradigms to include processes that successfully acclimate an implementation roadmap to the dynamic nature of each organization’s culture, capability and environmental attributes that equally influence any initiative’s success.
Application of his framework involves the Business Analyst collaborative team serving as researchers, elicitors and documenters who actively educe organizational business needs, goals and objectives. In the context of successfully executing the Business Analysis framework of Donald Houde and Houde Consulting, it becomes immediately critical to define and clarify the accountabilities and responsibilities of each individual serving in one or more of the team’s roles. Within the context of his framework, responsibilities are assigned to those producing the work, but accountabilities are assigned to the individual who the leadership or management team will go to if a problem is recognized with a specific task, deliverable, milestone or project. For example, when assembling an initiative’s responsibility assignment matrix the desire is to have a single resource held accountable for each item in the RACI (Responsibility, Accountability, Consulted, Informed) chart.
Performing Business Analysis requires the Business Analyst team to skillfully engage stakeholders to ultimately formulate a course of action derived from the elicited, filtered list of needs versus desires, requirements versus wishes and achievable versus unachievable visions.