One thing that I often wish is that I had a month or two where I had nothing to do but work on the BABOK. Version 2 is well under way at this point and we expect it to be ready for public review soon enough, but there are a lot of little things that I’d still like to be able to do. One which might actually get to 2.0 is a description of the fundamental analysis models.
Even though I have almost two bookcases full of BA-related books in my office, and probably about half of those are on various analysis techniques, there are actually only a few components that we use to describe a business. Conceptually, I think every business analysis effort involves some combination of these things.
Roles. This is how we understand we describe the people who directly interact with our solution. Each role groups together people with similar needs, expectations, and goals (especially goals). Those goals, needs, etc. are the source of requirements, and they need to be met somehow by our solution.
Entities and relationships. These are the things we need to know about. They usually correspond to something in the real world; a place, a person, a thing, an organization. We need to know what objects, entities or facts are relevant to our business domain and how they connect to other things. Data models expand on this to also capture what information we know about things.
Events. When somebody asks our system or organization to do something: process an order, generate a monthly report, or anything else, it’s an event. Events are things we need to respond to in some way. We can’t forget about it until it’s dealt with, and we describe how we deal with events through:
Processes. Processes can be simple (involving one person and a system) or complex (involving many people, departments, organizations and systems), but they tell us who and what has to be involved in fully responding to an event. Processes tell us which roles interact and which entities they produce, but they don’t tell us how decisions are made. For that we need:
Rules. Rules are how we enforce our goals and how we make decisions. They can tell us when we can change information associated with an entity, what values of information are valid, how we make decisions in a process, and what our priorities are.
You don’t have to go from event to process to rule; there are people who start from rules, or from processes, and derive the others. However, understanding how these five things interact to get us where we want to be is the essence of business analysis. The rest is commentary.
Kevin Brennan, CBAP
VP, Body of Knowledge
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