Business Analysis Center of Excellence (BACoE)s are quite uncommon in industry. With our collective experience of interacting with 200+ organizations, not more than 5 % of organizations that we have come across have a formal BACoE. Though relatively new concepts, we find a significantly increased interest in BACoEs.
Why should an organization have a BACoE?
Business analysis affects organization as well as to the success of individual initiatives and projects. BACoE helps the organization to standardize its BA practices, improve them over time and can contribute significantly project success. BACoE can be a great value to any organization, especially those which have significant number of IT transformation projects.
How does the organization establish the BACoE?
Here is a 5-step approach:
Step 1: Internal acceptance of the concept and value of the BACoE.
This is required to understand and appreciate role of the BACoE for the organization.
It is advisable to keep simple and achievable goals for the BACoE in the beginning to build support for the initiative.
Step 2: Identify stakeholders to participate in the same development and execution of the BACoE.
Step 3: Allow time to deliberate and come up with the charter for the BACoE.
Step 4: Provide needed funding for the BACoE.
Step 5: Monitor and improved the functioning of the BACoE activities in an ongoing manner.
If you are looking for assistance to set up of BACoE, Adaptive US is a perfect partner. Our business analysts have more than hundred years of business analysis experience. Adaptive is capable of providing training and consulting on popular business analysis methodologies, tools and techniques.
Adaptive's Experience in Setting up BACoE for a Large Chemical Organization
The Brief
The client, a large manufacturing organization with a market capitalization of $20 Billion, briefed Adaptive US to assist it to build a business analysis practice to significantly improve business analysis across the organization.
The Challenge
The client had outsourced a critical project to a leading consulting firm. However, the project had disastrous ending due to poor business analysis. The client decided to move the project in-house as they had a small software maintenance team.
However, the team lacked business analysis skills. Although the organization had a defined software process, it was for maintaining existing software, not develop a new product.
Progress of the project was terribly behind schedule as the new project was significantly more complex, required stakeholder collaboration from multiple units and countries.
Our Approach
With 100+ years of combined business analysis experiences, Adaptive US understands and is proficient in building business analysis capabilities within organizations.
Using Adaptive’s BACoE practice approach, we reviewed the organization’s business analysis process, templates, methods and tools, quality, training and development. We improved business analysis process by defining BA process, developing appropriate templates, and providing BA training to Domain SMEs. Adaptive’s role was to recommend how the organization could improve its internal BA practice and supplement it externally.
The Outcome
Some of the key successes included:
- Project delivered on time.
- Improved competency of internal BAs
- Improved business analysis templates, methods, and tools
- Developing a business analysis quality process
- Increasing retention of internal BAs
- Improving business engagement by the BA practice
- Improving delivery quality and outputs.
The Conclusion
After building a BA practice for the client, Adaptive successfully improved the foundation for business analysis across the organization, fulfilling the client’s brief.
As a result of building a BA practice, Adaptive also improved business analysis templates, methods, and tools, developed a business analysis quality process, provided capability uplift for internal staff, improved staff retention and greatly improved the sourcing strategy that supported the BA practice on an ongoing basis.
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