Role of Business Analyst in Transforming an Organisation

Business Analysts are usually tagged as “Change Agents”, as they play a crucial role in guiding enterprises in taking the necessary steps to find innovations and change their services for structuring an organization.

Most Business Analysts are from IT or finance backgrounds, but they may not be formally trained in psychology or development of an organisation. Eventually, they look into the topics of changing management as incredibly napped ones. Additionally, changing the management topics involves in demanding high level of uncertainty, which might go against our methodical way of thinking, which usually opts for predictability, structure and order.

Generally, Business Analysts involve in gauging the ability of an organisation to accept the change as they aim to focus entirely on the technical part of the job, preferably requirements engineering. Generally, this task fits into the to-do list of the Project Manager as part of the “Stakeholders Management”. It is the fact that Project Managers are completely disturbed with the Stakeholders who affect the delivery of the project, not with the stakeholders who get overdone by the consequence of the project.

A Business Analyst must be well equipped with practical concepts of change management, to incorporate these concepts in the daily work. Firstly, it is very important to distinguish the three types of change management.

Strategic Change Management mainly focuses on the Business Model of a company. It involves in generating better profits, become more socially aware, etc. This type of change usually results in building new products, entering new markets, improving the business processes, creating new brand, re-structuring, etc.

Most of the IT professionals are familiar with IT Change Management, as it defines the processes of handling the change to IT systems like infrastructure, applications, and many more, to minimize disturbance of Business operations on users. This blog article discusses completely about ITIL, Microsoft Operations Framework, and Capability Maturity Model and so on.

The Organisational Change Management – It focuses mainly on the people-side of change, and uses a set of tools to help an organisation and its people transition from a current state to a sustainable target state. Before learning organisational change management, it is extremely important to understand the 3 levels of change: Group level, Individual-level, and Organisation level.

This 3-levels scheme is the core part achieved in organizations. But each individual is ruled by the conventions and dynamics of the groups they belong to. In turn, the groups are bound together in a whole system of groups of people that interact and interplay in terms of the whole organization and surrounding ecosystem.

Business Analysts can follow few basic steps to incorporate some change management practices in their work especially for a short period of time.

Adopt the right mindset

Most of the plans and methodologies like Project Management Methodologies, Business Analysis Methodologies, Projects Approaches, Enterprise Architecture Methodologies, and so on will depend mainly on extremely flawed assumption that “Organisation is a Machine”. It provides a sense of control over changes, as the machines are very controllable and predictable in comparison with enterprises homo sapiens, along with the complete biases, passions, preferences and the political agendas.

Know your role and expectations

Business Analysis expert “Steve Blais” outlined the role of IT Business Analyst as one or combination the following primary roles like:

• Intermediary: To work between the business, IT and upper level management.
• Filter: Evaluating and receiving change requests.
• Investigator: Obtaining information to choose the solution and problem.
• Facilitator: Assisting to understand problems and work together to get solution.
• Diplomat: Helps in solving the conflict among negotiates and parties integrated solutions.
• Change Agent: Plays important role in assuring the acceptance of solution by stakeholder throughout implementation.

The roles and responsibilities of Business Analysts changes based on the phase they are,

Change Planning: Here, Business Analyst (BA) mainly focuses on implementing his techniques, assessment skills and tools. Basically it’s all about discovering facts and profound analysis. Also they should be aware of client learning anxiety and survival anxiety. The BA can engage in defining the vision of the change in this phase, thus “pathfinding” or “Envisioning” is a significant skill for a BA.

Change Execution: BA plays a crucial role as a facilitator. BA can be the voice of reason and compassion for the people affected by the change among the cacophony of turbulence, chaos and anxiety. Even on a trail-and error basis facilitating the learning process would be a key activity.

Change Sustainability: In this phase BA establishes a highly accessible and visible Feedback Loops. Think about dashboards, alerts, scorecards, and other mechanisms that internalize the change and make it more transparent and visible.

Go through our Business Analysis Interview Questions to crack the Interviews.

Check the pulse of the corporate culture

Unfortunately, BA comes across with less luxury to manage a full cultural assessment relevant to the work. There are few indications that might represent the overall culture of client organizations. Information sharing is a hallmark of any corporate culture, where each member of an organization is an expressively indicative signal for its culture.

Irrespective of the technical precision of any change, there is a general formula that can help in answering this question: Beckhard and Harris’ Change Equation. Before you indicate the change, certify the parameters of this formula. If any single factor is zero or near zero, the modification will also be zero or near zero, and cost of the change would be more than the benefit.

The conclusion

There are Business Analysis trends that keep coming up around the Business Analysis industry which is opening doors and providing opportunities for the Business Analysis profession. Transforming the way Business Analysis is practiced in an organization and the method of structuring the BA team to achieve the most out of every individual, will help in tackling these complex Business issues. This article outlines evolving BA practice and changes the Business Analysis culture in an organization.

I hope that by now you have had an overview of Business Analysis. Before you enroll in ZaranTech’s certification course on Agile Business Analysis do check out this demo video: