Lean Business Analysis

Ideal Business Analysis

Imagine a business analysis process where stakeholders anticipate uncovering critical business needs with ease. They complete the analysis seamlessly, on time, and within budget, impressing executives with the efficient use of stakeholders' time and resources. The power of lean business analysis stems from identifying requirements accurately the first time, thanks to high stakeholder engagement and alignment around the organization's needs.

Designing Lean Analysis

Lean business analysis begins with strategy design - aligning stakeholders around the organization’s values, mission, and goals, then defining a path to realize the goals. 

The Learn Strategy Design trail on Salesforce Trailhead starts with a Challenge Framing and Scoping module that shows how to clarify a project’s purpose and focuses stakeholders on the business problems to solve. 

Software development success depends on defining, understanding, and agreeing to a realistic project scope. In strategy design, stakeholders define and constrain the business challenges within a scope. They should invest enough time and effort in strategy design to

  • Identify the business challenges.

  • Break the challenges down into manageable problems.

  • Understand the problems and the benefits of solving them.

  • Align the stakeholders around meeting the challenges.

  • Define each problem’s scope and get stakeholder buy-in.

Putting Challenges in Order

Once strategy design has broken down business challenges into manageable problems, stakeholders should rank the issues by dependency, urgency, and business impact. 

For example, an organization wants to broaden its customer base, build customer loyalty and increase revenues. The executives decide to deploy three solutions from Salesforce; Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Service Cloud. At first, they want to deploy all three concurrently, but a Salesforce consultant points out the adverse impact of disrupting operations in three domains simultaneously.

The service stakeholders wanted to deploy Service Cloud first to prepare for the onslaught of new customers. The Salesforce consultant recommended they deploy Sales Cloud first to create account and contact records that the service team will need for cases. The stakeholders accepted the recommendation and deployed Sales Cloud first to meet service and marketing dependencies.

Slicing the Scope

Once the stakeholders have agreed on the scope, they should rank business needs during the discovery process. While business stakeholders usually want all the features as soon as possible, requirements could change while developing a solution to cover an enormous scope. Ranking requirements enables business analysts and architects to put them into smaller versions. They put the top-ranked features in the first version, allowing the stakeholders to try the most important features and provide feedback.

Slicing the scope into small, manageable versions sets up agile development adapting to fast-changing requirements. Most business stakeholders realize that their organization’s needs change quickly and should appreciate agile development’s flexibility benefits. They will develop an agile mindset, continuously ranking requirements and sustaining focus on what’s important.

Leaning into Success

Embracing lean business analysis enables stakeholders to address business needs by strategically scoping and defining challenges effectively. This approach encompasses the following:

  • Segmenting challenges into manageable problems

  • Gaining a thorough understanding of these problems

  • Identifying the benefits of resolving them

  • Uniting stakeholders around shared objectives

  • Establishing each problem's scope

With an agreed-upon scope, stakeholders prioritize business needs during the discovery phase and divide the scope into manageable portions. This sets the stage for agile development, which is highly adaptable to evolving requirements, fostering an environment of continuous improvement and streamlined success.

Lean business analysis informed by strategy design streamlines the overall development process.

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Enlightened Development

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Compelling Strategy Design