Why Structure Matters
COPAF Consulting was founded by Johan den Heijer, an experienced Senior Business Analyst with over a decade of experience in business transformation. He has supported leading organisations in financial services, public institutions, traditional enterprises and multinational corporations. During his career he observed that the focus of solution delivery was primarily on IT rather than the end-to-end business change. Once the change initiative passed the development phase, a quick quality assurance was done and the solution went live. By the time the business and operations encountered the now newly-implemented IT solution, the project team had already disbanded. Business and operations had to fend for themselves to close the gap on the non-IT delivery by learning-by-doing.
Practical observation
The observation became more astute in Agile working environments. User stories are broken down in Product Backlog Items and fed to Developers, often devoid of business context. The recipe for disaster was complete when organisations decided Business Analysts were no longer needed in Agile working environments, effectively removing the guardrails that would provide business context around the work items of their development teams.
Product Owners would pick up some of the slack, but as they are primarily focused on their Product Roadmaps, the Business Analysis discipline loses its systemic depth over time. The focus on IT delivery at the expense of non-IT catches up with organisations once regulatory pressure starts to mount. There are no change agents left within the organisation that can translate between IT and Compliance. The need for structure becomes obvious once the organisation needs to explain to a regulatory body how something works from a functional perspective. Even more so when this regulatory body expects a mapping of these functional capabilities against their regulatory requirements.
Where structure pays off
There is an old adage in Business Analysis that says, ‘Aim, Design, Execute’. It advocates investing the majority of time and effort in the first two phases. Taking careful aim suggests to define a clear and concise scope of the intended change. Design specifies what, how, when and why change impacts. A Business Analyst can choose to follow a framework here to ensure thoroughness. This investment pays off quickly once unforeseen use cases are found and managed accordingly by the Business Analyst in close collaboration with stakeholders. Every organisation will agree it is more cost-effective to have a single Business Analyst solve an issue early, instead of a development team after a full sprint of effort. This layer of sanity-checking is implied in a thorough impact analysis. It is a key deliverable for any design phase. The residual is what is to be executed to ensure change is embedded in a controlled manner.
How this affects COPAF Consulting
COPAF Consulting has incorporated that experience through experience-led delivery. To avoid dilution of our delivery quality, we have chosen to focus on the art and science of Business Analysis. COPAF Consulting is organised around senior accountability, with other profiles operating within a clearly defined structure. This enables us to operate in small, specialised teams to deliver value-driven consulting to our clients. We only add capability when it enhances the overall Business Analysis discipline, making growth intentional and calculated.
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