Business Analyst: Are you designing for a disaster...

What intentional and unintentional errors in business analysis can lead to...and what impact it can have. This blog provides a guide to help the business analyst understand the consequences of errors in requirements and designs.

Unintentional:

One of the most unlikely incidents occurred due to a software bug in the Therac - 25 medical radiation therapy device in 1985-87. This machine was used to administer radiation doses on patients, and in several cases the faulty device administered excess quantities of radiation. In some cases, it exceeded 100 times more than the intended dose, and resulted in several injuries and three deaths.

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25)

Technology is like a 'Gift of Fire,' as correctly mentioned by Sara Baas in her book where she gave many examples of such disasters.


Correlating to her thought, it would be appropriate to ask a business analyst, “are you designing for a disaster?”


Many business analysts working on a project, especially a large project, fail to see the complete picture. This alone can lead their company or their client to the disaster.

Along with software design, development and testing, requirement analysis and design is key part of developing software solutions.


It is the business analyst who elicits a particular requirement or functionality document, confirms, and sign it off before communicating the requirements to the technical team. The requirement states precisely how it works under normal conditions, in an alternate process and possible error it may have.

What are the rules applied to the requirement? What is acceptable and not acceptable in terms of data, rules, format and so on?If the error lies in the requirement/functionality, intentionally and unintentionally goes undetected, could it lead to major disaster depending on the project/product it is used?For example, a decimal place mentioned incorrectly in a requirement document in banking software that deals with millions of transactions could potentially make a serious impact with loss of few millions dollars.

A particular requirement or function used in laser arm robotic surgery could be seriously impaired.

Defective transportation software could potentially cause loss worth millions and delay.

A space ship or flight software could cause an accident if any fault occurs in the system.

These are just a few examples of the thousands of potentially damaging situations that could arise if the software requirements are not documented and implemented correctly.


Intentional:


Of course, there could be intentional error in the requirements for designing the software solution to mislead authority. The most notorious example is how Volkswagen managed to manipulate the car emission system for two decades. Of course, when they are caught, they have to cough up close to 18 billion dollars in penalties, not considering the loss of face and brand value.

Oops...How brilliantly one can misuse the use of software... The team of business analyst/stakeholders/project manager who designed software never thought it would ultimately cost billions...

(Source: http://time.com/4046994/volkswagen-emissions-golf-crisis/)


Undetected hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica: This is another serious issue that impacts the whole world. The software that was used by NASA to map ozone layers had been designed to ignore certain values that deviated greatly from expected measurements.

Therefore, the hole in the ozone layer went undetected until 1985, even though the project was launched in 1978. It was only found after the scientists at NASA reviewed the data for abnormal results and found the error and the big hole.

(Source: http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/03/19/10-historical-software-bugs-with-extreme-consequences/)

The business Analyst's role goes far beyond the requirement lifecycle, as their role and responsibilities are not limited to just requirements or the solutions...but the total solution and its overall impact on the organization and beyond. Their contribution could possible make or break the organization.

Please read my book for more details: Business Analysis: The Question and Answer Book available on Amazon and other places in Kindle and paperback.

#BusinessAnalysis #Design #Disaster #SoftwareDevelopment #RequirementManagement #ProjectManagement

Automated model-driven BPMN approach for Business Analyst

This is my review to research paper “Resource-based Modeling and Simulation of Business Processes” written by Andrea D’Ambrogio. It is an interesting research paper that explores the simulation-based analysis of business processes that covers all the phases in BP lifecycle, starting from design to execution and improvement to post implementation enhancement phases.

The goal of the paper is to introduce a reliability in analysis that considers unexpected failures of resources to execute the process task due to unavailability of a resource allocated to a task.

The paper exploits both model-driven principles and Discrete Event System Specification, also known as DEVS.

This process requires first interpreting the BPMN model with the allocation of task resources described in terms of performance and reliability properties of the task resources and then transforming the annotated BPMN model into a DEVS-based model that in turn analyzes and produces the better outcome. This DEVS-based model can be used effectively by business analysts due to their unfamiliarity with or lack deep knowledge of the formalism. In addition, the author of the paper has proposed the automated model-driven approach, which would overcome the issues related to the manual building DEVS model, which are effort and time consuming, as well as error free. The mapping of BPMN elements to DEVS atomic models are later linked to the process control flow logic to get the final DEVS-coupled model. Work is currently in process to complete the specification of mapping rules for basic BPMN elements.

If this research is applied to advanced BPMN and becomes successful, it will have more scope in writing business requirements, business rules, and designing the systems.

Opportunities for Business Analysis in future…

Business Analysis includes strategy analysis, business process management, business-technology-management i.e. analyzing business (using business analysis process and business analysis techniques) and identifying solution for better business with or without using IT.

Business Strategy Analysis: Analyst with business background can go for strategy analysis part of business analysis and work closely with business stakeholders. Strategy Analysis will include, but not limited to identifying business need (problem or opportunity) and recommend the solution to achieve organization’s goal. The organization goal could to taking care of exiting problem, or improving existing business or clutching new opportunity to expand business.

Business Technology Analysis: Analyst with technology background can go for system/technology analysis part of business analysis work closely with technology team. Business / System analysis will include, but not limited to analysis the solution requirements (capability and conditions of solutions or Functional and non-functional requirements) to ensure that the future solution meets the problem or opportunity mentioned in business need document.

Opportunities: There is tremendous opportunity in every sector as every organization strives to improve their business (product, services, operations technology and so on...) to remain competitive or to create competitive edge or new create a business (for example Facebook, a networking was a new/emerging business just a decade ago…)

The need for business analysis will increase for following reasons:

• The increase in complexity in technology with new innovation technology will have highly sophisticated solutions.
• The increase in complexity and competition in business will have larger scope for strategy analysis, one part of business analysis.
• Dynamic business environment where change is not only accepted, but also accepted at the speed of light
• A dramatic change in traditional to technology focus business with technology savvy new generations will experience new business opportunities that were never thought of...and many more...

This is one of the reasons why many universities in UK and USA have started offering full-fledged courses in either in business analysis or business technology management. Although IEEE, USA is pioneer in setting the standards for IT industry, recently many professional institutions such as IIBA from Canada, PMI from USA, BCS from UK and IREB from Germany and more are working towards improving the quality and setting new standards for this field.

There are few institutions involved in setting standards in business process management.

Most of the institutes offer certification program suitable for business analysis professionals and also support industry to create center of excellence.

All industries need business analysis as every industry and every company will need business technology optimisation and management throughout their life-cycle.

Following is the partial list of industries and functions who will extensively use the business analysis for their day-to-day business operations. 

To read more about career paths in Business Analysis, pls visit my blog: Career Paths for Business Analyst

Construction, manufacturing, healthcare, non profit, advertising, agile, architecture, automotive, agency, budget, building, business development, consulting, communication, clinical research, design, software development, product development, interior design, web development, engineering, education, events, electrical, exhibition, energy, ngo, finance, fashion, green card, oil gas, hospital, it, marketing, media, mining, nhs, non technical, oil and gas, offshore, pharmaceutical, real estate, retail, research, human resources, telecommunications, technology, technical, senior, digital, software, web, clinical, hr, infrastructure, business, ERP, Creative, ICT, hvac, sales, quality management, uk, implementation, network, operations, architectural, environmental, crm, website, interactive, security, supply chain, logistics, training, project management, administrative management…








#Analysis #BusinessAnalysis #BusinessAnalysisTraining #Businessprocessmanagement #ANISANtechnologies, #SandhyaJane,

The importance of data repository in impact analysis.

Handling the change in business processes is one of the most difficult tasks faced by the large corporates, as the impact of change is unpredicted even after the change management team follows the standard process diligently to measure the impact of change in business process. Thus, making it more tedious and time consuming leading to the competitive disadvantage over small companies. On other hand, the small companies, including start-up have advantage of being agile in handling their business process changes effectively and creating a sizeable hole in their competitors who are large businesses providing combined and complex business solution. Although not noticeable initially, but it is creating an impact slowly and steadily. For example, mobile app companies or crow-funding companies are making their presence felt against large corporations.

The process would be less challenging, if the current common practice of using a commercial tool that uses fragmented data on change history to measure the impact for a change in business process were done comprehensively. For that, the common practice of maintaining the impact data as part of project files categorized under change management or requirement management and/or configuration management needs to be changed. Because, analyst or concern person who is incorporating the impact data in the analysis is mostly retrieving and processing it in manual or semi-automated way mostly using latest few versions based on analysts’ analytical ability and business expertise’s recommendations. The manual retrieval and large data in impact analysis could lead to an uncertain situation or incorrect result in future.

However, considering the frequency and urgency of change implantation in business-IT process, it would be recommended to use the automated tool to create a repository of change and compute its impact analysis to deal with fast paced dynamic business environment to stay ahead in the competition.

There is a real need for a tool that can provide a repository of complex mathematical calculation, business process and complete history of impact of changes to predict the impact in future change using various mathematical and technical calculations based historical data on change management. In addition, it can also use the human the ‘human workflow’, dealing with roles, task, emergencies, and exception related details for decision-making process and product life cycle (single and collaborative), virtualization mark-up, and collaboration internal and external business data for creative effective engineering for change management process.

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