What is Business Analysis and what the disciplines?

Business Process Analysis (BPA) is a system that helps organisations to operate more efficiently so that they may cut back on costs, save more resources and be of better service to their customers. Using different processes, businesses are able to revolutionize end-to-end activities that make a customers experience more useful and removing any unnecessary work for the business.

But Business Analysis (BA) is more than “just” process modelling, it can be enhanced to the following disciplines:

Enterprise analysis or company analysis focuses on understanding the needs of the business as a whole, its strategic direction, and identifying initiatives that will allow a business to meet those strategic goals. It goes more into the Enterprise Architecture area.

Requirements planning and management involves planning the requirements development process, determining which requirements are the highest priority for implementation, and managing change.

Requirements analysis describes how to develop and specify requirements in enough detail to allow them to be successfully implemented by a project team.

Requirements communication describes techniques for ensuring that stakeholders have a shared understanding of the requirements and how they will be implemented.

Solution assessment and validation describes how the business analyst can verify the correctness of a proposed solution, how to support the implementation of a solution, and how to assess possible shortcomings in the implementation.

Business process analysis is just one technique that is performed by business analysts, and it can offer valuable outputs that have nothing to do with implementation of new software packages or computerized systems, but everything to do with improving efficiency and ensuring that you offer an efficient, top quality service to your customers. How can you achieve this when not by modelling your end-to-end business process?

All organizations, whether they are huge multi-national corporations or sole traders, need to operate ‘business processes’ in order to carry out the day-to-day activities of the business. By carrying out a ‘process mapping’ exercise on these processes you can focus on what is being done, why it is being done and who is doing it. If you are interested in <<Login or Register to see the link>>. The process map can be a simple, static ‘snapshot’ of your business that will help you identify your logical process groups  or it can be a full-blown process analysis exercise which can allow you to recognize your organisation’s strengths and weakness and may help to identify a need for change.

What is a Process and how can the performance be measured?

A process is an ongoing chain of process steps with events and results. The first step to define a process is to identify the boundaries. This is where the process begins and ends. The beginning of a process starts with a trigger (Event) that causes a specific action to be taken by a person, another process, or work group. The ending (Result) occurs when the results get passed on to another person, process, or work group.

Compare Diagrams

When optimizing a process the first question is how to measure a process performance? The easiest way is to use modelling tools and their simulation capabilities to create scenarios for As-Is and To-Be. These simulation tools give you the following performance measures:

Process capacity, Capacity Utilization, Throughput, Throughput Time/Lead Time, Cycle Time, Process Time, Idle time, Work in Progress, Set-up time, Direct labour content, Direct labour utilization, and much more.

The process capacity is determined by the slowest series task in the process, this is known as the bottleneck and can be optimized as well.

Process Flow Simulation Run

The process analysis exercise can help you to identify faulty workflows that are causing bottlenecks in your process which may be costing you time and money, or processing delays that cause your customers to lose faith in your ability to deliver an efficient quality service. Techniques like process flow simulation, Six Sigma helps you to optimize your processes.

Or there may be areas of duplicated effort, for example, you may be capturing the same information in more than one process. Identifying these duplications will help you to streamline your processing to maximize the value gained from your resources.  This identification is easier if you use a central repository to store your information objects centralized and different Stakeholders can access the same set of information just from a different angle

A Business Process Map

In Principle you can think of BPA as a map. When you use a map, you are able to see the entire picture of where you want to go. However, each of those roads within the map is a link that will get you to where you want to go. You can then weed out the roads that may be inefficient with roads that make the trip easier and quicker. The same thing goes with a BPA. Once everything has been mapped out, a company is then able to see the entire picture. They can remove workers or materials that may not be needed in order to reach their goal; customer euphoria.

In Business Process Analysis (BPA), organizations will often look at not only textual information but more importantly process flows, graphs and charts to get more of a visual on the flow of information. For example, there are many different stakeholders (different departments, project teams,..) that make up a company.

Value Chain Diagram

Each stakeholder t in the organization is trained to document everything that is involved in the developing of a project. Each stakeholder will then give the demographics of their department so that the BPA Team t can map out what is going on within all areas of the company. A company is then able to see everything that is going on within the organization and can then analyze each department and how everything works together in unison.

Once the entire chart is mapped out, a organization can then analyze to see where improvements can be made to cut down on costs. They can see where more workers may be needed or what materials they may need more or less of. In turn, this makes the organization run a lot more efficiently and able to maximize their potential in every possible way.

Application Technology Diagram

Business Process Analysis (BPA)  can help business leaders to understand the business and develop resourcing, training and IT- and Business strategies. For this exercise you need to analyse the IT component Application, Interfaces, Hardware as well. It makes also sense to create relationships between the IT artefacts and the process documentation.

The more stakholders are involveld the more you can use spread the costs and create a faster return on investment. If you are interested in <<Login or Register to see the link>>.  Through careful analysis of workflows and business processes you can identify opportunities for increasing efficiency and profitability. You can use business analysis techniques to help you identify potential processing bottlenecks or under-utilisation of costly resources.

Any great organization needs to implement BPA system in order to maximize their chances of being successful. This will help create a more direct route to their goal just like a map is the way for getting to where you want to go.

You are responsible for the IT Operations department, and to improve the functioning of the department. You want to reduce costs, higher productivity and better customer reach, and the best possible use of knowledge and experience. You look for the answer in ITIL, the famous collection of successful practices for IT Service Management. But documentation is in eight thick books and what may seem unpalatable out. Maybe you helped with a good set of process models.

There are several companies that prepare for ITIL process models. To help the process go forward in implementing ITIL, you have a great selection. One of the best known tools for building process models’ Corporate Modeler “of the company Casewise. This is a modeling tool that lets you build models for business and IT processes for the organization of the company (human and technical resources in the implementation of the processes involved), the sites of the company (where the various processes occur) and the stored data. But the software is also used for the technical aspect: the software applications, hardware and IT infrastructure.

The models in Corporate Modeler take the form of diagrams, with accompanying texts. All items are stored in a central repository. One can consult the models through the company intranet.

OVERLAPPING THEORIES
Companies and their IT departments have different theories. On the business side should not only take into account the ISO standards for quality: in companies listed on a stock exchange in the U.S. is one of each number in a financial report to identify the origin (Sarbanes-Oxley), banks are legally obliged to hedge against operational risks (Basel II), etc.. On the IT side, there are several frameworks successful practices that can be used, eg Cobit, ITIL and CMMI.

Casewise put a number of consultants working on the challenging assignment of several theories that process into process models, and in between also here take into account the considerable overlap. Thus arose the “Best Practice & Compliance (BPC) Accelerator”. Helmut Schindlwick, senior ITIL consultant: “Some companies have two or more of these theories implement.

From the cell “organization” than multiple audit teams. These teams investigate the state of the business and IT processes, and each other while running for the feet. Some business people and some IT people should also audit several times the same questions. That is absurd and expensive to avoid situation, a company can deploy BPC Accelerator. ” The tool also supports research through audits, reporting and monitoring of the actions taken.

“A process model approach has many advantages,” Schindlwick told, “First and foremost in the field of communication: the people who participate in the discussion to see and understand how the process is executed, if a step was missed, that rapidly observed. Even if two process descriptions are contradictory, it is notable. The process models can also be used to staff explain a new job or new staff to train. ”

“Our customers can also adapt the process models and create new models,” he continues, “When a clear view on the processes, one can quickly determine where to intervene first. Another advantage: a clear vision of the process also helps in the selection of tools. ”

MODELS FOR THE ITIL PROCESSES
ITIL is one of the theories presented by the consultants of Casewise was taken in hand, and translated into process models. BPC Accelerator translates the detailed guidelines from seven ITIL books to a visual model. The persons concerned may examine the processes through the intranet to navigate through the model. That way they can study the best practice processes, and subsequent introduction. With the same approach can also present in the business processes and document the differences between the current and future situation analysis.

<<Login or Register to see the link>>: “BPC Accelerator also includes questionnaires, which our customers can start work immediately. They ask the questions to the business and IT people. So they get a picture of the current situation in the field of IT Operations. They also see the processes where improvement is most needed and will yield the greatest results. ” BPC Accelerator compares the entered answers to ITIL Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). “BPC Accelerator can also collect performance data from other systems,” said <<Login or Register to see the link>>.

Suppose you’ve examined the current processes, and a process improvement project started. With this tool you can indicate where changes need to happen: in business (operations personnel, equipment and software applications), in the processes of IT Operations, the resources (personnel and equipment), databases, applications and hardware.

PROCESS DESCRIPTIONS

What you see, if you use this tool? We put it out on the basis of one example: the Incident Management process (one of the processes of Service Support). For each process you find the diagram, the process description (taken from the book on ITIL), the critical success factors, Key Performance Indicators, the audit questions and the roles.

The Incident Management process that:
- Description: The primary goal of the Incident Management process is to restore normal service as quickly as possible following loss of service, etc..
- The roles: Incident Manager, Service Desk Analyst, Service Desk Manager
- Critical success factors: knowledge base, close links with the Service Level Management, effectively automated system, up-to-date CMDB
- Key Performance Indicators: average cost per incident, incidents processed per Service Desk Workstation, average time (elapsed time) to solve an incident or a workaround to offer, number and percentage of incidents resolved remotely, percentage of incidents closed by the Service Desk without referral to other levels of support, percentage of incidents handled within the scheduled time, total number of incidents.
- The audit questions, for example: Is the process documented?
- The diagram

The chart above shows the breakdown of the process in processes of a lower level. The Incident Management process consists then of the processes’ Understand Incident Management “,” Plan and implement Incident Management ‘,’ Consider tool requirements for Incident Management “, etc..
For those underlying processes is always a model of the diagram, the process description, the critical success factors, Key Performance Indicators, the audit questions and the roles. And so it goes on.

ROLES

In IT Operations everyone one or more roles, one role for one or more persons. ITIL has a few dozen rolls, for example Chief Information Officer, Service Support Manager, Service Delivery Manager, etc.. For each role can find the description (taken from the book on ITIL), the roles of which this person was the manager, the role of the manager of that person and the processes whereby the person involved.

For example, the Change Manager role:
- Description: The Change and Configuration Management role is responsible for Change, Release, and Configuration Management, etc..
- The roles of which this person was the manager: Change Owner
- The role of the manager of that person: Service Support Manager
- Processes which that person is involved: TOP LEVEL Application Management

Christiane Vandepitte is an independent consultant.

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