Top Ten Business Analysis Trends A/E Firms Can Learn From

Communication Key to Driving Client Collaboration & Greater Business Value

If you’re a leader in an architecture/engineering firm, then you’re most likely familiar with business analysis. At its simplest, business analysis is about analyzing an organization by assessing the business model, and a business analyst is the person who does that research. Sound familiar?

Maybe you even do that leg work yourself or perhaps hire someone else to do it (and if you’re not doing any business analysis at all—well, you definintely should be!). Each year, trends emerge within the business analysis field. Understanding them can help you be a better leader--and, ultimately, make better business decisions for your firm. Here are the top ten:

More focus on business value, less on project activities. This year, delivering and optimizing business value should take its rightful priority over the traditional project goals of delivering on-time and within-budget. Projects will need to provide better solutions that deliver benefits for years to come.
It’s not just about software, it’s about the WHOLE solution. Changing organizational needs will demand much more focus on the business context, not just information technology. The interfaces, interdependencies, and interactions that happen between the people, processes, business rules, and other enablers will add to the challenge and “wholeness” of delivering solutions.
Building better business cases that set up projects for success and avoid ones doomed to fail. The discipline of business analysis will help keep companies from getting into trouble due to their tendency to build business cases that are biased, inaccurate and superficial. Smart organizations will realize that avoiding one bad project can cover their business analysis budget for the year.
Wider adoption of a professional analysis approach to increase organizations’ agility. Business analysts will use tools like use-case diagrams, work-flow models, decision tables, and other models that enhance analysis and communication. Better collaboration, trust, and buy-in of models by stakeholders will feed into the business architecture for the whole enterprise to collectively deal with complexity and change into the future.
Goodbye to the business requirements document. There will be a shift from the low-value work writing and updating text-based documents to visual modelling, online repositories and real-time collaboration tools. Driven by the needs of geographicallydispersed virtual teams, companies will need to invest in changing the way people work together.
Business analysis will help deliver better results from technology investments. Organizations will apply the discipline of business analysis before investing in enterprise-wide solutions like COTS products to ensure the right fit, and show businesses the greater value in changing their processes first rather than customizing software.
More business analysis, fewer business analysts drive career opportunities. The techniques and tools of BA will be applied more, but there will be fewer with the job title of business analyst. We’ll see more titles such as process analyst, knowledge engineer, project director, client service director and client relationship manager, which will create greater career opportunities by avoiding the less valued business analyst title.
Yet many will continue to expect the “same old, same old” from business analysis. Other parts of the organization, as well as other professions and disciplines, will remain unaware of the evolution of the business analysis discipline, and as a result will hold it back from its greater strategic potential.
Don’t expect to get all the requirements up front. With about 45 percent of all approved requirements never actually being used, business analysts will use communication tools and techniques to allow requirements to emerge and evolve over time.
Ultimately, today’s business climate requires project-driven change to be executed with more discipline and agility than ever before. The business analyst’s skilled interaction with stakeholders throughout the organization will facilitate the critical need to bridge the gap between strategy and execution and drive business value.

About the Author: Joseph R. Czarnecki, PMP, SCPM, Vice President Product & Sales Support, TwentyEighty Strategy Execution, an assembled a panel of senior executives from around the world to compile the Top Ten Business Analysis Trends for 2016. Joe’s in-depth knowledge allows him to align client needs with course offerings, guide the contextualization of courses to client’s cultures and processes, and bring insights from clients to the development of new courses. Joe has more than 25 years of experience in instructional design with a focus on portfolio and program management for financial services, aeronautics, manufacturing, energy, and technology companies. To download a free copy of the trends, visit strategyex.com.

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