How do Business Analyst Add value

For this article I want to look at how business analyst can create value for organizations, breaking it down specifically how the practice of business analysis creates better Return on Investments(ROI) when they are hired for critical and high value projects within an organisation.

Business Analysts Add Value Through Reducing Project Costs

If we can begin by exploring how business analysts reduce the investment, or the cost, of a project. if you’re thinking about this .. and specifically you are in a position of looking after an initiative or project budget “You may ask yourself do I need to add a business analyst to my team? Do we really need one? We know what we really need, or we need that configured system into our business user’s hands. Why don’t we just skip the analysis and go right to coding?”
Maybe this was not a completely practical way you may go about making that decision, but you get the idea, but here are a few specific ways that business analysts help reduce costs, they’re going to take the time to reduce re-work. So, when you start coding and making those changes and start figuring things out, and then you put that into the hands of a business user, they’re going to be like, “Oh, no. I didn’t really want this. I wanted that.” Which I am sure you agree should be avoided.
Essentially, something that maybe seemed like it was simple, gets quite complicated as like stakeholder requests come in, defects come in, and you have this re-work where you’re going back and revisiting the same implementation again, again, and again. Naturally, this results in costs increasing. If you add some analysis up front to figure out what is needed, the time and costs spent on re-work should go down.
The other place that business analysts have an effect on project costs is in the the time it takes for the business community to figure out what it is they actually want and expressing these wants into essential needs for the business.
In practice this is not always easily tangible. But if you think about all meeting times spent to gain requirements especially ones that might have high-level stakeholders in the room, there’s a definite cost to that meeting. If you’re having duplicate meetings again, and again, and again to discuss essentially the same issue and never getting to a solution, that’s an expense that your organization is taking on that’s bloating the impact, or cost, of what needs to be invested to figure out those requirements.

Good business analysis is going to help present solutions, create a logical decision-making process, and reduce any communication gaps, and help facilitate communication across departments, across different levels of the organization.
All of the above process does takes time. It’s not like you put a business analyst in and, snap, they come up with the requirements. But it’s going to take less time and less back and forth than if you didn’t have somebody who was in charge of facilitating that part of the process.
Finally, when it comes to the investment side of the equation, the other way that business analysts can help is proposing more cost-effective solutions. When you dial into what problem are we solving – a good analyst will say that again and again Why is this project being implemented in the first place? Sometimes creative solutions just pop up.

They don’t even have to be big technology solutions. Maybe there are tools that you can use that you already have. Maybe there’s a business process change that can get you a certain amount of the way there. That’s where we can take what maybe was a big investment and reduce that by half and still get that same return. It doesn’t always happen. But if it is possible, your business analyst is going to help you find it.
Did any of the above sound familiar to you? but you did not know how best to deal with it. If so, it may be a good time to consider working with a business analyst.
www.aicgconsulting.com

www.aicgconsulting.com