InetSoftWebinar: Recruit Business Analysts and Develop Competencies

This is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Top Trends for Business Analysts." The speaker is Rick Smith, Senior Business Analyst at InetSoft.

Late last year I worked with one of those larger organizations where we developed a program to recruit business analysts, to develop competencies, and to train them. I helped them to build marketing material to present to their customers about the value of business analysis as a practice, as an add-on service to the services that they were already offering in this company.

Their competitors are doing just the same thing, and the reason that it’s happening is that these outsource vendors are seeing some of the turmoil that’s going on inside of organizations where requirements and project management and quality assurance are these big mixing bowls of activity, and stuff is coming out, but we are never really certain what the quality of that stuff is that is coming out.

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And so inevitably what happens is we’re turning to our vendors and asking them to develop software for us when we are challenged with identifying the requirements to help them develop software. So what’s happening is service level agreements that are put into place with these outsource vendors are being blown out of the budgetary water, so to speak.

An outsource vendor comes in, and I am using a graph with an order of magnitude here. An outsource vendor will come in and say okay, it’s a million dollars a year for us to do all your software development, support all your systems and over the course of that year, you get extra workload, extra documentation, and extra helpdesk support.

Escalation change requests all come in add to the overall cost, and so in order to reduce them, so to speak, outsource vendors are offering this opportunity. They say, hey listen we recognize that your business analysis practices aren’t quite up to speed, and you’re struggling with them so we'll provide that as a service for you so that we can help the requirements management process and the delivery of business services move along a little bit faster.

So we are starting to see this happen an awful lot. I am starting to see it, and if you just snoop around some of the LinkedIn groups that are out there, and you snoop around at what’s happening you look at certification of the IIBA, the CCBA certification, they are on the rise. CBAP certification is on the rise, particularly in India. The number of training companies in India is on the rise. The number of software solutions for requirements coming out of India is also on the rise. So there is a huge trend I think to watch for that we are going to see a large influx of on-shoring of business analysis resources.

Here is a good question that just came in, ‘do you see a risk in development providers providing BA services with the interest of the vendor not the client being served by results?’ This is the $64 million question that I really think has 64 million answers to it, but if I had to give you my own thoughts and opinions on it, is there a risk? Sure there is a risk. The most arguable risk is they don’t know our business.

That’s the first one, but that would be a con. The pro might be we can bring in somebody who knows the industry, and this is how the outsource vendors are going to pitch it. We know the industry. We’ve been in the industry long enough. We are going to bring them into your organization. We are going to have them facilitate requirements management workshops. You are going to provide the requirements. We’ll put them in a structured format and approach so that when our development team sees them, we are moving a little bit more faster and a little bit more efficiently. So, that’s the way I see things trending.

Look at the questions coming through. I am going to stop for a second to see if I can answer a couple of questions. Here is a comment, I disagree with the BAs having to have software development experience. I do believe that a BA should have excellent facilitation, presentation, and analysis skills. I have experienced that developers moving into a BA role tend to solutionize rather than determine actual requirements.

I don’t think anybody is disagreeing with this comment. I said earlier that the more knowledge, the more experience, the better. I did say in my comments that there are some risks and pros and cons, and one of those risks is that software developers will tend to have a tendency to solutionize before anything else. I couldn’t agree more with that. Thank you for your contribution. I really appreciate that.

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