Practical tips for success

I would like to outline a few pointers that you can use when you do business analysis tasks. These are relatively simple tasks that helped me tremendously. The simplest and easy-to-do items are always overlooked. You can avoid common causes of missing out on understanding business needs by taking note of the following pointers:

• Understand the goals and objectives of the business analysis work that you plan to perform. You should be in a position to explain in simple terms why you are performing these activities.
• For any business analysis effort to be successful and to be able to identify needs, analysts need to gain trust from stakeholders. This is a long process and needs to be earned. I would encourage you to start it early.
• Get to know the stakeholders. You can get information from organizational charts or social profiles.
• Schedule meetings in advance. Make sure that you find the right time and location/medium and block time in advance.
• Provide an agenda. Prepare and communicate it a day or so before the meeting.
• Facilitate the meeting and make sure that you encourage everyone to contribute. Your job is to facilitate discussion and mediate any conflicts.
• Capture notes (assign one of your team members who is good at note-taking) and send out the minutes.
• Follow up as needed until you and the stakeholders understand and agree to high-level requirements.
• Do not get into designing solutions. Understand the business requirements. If you’re savvy with Salesforce and CRM technologies, if you know a requirement is not feasible because of design constraints, say so and place it in the parking lot. Being open and honest will help build trust in the long run.
• Approach with a design-thinking mindset. Look for people and their needs before feasibility and viability. This automatically maximizes usability and user experience. Your goal should be to gain a good understanding of the complete situation and not provide options or solutions.
• Ask end users and stakeholders how their needs benefit them and their business unit. If this need is not fulfilled, do they have a workaround?

With this, we have completed this chapter on how to identify sources of requirements.