Whitepaper Archive

Closing the Business Analysis Skills Gap
Almost all of today’s business processes are intertwined and dependent on information technology. This connection has led to the growth of the business analysis profession and sparked a demand for increased business analyst involvement throughout the system development life cycle. This paper discusses why the task of finding skilled business analysts has become a problem for so many organizations and suggests some effective solutions.

Comparison of Three Tools for Business Analysts
Business Analysts need tools specifically targeted for their needs, including requirements definition (both text-based requirements and visual views), requirements management, support for the requirements review process, an intuitive user experience, excellent document production capabilities, and integration with quality assurance tools. This paper compares three tools in this space, provided by vendors whose solutions can scale from ten users to thousands.

Achieving Business Analysis Excellence
The job that business analysts perform is often ad-hoc and undocumented. Individual BAs struggle to know how to approach the different types of projects they encounter and it’s difficult for them to make lasting improvements without a support structure to help them grow their skills and to build a consistent, sustainable best practice approach. In this white paper, we discuss what a Business Analysis Center of Excellence (BACoE) is, how to discover and plan for what you need, how to build one, and how you can develop a solid business case that supports the decision to proceed.
BA Competency Business Case Table of Contents
Building business analyst competency doesn’t happen in just a week or a month. It needs to begin with a Discovery and Planning effort that will produce an assessment of the current maturity of your BAs, recommended improvements, a roadmap for moving forward, and – perhaps most important – a business case to justify the work. What would a business case look like? Go here to see a recommended Table of Contents.
Berkshire Life Pioneers a Requirements-Focused Culture
Read how Berkshire Life Insurance Company improved the way it gathered and managed requirements, as well as how it fundamentally changed its organization’s structure by building a center of excellence to support the changes.

Enterprise Business Analysis Is Key to Product Launch Success
A product manager in a large financial services institution had an idea for a product that had the opportunity to provide a new revenue stream. But because the financial institution was conservative, the product manager needed more than a good business case. She needed a comprehensive view of the impacts the product would make across the organization. This paper discusses how the product manager used Enterprise Business Analysis to execute her vision.
Infusing Business Analysis into the Product Life Cycle
To ensure an insurance organization’s growth and profitability, the ability to bring new products to market quickly and accurately must become a key core competency. This means creating a product development cycle measured in months, not years. For many this goal seems like a pipe dream; instead they deal with the costs of rework and lost opportunity. The solution? Incorporate Business Analysis competency into the product development team on a full-time basis.

5 Reasons to Outsource Requirements
Finding, attracting and signing top BA talent into full-time roles is difficult and expensive. But usually projects must be staffed immediately with highly productive business analysts. As a near term solution, the business analysis skills gap can be closed by working with a specialized contractor to provide a managed solution using best-of-breed business analysis talent. This white paper describes the questions you should ask.

A Case Study in Virtual Facilitation for a Distributed Organization
When remote participants join an analysis workshop, additional techniques must be employed to offset the difficulties of remote communication where the lack of visual cues and feedback mechanisms can lead participants to become observers rather than contributors. This paper illustrates the effective application of best practices in distributed workshop design.
Charting the Course to Better Virtual Meetings
Conducting a virtual meeting well is about taking extra measures to plan and orchestrate an engaging collaborative process. This white paper lays out a practical approach that ensures your virtual team will have input during the brainstorm, voting, and discussion phases, making them highly engaged and truly committed to the decisions that are made.