Hello to all you crazy passionate practitioners and supporters of business analysis! Welcome to Bob The BA’s slightly askew, often strange but 
true and informative business analysis planetoid (a bit cramped but I can’t afford a large planet). No matter what I write, perspicacious or preposterous (two words one should never use in a requirements specification) I want to hear from you; your opinions, your experience, your insights. Why? Because we all learn from the collective whole – the different knowledge, behaviors and experience each of us brings to the table makes us stronger.
So what is a Blogisode? Well, it is a cross between a blog and an episode. Think somewhere between a serial and a soap opera (Flash Gordon meets the Guiding Light). Danger! Drama! Adventure! Thrills! And let me tell you, I speak from experience that there can be a lot of drama and thrills on the journey to Business Analysis Maturity while creating a Business Analysis Center of Excellence. So every two weeks for the next several months you will see a new Blogisode on BACOEs and Business Analysis maturity. Months? Yep – in soap opera proportions.
So you may have heard about BACOEs (Business Analysis Center of Excellence) (should blogisodes have glossaries?) or talked to colleagues about the level of business analysis maturity in your organization. What are they? Why do we need it? The simple truth is that in our ever changing economy and hyper-competitive work environments, we need to find ways to both standardize and be flexible at the same time to maximize the value of what we do. A BA Center of Excellence is a great foundation to drive your business analysis maturity. If you have found that your organization lacks standards, best practices, governance, pay-for-performance competency measurements, change management components, and more – you are probably a candidate for a BACOE to help drive maturity.
There are many paths to business analysis enlightenment (maturity). It just depends on how “enlightened” you or your organization wants to be. To start your journey you must first ask yourself some very simple questions. Why? Why is that? Why would we need to do that? Why is that? And of course… wait for it… yep, you guessed it… WHY! Get to the root of your problem with the five why’s of root cause analysis. Only then grasshopper should you proceed to enlightenment armed with the knowledge of WHY you need maturity. Think of this just like creating a business case for your organization’s maturity. This will turn into a project funded or not. This will take time. This could change your life!
Okay, blogisode one is already done (space limitations you know). Let me know where you think this journey is going to go, what you want or need to get out of it. Thanks!
Next Blogisode: Maturity is easy, it’s the getting started that’s hard! OR… How I learned to stop worrying about BA maturity and love the bomb!
Kathleen B. Hass, PMP, Richard Avery, Terry Longo, and Alice Zavala posted an interesting article about this in the IIBA St. Louis chapter website…I’m reading it as I write this.
http://stlouis.theiiba.org/download/BACoE.pdf
Thanks,
Paskwa
Thank you for the reply! Kathleen has been a leader in the BACOE arena for many years. In fact, I read that article several years ago as I was first embarking on setting up my own BACOE where I worked at the time. It is a great foundational article and everyone should definitely read it. Some of the things that we will explore through my blogisodes though will shed some light on where theory stops and real life application starts. There are many hidden things that only experience can tell us. Things like cultural evaluation – determining how much of a BACOE is right for you and your organization. It is simply not practical to implement everything. Also, understanding how long the BACOE concept might be good for. They actually can have a limited lifespan. And much more. Thanks again for sharing the article with us and look forward to more comments in the future!
Regards,
Bob