You can't choose whether to analyse, but you can choose WHEN to do it...

...and therein lies the key. For Business Systems Analysis to be effective in the current world of dynamic and rapid change, it must be highly responsive to the extreme pressures that projects in modern organisations face.

Business Systems Analysis is the first step in the translation of business expectations into the real world. The key elements are:

• Modelling the scope of the change in systematic terms
• Documenting the corporate context and strategic opportunities of the change
• Understanding the risks, problems and opportunities offered by the proposal
• Analysing the financial returns of the proposal
• Specifying the core changes required in business terms, prior to physical design and styling

The core outputs from the Analysis task are the Business Requirements Specification and the Benefits Realisation Plan. These two documents form the basis of further project planning, with the Business Requirements scoping the physical deliverables that will be developed, and the Benefits providing the Return On Investment that is the heart of the Business Case.

Mistakes and mis-directions in the analysis of the change affect every subsequent aspect of the change project. Effective analysis is based on the following principles:

• Focus on the expectations of the client
• Short time cycles to ensure capability to respond rapidly
• Iteration, at deeper and deeper levels, and with management approval based on return on investment driving each iteration
• Integration with project management
• Flexiblity to suppport a variety of methodologies and project management styles
• A natural extension of human capacities, building on the human strengths of the team, the stakeholders and the clients
• Clear and appropriate governance
• Use of a variety of graphical options to model highly complex business activities clearly on different dimensions
• Quality assurance and documentation integrated into the analysis, to minimise rework and key-person dependencies
• Building on current capacity
• Evidence-based, with facts and field analysis replacing personal memory and opinion
• Quantitative financial analysis

We offer research, education and advisory services in the areas of Business Systems Analysis and Business Requirements Specification.