Requirements Analysis Challenges and Solutions

By Kadir Çamoğlu

The book Challenges and Solutions in Business Analysis Studies covers the pitfalls, problems, problems, and challenges business analysts often encounter in their daily work. Whether you are an experienced or inexperienced analyst, it will be very useful for you to know what you need to do to avoid these negative situations. The book also includes suggestions on how to recognize these negativities and how to get out of the situations you are in.

I have written this book as a supporting reference to carry out successful business analysis studies by filtering over 25 years of experience in software projects, software process consulting, and technical training, especially to support early career analysts.

The book covers over 40 challenges, including the most basic ones that can happen to anyone, such as gold plating, and scope creeps.

 

What will you learn?

There are nearly 50 analysis difficulties and solution suggestions under 8 main headings in the book.

• Analysis paralysis and its solution
• Challenges and solutions in business analysis studies
• Challenges and solutions in vision and scope studies
• Challenges and solutions for stakeholders
• Challenges and solutions for requirements and other business analysis information
• Challenges and solutions for uncovering business analytics insights, communication, and collaboration
• Documentation and modeling challenges and solutions
• Business analyst's career challenges and solutions

Who should read this book?

The primary audience for this book is anyone who performs analysis tasks in software solutions, regardless of what's on the business card. The following audiences will benefit most from this book:

• Business Analysts
• System Analysts
• System Engineers
• Requirements Engineers
• Process Analysts
• Web Designers
• User Experience Designers
• Developers
• Testers
• Project Managers
• Demand Managers
• Service Managers
• Consultants
• Solution Developers
• Product Managers
• Scrum Masters

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kadir Çamoğlu
• Release date: Sep 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215165508

Kadir Çamoğlu

Kadir Çamoğlu (Ph.D., Computer Engineering), is a problem solver, consultant, teacher, author,  practitioner, and architect of system and software solutions. Over the past 25 years, he has worked in every phase of the software development life-cycle. Kadir, who has been particularly focused on software quality and processes for the last 10 years, has published 13 books in Turkish in print and electronic formats in this field. He also holds the CBAP, PMP, PSM I, CSM and CSPO certifications. [e-mail]

Book preview

Introduction

The success of IT projects depends on many factors. However, one of them is the most critical of all: the lack of understanding of business needs and requirements. This brings us to the importance of business analysis.

Field studies show that [1] the two biggest factors in software project success or failure are stakeholders, scope, vision, and requirements. These factors lead us directly to business analysis.

In this book, I have discussed the analysis and analyst’s mistakes that can lead to project failure. This will help you identify common mistakes that are made in practice and guard against them without the cost and effort of learning through your own mistakes.

What needs to be done to conduct effective business analysis and be a good business analyst is not the primary goal of this book. However, I had to go into a little bit of the basics of business analysis while explaining the mistakes and what you can do about them. To improve on these points, do not limit yourself to what is explained in this book. Make sure you improve by searching more resources.

Structure of the Book

While writing this book, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to classify business analysis challenges. Some mistakes could not be categorized into one single area. There were mistakes and pitfalls that affected multiple areas. While I grouped these together in the book under a specific title, I took the main element that caused the challenge as the basis. The last of the challenges I listed was a career-oriented issue.

The book begins in the second chapter with analysis paralysis. This is about analysis paralysis, its symptoms, what you can do to avoid analysis paralysis, and advice on how to escape it.

The third chapter is about business analysis activities. It starts with planning mistakes and covers common mistakes in analysis work.

The fourth chapter is about vision and scope. This is about the challenges associated with the vision that underlies the solution and the scope that will determine the success of the project.

The fifth chapter is about the stakeholders. Here you will find the challenges you may encounter when working with the stakeholders who will initiate the project, submit the requirements, accept or reject the solution, and use the final product.

The sixth chapter focuses on requirements and other business analysis information. What problems and pitfalls might you encounter when working with risks, assumptions, business rules, and other business analysis information? I discuss them in this section.

The seventh chapter is about elicitation, communication, and collaboration. In this section, you can read about the difficulties you may encounter when working with stakeholders and what you can do about them.

The eighth section is dedicated to documentation and modeling. In this section, we discuss the difficulties you may encounter when modeling and documenting the business analysis information you receive and develop.

Our final chapter is devoted to the skills and career of the business analyst. Under this heading, you will learn about the mistakes you might make regarding you trying to improve your career development and professional skills. In this section you will find tips on how to better manage your career, what actions you can take and what work you can complete, and how to improve your skills for daily tasks.

Challenges, Symptoms, Causes, Prevention and Cure

In this book, I would like to state that with the concept of challenge, I have expressed all the situations such as problems, issues, difficulties, pitfalls, and difficulties that a business analyst may encounter. I’m talking about the situations where things are not going well...

Each challenge has its own symptoms and clues. If you know them, you will be able to understand the situation you are in. For this reason, when describing a challenge, I have also described how you can understand that it happened along with the facts that what it is and why it happened.

The human mind tends to understand events in the context of cause-and-effect relationships. This allows you to make plans and take precautions. To overcome and prevent challenges, you need to know their causes. If you know the reasons that lead to the challenges, you can prevent them from developing or eliminate them.

Once you know the symptoms and causes, the first thing you should do is prevent the challenges from occurring. To do this, develop immunity to mistakes and try to do what needs to be done correctly. It is much better not to get into trouble than to try to get out of it.

However, if you do get into a challenge, learn how to get rid of it and improve yourself in that regard.

To get rid of a challenge you have gotten into, apply the 4-step cure.

Recognize and accept the situation you are in

Evaluate the situation.

Create an exit plan.

Follow the exit plan step by step. Evaluate the situation and update your exit plan if necessary.

For a detailed example of how to do this, see How to Deal with Analysis Paralysis in the Analysis Paralysis section.

Do not try to change the external environment to solve your problems. Start by changing yourself first. This is easier, faster, and more applicable. Perhaps others, seeing that something has changed in you and things have been fixed as a result, will take an example from you and if you are lucky, you will have a chance to change your external environment.

Finally, do not say, Such things do not happen to me. It is better to be prepared.

Challenges in This Book

In this book, I’ve started from the knowledge I have created with thousands of pages of documents, articles, and books that I have seen and experienced in 30 years of project and consulting experience, and that I have shared with participants in 25 years of technical training. Of course, there are things I have overlooked. The challenges you face may differ based on different cultures and project structures. You may not find them all here. However, you can be sure that you will find the most common day-to-day issues here. Since these are found under different headings and scattered throughout the book, I’m giving the challenges here as a list, so you can get a better idea of the book's content:

Analysis paralysis

Scope creeping

Gold plating

Multitasking

Do something, you'll fix later if needed

Making baseless assumptions

Ignoring stakeholders

Conflicts among stakeholders

Conflicts with project team

Not getting approval from the stakeholders

Focusing only on the requirements

Being a yes-man or a no-man

Inability of the analyst to determine the scope of the work within the project

Incorrect determination of the analysis approach

Planning mistakes

Documents with analysis defects

Failure to follow up the plan and the work being done

Failure to monitor the analysis process and the performance of the analyst

Not clearly determining the business need and the expected benefit

Not conducting the impact analysis good enough

Working with the wrong stakeholders or missing stakeholders

Stakeholder engagement challenges

Stakeholder accountability issues

Ignoring business analysis information attributes

Incomplete/vague business analysis information

Unstable business analysis information

Inadequate work on uncertainty

Not detailing business analysis information at the right level

Insufficient, incomplete or incorrect requirements

Not creating consensus for the business analysis information

Not planning the elicitation activities correctly

Choosing the wrong elicitation technique

Failure to manage participants and participation

Inefficient execution of the elicitation activity

Failure to manage elicitation scope

Failure to manage project scope during elicitation activity

Not receiving business analysis information attributes during elicitation

Post-elicitation work issues

Not making confirmation as necessary

Wrong document choice and errors in the document template

Creating documents that are hard to read

Unapproved, unverified documents

Outdated documents

Business analysis without documents

Audio and video recording issues

Analysis Paralysis

Wikipedia defines analysis paralysis as:

Analysis paralysis (or paralysis by analysis) describes an individual or group process when overanalyzing or overthinking a situation can cause forward motion or decision-making to become paralyzed, meaning that no solution or course of action is decided upon within a natural time frame [2].

As you can see from the definition, analysis paralysis is not just a case of business analysis. If you are having difficulty making decisions or taking the next step because you are over-thinking or over-analyzing on any subject, including your work and personal life, then you are suffering from analysis paralysis.

The counterpart of this is that the analyst does not think the work, documents, and models she/he has created are sufficient and cannot complete her/his studies. Although analysis paralysis usually occurs in complex situations, it is also possible for it to occur in routine work.

Because analysis paralysis causes bottlenecks and slows down your business processes, it impacts time first and most significantly. Deliverables that cannot