BobtheBA here, as I headed towards my vacation destination of Las Vegas I started to think about the wonderland of Business Analysis that Vegas surely had in store for me. When I travel I am always on the lookout to see how business analysis was and was not applied. I mean, think about it… the financial applications alone in a world where you are geared to lose has extreme business rules written all over it. For the record, I go to Vegas for the world-class restaurants and the shows but gambling does fascinate me and there is business analysis happening everywhere you look. However, the one thing that really caught my attention on this trip was the service and underlying competencies. This cannot be more important than in the food industry in Las Vegas where the economic downturn has turned up the competitive heat for business.

I have often heard that BAs make “common” mistakes. Perhaps it is just an unfortunate choice of words (or perhaps my glass is always half-full), but I personally believe that we should focus less on the negative and more on the missed opportunity. So what are missed opportunities? Missed opportunities are generally considerations or course corrections that were not accounted for in the business analysis approach. We should remember that there are a million and one ways to slice, dice and do business analysis. Business analysis approaches on projects are not one size fits all nor are they ever the same. The business analysis approach is dependent on the expertise of the BA and influenced by a number of things that includes real-life experience, training, stakeholder influence, size and complexity of the project, standards and corporate culture. So what are some of these missed opportunities that BAs should take advantage of?