Canadian Government Executive - Volume 24 - Issue 07

36 / Canadian Government Executive // February/March 2019 TRANSFORMATION Going Beyond Technology-Focused Change It’s understandable If you’re thinking, “Wait a minute, aren’t Business Analysts just those people who help IT gather re- quirements and do testing?” In many or- ganizations, people with the title ‘business analyst’ focus solely on such activities. But the role of a business analyst can be much greater, and often people performing busi- ness analysis are not labelled as business analysts. To help us understand the po- tential of business analysts, we need to understand what business analysis really is. The International Institute of Business Analysis defines business analysis as “the practice of enabling change.” This is much broader in scope than just technology-re- lated change and can encompass anything from organizational restructuring to pro- cess improvement to digital enablement. Change can involve many aspects, but al- ways involves these four key components in some form: • People (and groups, structures, gover- nance entities, etc.); • Processes (and policies); • Information; and • Technology. Business analysts are experts who under- stand how an organization operates today, break down those operations into its four components, assess the potential value of changes to the various components, and can make recommendations on what should change and how. They then work with the teams responsible for imple- menting the changes to ensure they meet the defined business needs. While project managers are generally held accountable for ensuring changes are delivered within a given scope and set of resource con- straints, business analysts can be respon- sible for ensuring that what is delivered meets desired outcomes. This means they should be involved before, during and af- ter the change to continually assess the po- tential and realized value of changes. I like to think of business analysts as the oil between the cogs of change: they work with all stakeholders involved (cus- tomers/clients, organizational units af- fected by the change, technology teams, executives, and in the case of the public sector, the external organizations, such as non profits, who help deliver government programs or achieve target outcomes) to ensure there is a shared vision of what is to be accomplished at all levels of detail, while analyzing the potential impacts of change across the four components. Here are some examples of the work business analysts perform through the lifecycle of a change: • Before a change: Analyze and confirm the business need, develop a business case, establish strategic outcomes, as- sess potential approaches to implement- ing the change and recommend the best option (which may be to not proceed with a change). • During the change: Identify and man- age requirements, determine how to evaluate the performance of the new solution once the change is completed, design (and possibly implement) solu- tion components to meet requirements, assess the readiness of people and sys- tems to adapt to the change. • After the change: analyzing the perfor- mance of the new solution, identifying, classifying, and prioritizing opportuni- ties for improvement, revising solution designs and implement changes. I am currently involved in a large digi- tal transformation project that involves multiple Ministries. Each Ministry is re- sponsible for ensuring that staff, systems, processes and external stakeholders can successfully adapt to the changes occur- ring, while the centralized project team focuses on delivering the new system, standardizing business processes, and co- ordinating integration. To help some of the Ministries success- fully navigate the change, we are using business analysts to assess the impact of the process, information and technol- ogy changes on internal staff and external stakeholders, develop readiness criteria to evaluate how well everyone adapts to the change, identify where additional sup- port is needed, and create training and coaching materials to help those impacted transition from their current practices by providing them instructions that take into account their current context. This is a good example of how business analysts can go beyond requirements and testing to ensure changes are successful. Reducing Risk During Transformation Business analysts can play a critical role in large transformation initiatives, but the role can also be used to break down trans- formation activities into smaller changes, which not only reduces the risk of failure but also allows people to realize the ben- efits much more quickly. The ‘platformization’ of technologies is a trend that reduces and in some cases eliminates the need to develop software code in order to deliver enterprise-level