Business Analysis: Strategic or Tactical?

Does your company employ business analysts? If so, to what extent is their role strategic versus tactical?

According to Wikipedia:

A business analyst (BA) is responsible for analyzing the business needs of their clients and stakeholders to help identify business problems and propose solutions.

A common activity of business analysts is to document business processes. Business needs typically stem from inefficiencies and problems in these processes. To the extent that your business analysts solely document the processes - as opposed to eliciting and researching them, identifying the inefficiencies and problems within them, and proposing solutions - your BAs have a very tactical role.

There is nothing wrong with such a role, as long as the people performing the more strategic functions are qualified to do so. Be careful about relying on subject matter experts (SMEs). Being experts in a domain doesn't by itself qualify them to analyze business processes and problems.

Comments

Roger L. Cauvin said…

Thanks, Scott, for contributing to the discussion. You raise some important points about the differences between product management and business analysis. Please see my 10/1/2006 entry for further thoughts on the matter.

Sun Oct 01, 05:10:00 PM 2006

Why Spreadsheets Suck for Prioritizing

The Goal As a company executive, you want confidence that your product team (which includes all the people, from all departments, responsible for product success) has a sound basis for deciding which items are on the product roadmap. You also want confidence the team is prioritizing the items in a smart way. What Should We Prioritize? The items the team prioritizes could be features, user stories, epics, market problems, themes, or experiments. Melissa Perri makes an excellent case for a " problem roadmap ", and, in general, I recommend focusing on the latter types of items. However, the topic of what types of items you should prioritize - and in what situations - is interesting and important but beyond the scope of this blog entry. A Sad but Familiar Story If there is significant controversy about priorities, then almost inevitably, a product manager or other member of the team decides to put together The Spreadsheet. I've done it. Some of the mos...

5 Ways Companies Make Product Decisions

In the last blog entry, we reviewed the four problems that companies face, or are trying to overcome, as they make product decisions . Now we'll look at the ways that most companies make their product decisions. Companies that develop, market, and sell products and solutions make strategic and ongoing tactical decisions. They decide what features to include in their products, what messages they will use to communicate the value of their products, what marketing tactics they will use, what prospective customers they will target, and many day-to-day choices. Whether or not these decisions are deliberate or ad hoc, most companies use some combination of the following ways of making product decisions. (A downloadable "map" that summarizes the product decision landscape is included at the end of this article.) Customer Wants Product decisions based on feature requests, focus groups, and what prospects and customers say they want. Companies are selling products to ...

Is Customer Development Pseudoscience?

The “Science” of Lean Startup Lean startup practitioners embrace the scientific method, seeking the "truth" about what business model and strategy will lead to product success. We do so by: Formulating hypotheses Crafting and running experiments to test them Learning from the experiments Iteratively feeding our learnings back into revised hypotheses Sounds pretty scientific, at least in spirit, doesn't it? Yet this process actually neglects a key ingredient in the scientists' mode of operation. To identify what’s missing, let’s examine “customer development”. Customer Development Steve Blank is one of the pioneers of the lean startup movement. He introduced into the lean startup lexicon the term “customer development”. Customer development consists of sessions and interactions with customers to test hypotheses. For example, a product manager might interview a prospect, asking if she agrees with the product manager’s hypotheses about the problems she faces or the ...

Cauvin

Search This Blog