5. Initiative Horizon
5.7 Techniques
Agile Extension to the BABOK® Guide
5.7.1 Agile Extension Techniques
- Kano Analysis: used to determine the features most relevant to satisfying the identified need and determine the best approach for delivering those features.
- Personas: used to create a shared understanding of who the customer is; frequently a core item when Thinking as a Customer.
- Planning Workshop: used to create a shared understanding of the approach to constructing the solution.
- Purpose Alignment Model: used to determine the features most relevant to satisfying the identified need and determine the best approach for delivering those features.
- Real Options: used to understand the appropriate time for making decisions.
- Relative Estimation: used to make decisions about which features to deliver and in what order.
- Retrospectives: used to provide teams a means of explicitly discussing opportunities for continuous improvement.
- Story Decomposition: used to support decisions about which features to deliver, in what order, and how much of the feature needs to be delivered in order to reach the desired outcome.
- Story Mapping: used to elicit and model information about a solution, including notable features or characteristics of that solution.
- Value Stream Mapping: used to identify the portions of a problem or solution and identify what their ability is to alter the value of the affected item or process.
- Backlog Management: used almost consistently in most agile approaches.
- Balanced Scorecard: may provide measures of desired outcomes for the initiative. May be used for “scoring” different solution options or solution components for prioritization.
- Brainstorming: used to create many options for a given problem; brainstorming is a technique well suited to agile.
- Collaborative Games: used to identify potential solution options.
- Concept Modelling: used to build a shared understanding of the need and potential solutions.
- Data Dictionary: used to build a shared understanding of the relevant data in the problem and solution space.
- Data Modelling: used to elicit information necessary for making the decisions identified in the Initiative Horizon.
- Document Analysis: used to elicit information necessary for making the decisions identified in the Initiative Horizon.
- Functional Decomposition: used to build and maintain a shared understanding of the desired solution.
- Glossary: used to build a shared understanding of the problem and solution space.
- Interface Analysis: used to elicit information necessary for making the decisions identified in the Initiative Horizon.
- Interviews: used to elicit information necessary for making the decisions identified in the Initiative Horizon.
- Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): used to provide measures of desired outcomes for the solution.
- Observation: used to elicit information necessary for making the decisions identified in the Initiative Horizon.
- Prioritization: used to determine which features will and will not be delivered as part of the initiative and in what order.
- Process Modelling: used to build and maintain a shared understanding of the desired solution.
- Prototyping: used to create a working or non-working model of a possible solution. Often helps Getting Real With Examples.
- Risk Analysis and Management: used to identify information necessary for making Initiative Horizon decisions, especially which features to deliver and in what order.
- Scope Modelling: used to build and maintain a shared understanding of the boundaries of th desired solution.
- Stakeholder List, Map, or Personas: used to build and maintain a shared understanding of the entities involved with or affected by the solution and its implementaton.
- Vendor Assessment: used to provide input into decisions about which solution will satisfy the identified need.
- Backlog Management: used almost consistently in most agile approaches.
Mapped Tasks From the BABOK Guide
Learn how Tasks from the BABOK Guide Knowledge Areas apply at the Initiative Horizon.
3.1 Plan Business Analysis Approach
The specific agile business analysis approaches and activities are selected at the InitiativeHorizon. The level of planning is lightweight and just what isneeded to meet the needs of the horizon.
The agile approaches and activities arecontinually redefined and business analysis methods change and evolve as feedback is received.
3.2 Plan Stakeholder Engagement
The plans for stakeholder engagement are relative to the specific needs of the Initiative Horizon.
The approach for establishing and maintaining effective working relationships with the stakeholders is an ongoing adaptive process and includes stakeholders from across all initiatives in the organization who are responsible for executing on organizational goals.
3.3 Plan Business Analysis Governance
Define how management of the initiative requirements will take place. This includes determining if Scrum, Kanban, or another agile approach will be used. The team determines how the backlog will be refined and prioritized throughout the initiative.
3.4 Plan Business Analysis Information Management
The approach for how business analysis information will be stored and accessed is defined through ongoing collaboration with the delivery teams involved in the initiative. To facilitate continuous improvements, feedback and learning is shared with the other horizons.
3.5 Identify Business Analysis Performance Improvements
Assessing business analysis work and planning to improve processes is continuous and based on ongoing feedback. Measures focus on the ability to learn and adapt based on ongoing feedback.
4.1 Prepare for Elicitation
Preparing for elicitation involves creating and supporting a framework for collaboration and learning across all delivery teams and using feedback to ensure continuous improvement in elicitation outcomes.
4.2 Conduct Elicitation
The focus of conducting elicitation is continuous and spans across all initiatives, throughout the organization, and spans beyond the boundaries of the organization. The focus is on ensuring that ongoing feedback is heard, and that ongoing organizational learning extends across allinitiatives.
4.3 Confirm Elicitation Results
Confirming elicitation results involves ensuring that feedback received from all horizons is both consistent and still relevant. Confirmation occurs from feedback from other horizons.
4.4 Communicate Business Analysis Information
At the Initiative Horizon, the emphasis is on communicating information to stakeholders and collecting feedback and information from customers. This can be done through reviews, product demonstrations, workshops, release plans, and the product roadmap.
4.5 Manage Stakeholder Collaboration
Driving collaboration and connection is a core agile value, and a core agile business analysis value. Find ways to ensure that your activities are transparent and communicated.
5.1 Trace Requirements
Efforts focus on ensuring requirements are traceable to the business goals and metrics established in the Strategy Horizon.
Effective requirements tracing ensures efforts within one initiative are aligned to and not in conflict with other initiatives within the organization.
5.2 Maintain Requirements
Maintaining requirements is focused less on maintaining accurate requirements and more on understanding the accuracy of customer needs and lessons from customer experience, and determining if existing information remains relevant. This may involve a trade-off between accurate maintenance of requirements in favour of experimentation, continual change, and learning.
The focus is on the selection of which features to deliver, not necessarily the order in which they are delivered.
5.3 Prioritize Requirements
At the Initiative Horizon, the focus is on the selection of which features to deliver, not necessarily the order in which they are delivered.
5.4 Assess Requirements Changes
Requirement changes are assessed during backlog refinement activities. This is a lightweight activity and only done on an as-needed basis.
5.5 Approve Requirements
Agile initiatives generally appoint a lead such as a product owner or customer representative. Approval happens when the lead selects a requirement for delivery.
Reducing the number of approvals needed can help ensure that the team can deliver quickly and focus on increasing feedback and learning opportunities.
6.1 Analyze Current State
When beginning an initiative, business analysis practitioners analyze the current state. Analysis focuses on understanding the whole at a high-level and then identifying the most valuable parts for change.
6.2 Define Future State
At the Initiative Horizon, defining the future state involves identifying the intended outcome of the initiative.
Multiple potential future states and different time horizons are continually being defined and re- defined while change is happening.
6.3 Assess Risks
The ongoing assessment of risk, based on continuous feedback and learning, helps determine which features to work on first.
6.4 Define Change Strategy
Continuous feedback and learning informs an ever evolving change strategy. Multiple potential strategies may be defined through experimentation.
7.1 Specify and Model Requirements
The Initiative Horizon specifies and models stakeholder needs and problems to be solved.
7.2 Verify Requirements
Verifying requirements involves communicating a shared understanding of the problem and the solution. This facilitates a shared understanding of the features and ensures the delivery team can act on them.
7.3 Validate Requirements
The ongoing validation of outputs based on continuous feedback and learning helps the evolution towards the desired outcomes of the initiative.
7.4 Define Requirements Architecture
Requirements architecture is managed through the backlog. Techniques such as Purpose Alignment Model, Retrospectives, and Value Stream Mapping are used on an ongoing basis to ensure feedback and learning informs the evolution of the requirements architecture.
7.5 Define Design Options
Design options are continually being defined and redefined based on ongoing feedback and learning.
Multiple design options may be investigated through experimentation as a means to determine which option to pursue.
7.6 Analyze Potential Value and Recommend Solution
Experimentation is used to analyze potential value and make solution recommendations.
8.1 Measure Solution Performance
Solution performance is measured based on a continual assessment of outcomes achieved. Ongoing learning and feedback from metrics with quick time frames provide indicators that the desired outcomes are on target.
8.2 Analyze Performance Measures
Analyzing performance is measured through a continual assessment of outcomes achieved. Ongoing learning and feedback from metrics with quick time frames provide indicators that the desired outcomes are on target.
8.3 Assess Solution Limitations
Solution limitations are assessed through ongoing feedback and learning throughout the initiative. Unintended consequences are frequently discovered.
8.4 Assess Enterprise Limitations
The ongoing assessment of enterprise limitations define the constraints that impact solution design.
8.5 Recommend Actions to Increase Solution Value
The Initiative Horizon is responsible for recommending changes to the outcomes of the initiative. This includes recommending to start, stop, or change an initiative. Recommended changes are based on ongoing feedback and learning.
