In today’s world, your organization must be responsive, flexible, and make things happen quickly. You must do more with less – and faster. You no longer have business as usual, so why do business analysis as usual?

Moving toward Lean Business Analysis in your organization will reduce the cost of every IT initiative. The savings realized by optimizing your business analysis value stream may just be the most rewarding investment your organization can make.

Moving toward Lean Business Analysis

If we are serious about moving toward lean Business Analysis, we need to become more introspective. In a nutshell, we should try to use our Business Analysis skills to improve our own Business Analysis practices.

Specifically, we should:

• Consider the Business Analysis process in our organization as a product
• Get funding and priority assigned to Business Analysis product development
• Conduct lean problem analysis to identify areas that are the main causes of waste
• Create a product backlog defining how we need to change to reduce the waste
• Implement the changes incrementally following the continuous delivery philosophy
• Schedule and perform retrospective sessions to assess the impact of each change
• Continue to monitor the performance of all Business Analysis activities executed by “anyone wearing the Business Analysis hat” (i.e., not only by those with the job title Business Analyst)