Supporting your stakeholders' evolution from the current state to the future state requires you to perform activities across all the stages of a digital transformation initiative.
This article arms you with the knowledge you need to support the full digital transformation lifecycle.
The Business Analyst Execution Model (ODESA™)
Business analysts support their upstream and downstream stakeholders through the digital transformation lifecycle by performing orientation, discovery, elaboration, support, and adoption-related tasks.
Each of these task groups enables you to perform the necessary analysis work needed to produce the analysis deliverables when required and to support your stakeholders when required.
- Onboarding (O) means that you're preparing yourself and your stakeholders for the events that are coming up in the project.
- Discovery (D) means that you're working closely with clients to discover their true business and user-level needs.
- Elaboration (E) means that you're helping your business stakeholders express their needs in a deeper level of knowledge
- Support (S) means that you're supporting your upstream and downstream stakeholders through the product build stage.
- Adoption (A) means that you're supporting your upstream stakeholders as they work towards adopting the new product into their business operations.
Onboarding Tasks
Onboarding is the critical first step in a digital transformation project, where you ensure that all stakeholders are aligned and prepared for the upcoming work that needs to be performed.
This stage involves determining who your key stakeholders are, introducing them to business analysis deliverables if required, setting expectations about your role, and establishing clear communication channels to make sure that everyone is the correct expectations set for the project.
Tasks can Include:
- Orienting Yourself: Getting access to the resources you need to execute the project.
- Helping Identify Roles and Responsibilities: Clearly define and document the roles and responsibilities of each team member.
- Identifying Key Stakeholders: Identify all relevant stakeholders and ensure their involvement from the beginning.
- Educating Stakeholders: Provide necessary orientation to stakeholders to familiarize them with the tools, processes, and methodologies to be used to carry out the analysis work.
- Clarifying Expectations: Ensuring stakeholders understand and agree on what the business analysts will and will not be assisting with during the initiative.
- Understanding Fixed Parameters: Identify and document the non-negotiable constraints that have already been established for the initiative.
- Acquiring Domain Knowledge: Gain the knowledge you need to have intelligeny conversations with your stakeholders.
Effective onboarding helps you to foster a collaborative environment ensuring that everyone you'll be interacting with understands their roles and responsibilities.
Discovery Tasks
At the beginning of a digital transformation, the business analyst focuses on identifying and understanding the customer’s challenges and needs.
This involves conducting a thorough analysis of the current state, defining future state goals, and performing a GAP and feasibility analysis.
The business analyst is responsible for creating essential documents such as Business Requirements Documents (BRDs), developing a compelling business case to justify the project, and building a product backlog to prepare for project execution.
Tasks can Include:
- Conducting Current State Analysis: Analyze and document the existing processes, systems, and organizational structure to understand the baseline from which changes will be made.
- Defining Future Processes: Collaborate with stakeholders to envision and define the desired outcomes and objectives of the transformation.
- Performing GAP & Feasibility Analysis: Identify the gaps between the current state and future state, and assess the feasibility of proposed changes.
- Creating BRDs: Document the customer's needs in a business requirements document to get agreement and sign-off on the functional scope of the project from all required stakeholders.
- Developing a Business Case: Build a robust business case that articulates the value, benefits, and justification for the transformation project.
- Building Product Backlog: Create and prioritize a product backlog consisting of user stories and system functions to be developed and implemented.
Elaboration Tasks
On every project, there comes a time when the business analyst needs to translate user-level needs into detailed specifications. This is called elaboration and allows you as the business analyst to express the business need at a level of detail that your development and QA stakeholders need to build and test the software product.
Formally, these activities are supposed to start once funding has been approved, but in reality, you should start the elaboration work as soon as you can to stay well ahead of the development team.
Elaboration involves taking product backlog items (PBIs) from the product backlog and detailing them into functional specifications by:
- Writing Use Cases: Describe the interactions between users and the system to achieve specific goals, providing a clear context for development.
- Creating Wireframes: Develop visual representations of user interfaces to illustrate layout, navigation, and functionality.
- Specifying Screen Elements: Define the details of each screen, including layout, fields, buttons, and other elements to guide developers.
- Defining Business Rules: Document the rules and logic that govern business processes and decisions to ensure accurate implementation.
- Modeling Data: Create data models that outline how data is structured, related, and managed within the system.
- Securing Release Approval: Obtain the necessary sign-offs from stakeholders and regulatory bodies to authorize the deployment of the software product.
These detailed functional specifications are essentially the user requirements (user stories, system functions) expressed at a deeper level of detail to ensure that developers and testers have a clear understanding of what needs to be built.
Business stakeholders lack the language and skills needed to express their needs at this level of detail and rely heavily on you as the business analyst to help them express their needs to the downstream stakeholders.
Note: Our FOBA course teaches you how to perform these elaboration tasks by having you produce actual deliverables.
Support Tasks
You will play a crucial role in assisting both upstream and downstream stakeholders during the build and test stages of the project.
They provide clarity on specifications to the Dev & QA teams and help customers navigate through the user acceptance testing (UAT) phase.
- Clarifying Requirements and Specifications for Developers & QA Teams: Ensure that development and quality assurance teams fully understand the detailed requirements and functional specifications to avoid any misinterpretations during implementation.
- Facilitating Customer Change Requests: Manage and document any changes requested by customers, ensuring they are evaluated, approved, and integrated smoothly into the project plan.
- Helping Customers with User Acceptance Testing (UAT): Guide and support customers through the UAT process, helping them to validate that the developed solution meets their needs and requirements.
These support tasks may seem trivial on the surface, but they are instrucmental in helping the project succeed, and the consume analysis time. If a project manager undercuts the analysis time, you may need to bring these tasks to their attention to clarify that you are spending time outside of discovery and elaboration to support the team..
Adoption Tasks
The final phases of a digital transformation focus on integrating the software product into the enterprise, and you might have an important role to play in this phase on some projects.
Here you might be helping your team members secure approvals needed to make product releases, handle some communication, and train users on the new system.
- Communicating the Release: Inform all relevant parties about the release schedule, features, and changes to ensure everyone is prepared for the transition.
- Training Users: Conduct training sessions to educate users on how to effectively use the new system, ensuring a smooth transition and maximizing productivity.
- Producing User Guides: Create detailed documentation and user manuals to support users in understanding and navigating the new software, providing a reference for future use.
Key Takeaways
- Business analysis goes far beyond just writing user stories and producing data models.
- Business analysts play a key role across the entire digital transformation lifecycle.
- You can achieve significant career advancements in your career by learning our ODESA™ framework and adopting skills across all phases of the framework: Onboarding, Discovery, Elaboration, Support, and Adoption.
About the Author
Emal Bariali is a seasoned business analysis professional with 20+ projects executed since starting his BA career in 2005.
Emal increased his yearly business analysis income fivefold between 2005 and 2022 by enhancing his BA skills and transitioning to BA consulting.
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