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8) Techniques (part 1) - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Testability
      - Measures
  - - - • Evaluation criteria helps in defining priorities.
      - • Evaluation criteria assist in the delivery of expected return on investment (ROI) or otherwise specified potential value.
      - • Evaluation criteria provide the ability to assess diverse needs based on agreedupon criteria, such as features, common indicators, local or global benchmarks, and agreed ratios.
      - • Acceptance criteria provide the ability to assess requirements based on agreedupon criteria.
      - • Acceptance criteria are necessary when the requirements express contractual obligations.
      - • Agile methodologies may require that all requirements be expressed in the form of testable acceptance criteria.
    - - • Acceptance criteria may express contractual obligations and as such may be difficult to change for legal or political reasons.
      - • Achieving agreement on evaluation criteria for different needs among diverse stakeholders can be challenging.
- - - - • An effective approach to responding to changing stakeholder needs and priorities because the next work items selected from the backlog are always aligned with current stakeholder priorities.
      - • Only items near the top of the backlog are elaborated and estimated in detail; items near the bottom of the backlog reflect lower priorities and receive less attention and effort.
      - • Can be an effective communication vehicle because stakeholders can understand what items are about to be worked on, what items are scheduled farther out, and which ones may not be worked on for some time.
    - - • Large backlogs may become cumbersome and difficult to manage.
      - • It takes experience to be able to break down the work to be done into enough detail for accurate estimation.
      - • A lack of detail in the items in the backlog can result in lost information over time.
- - - - • Facilitates holistic and balanced planning and thinking.
      - • Short-, medium-, and long-term goals can be harmonized into programs with incremental success measures.
      - • Strategic, tactical, and operational teams are more easily aligned in their work.
      - • Encourages forward thinking and competitiveness.
    - - • A lack of a clear strategy makes aligning the dimensions difficult.
      - • Can be seen as the single tool for strategic planning rather than just one tool to be used in a suite of strategic planning tools.
      - • Can be misinterpreted as a replacement for strategic planning, execution, and measurement.
- - - - • Benchmarking provides organizations with information about new and different methods, ideas, and tools to improve organizational performance.
      - • An organization may use benchmarking to identify best practices by its competitors in order to meet or exceed its competition.
      - • Benchmarking identifies why similar companies are successful and what processes they used to become successful.
      - • Market analysis can target specific groups and can be tailored to answer specific questions.
      - • Market analysis may expose weaknesses within a certain company or industry.
      - • Market analysis may identify differences in product offerings and services that are available from a competitor.
    - - • Benchmarking is time-consuming; organizations may not have the expertise to conduct the analysis and interpret useful information.
      - • Benchmarking cannot produce innovative solutions or solutions that will produce a sustainable competitive advantage because it involves assessing solutions that have been shown to work elsewhere with the goal of reproducing them.
      - • Market analysis can be time-consuming and expensive, and the results may not be immediately available.
      - • Without market segmentation, market analysis may not produce the expected results or may provide incorrect data about a competitor's products or services.
- - - - • Ability to elicit many ideas in a short time period.
      - • Non-judgmental environment enables creative thinking.
      - • Can be useful during a workshop to reduce tension between participants.
    - - • Participation is dependent on individual creativity and willingness to participate.
      - • Organizational and interpersonal politics may limit overall participation.
      - • Group participants must agree to avoid debating the ideas raised during brainstorming.
- - - - • Provides a shared articulation of outcomes, strategy, and performance, which help create very focused and aligned initiatives
      - • Helps align business initiatives across multiple aspects of the organization.
      - • Useful when assessing the ability of an organization to offer new products and services.
    - - • Requires an organization to agree to collaborate on this model.
      - • When created unilaterally or in a vacuum it fails to deliver on the goals of alignment and shared understanding
      - • Requires a broad, cross–functional collaboration in defining the capability model and the value framework.
- - - - • Provides an amalgamation of the complex facts, issues, and analysis required to make decisions regarding change.
      - • Provides a detailed financial analysis of cost and benefits
      - • Provides guidance for ongoing decision making throughout the initiative.
    - - • May be subject to the biases of authors.
      - • Frequently not updated once funding for the initiative is secured.
      - • Contains assumptions regarding costs and benefits that may prove invalid upon further investigation.
- - - - • It is a widely used and effective framework that can be used to understand and optimize business models.
      - • It is simple to use and easy to understand
    - - • Does not account for alternative measures of value such as social and environmental impacts.
      - • The primary focus on value propositions does not provide a holistic insight for business strategy.
      - • Does not include the strategic purpose of the enterprise within the canvas.
- - - - • When enforced and managed by a single enterprise-wide engine, changes to business rules can be implemented quickly.
      - • A centralized repository creates the ability to reuse business rules across an organization.
      - • Business rules provide structure to govern business behaviours.
      - • Clearly defining and managing business rules allows organizations to make changes to policy without altering processes or systems.
    - - • Organizations may produce lengthy lists of ambiguous business rules.
      - • Business rules can contradict one another or produce unanticipated results when combined unless validated against one another.
      - • If available vocabulary is insufficiently rich, not business-friendly, or poorly defined and organized, resulting business rules will be inaccurate or contradictory.
- - - - • May reveal hidden assumptions or differences of opinion.
      - • Encourages creative thinking by stimulating alternative mental processes.
      - • Challenges participants who are normally quiet or reserved to take a more active role in team activities.
      - • Some collaborative games can be useful in exposing business needs that aren't being met.
    - - • The playful nature of the games may be perceived as silly and make participants with reserved personalities or cultural norms uncomfortable.
      - • Games can be time-consuming and may be perceived as unproductive, especially if the objectives or outcomes are unclear.
      - • Group participation can lead to a false sense of confidence in the conclusions reached.
- - - - • Provide a business-friendly way to communicate with stakeholders about precise meanings and subtle distinctions.
      - • Is independent of data design biases and the often limited business vocabulary coverage of data models.
      - • Proves highly useful for white-collar, knowledge-rich, decision-laden business processes.
      - • Helps ensure that large numbers of business rules and complex decision tables are free of ambiguity and fit together cohesively.
    - - • May set expectations too high about how much integration based on business semantics can be achieved on relatively short notice.
      - • Requires a specialized skill set based on the ability to think abstractly and nonprocedurally about know-how and knowledge.
      - • The knowledge-and-rule focus may be foreign to stakeholders.
      - • Requires tooling to actively support real-time use of standard business terminology in writing business rules, requirements, and other forms of business communication.
- - - - • Provides all stakeholders with a shared understanding of the format and content of relevant information.
      - • A single repository of corporate metadata promotes the use of data throughout the organization in a consistent manner.
    - - • Requires regular maintenance, otherwise the metadata could become obsolete or incorrect.
      - • All maintenance is required to be completed in a consistent manner in order to ensure that stakeholders can quickly and easily retrieve the information they need. This requires time and effort on the part of the stewards responsible for the accuracy and completeness of the data dictionary.
      - • Unless care is taken to consider the metadata required by multiple scenarios, it may have limited value across the enterprise.
- - - - • May be used as a discovery technique for processes and data or as a Technique for the verification of functional decompositions or data models.
      - • Are excellent ways to define the scope of a system and all of the systems, interfaces, and user interfaces that attach to it. Allows for estimation of the effort needed to study the work.
      - • Most users find these data flow diagrams relatively easy to understand.
      - • Helps to identify duplicated data elements or misapplied data elements.
      - • Illustrates connections to other systems.
      - • Helps define the boundaries of a system.
      - • Can be used as part of system documentation.
      - • Helps to explain the logic behind the data flow within a system.
    - - • Using data flow diagrams for large-scale systems can become complex and difficult for stakeholders to understand.
      - • Different methods of notation with different symbols could create challenges pertaining to documentation.
      - • Does not illustrate a sequence of activities.
      - • Data transformations (processes) say little about the process or stakeholder.
- - - - • Reveal hidden patterns and create useful insight during analysis—helping determine what data might be useful to capture or how many people might be impacted by specific suggestions.
      - • Can be integrated into a system design to increase the accuracy of the data.
      - • Can be used to eliminate or reduce human bias by using the data to determine the facts.
    - - • Applying some techniques without an understanding of how they work can result in erroneous correlations and misapplied insight.
      - • Access to big data and to sophisticated data mining tool sets and software may lead to accidental misuse.
      - • Many techniques and tools require specialist knowledge to work with.
      - • Some techniques use advanced math in the background and some stakeholders may not have direct insights into the results. A perceived lack of transparency can cause resistance from some stakeholders.
      - • Data mining results may be hard to deploy if the decision making they are intended to influence is poorly understood.
- - - - • Can be used to define and communicate a consistent vocabulary used by domain subject matter experts and implementation subject matter experts.
      - • Review of a logical data model helps to ensure that the logical design of persistent data correctly represents the business need.
      - • Provides a consistent approach to analyzing and documenting data and its relationships.
      - • Offers the flexibility of different levels of detail, which provides just enough information for the respective audience.
      - • Formal modelling of the information held by the business may expose new requirements as inconsistencies are identified.
    - - • Following data modelling standards too rigorously may lead to models that are unfamiliar to people without a background in IT.
      - • May extend across multiple functional areas of the organization, and so beyond the business knowledge base of individual stakeholders.
- - - - Strengths
        
        • Provides business analysts with a prescriptive approach for determining alternate options, especially in complex or uncertain situations.
        
        • Helps stakeholders who are under pressure to assess options based on criteria, thus reducing decisions based on descriptive information and emotions.
        
        • Requires stakeholders to honestly assess the importance they place on different alternate outcomes in order to help avoid false assumptions.
        
        • Enables business analysts to construct appropriate metrics or introduce relative rankings for outcome evaluation in order to directly compare both the financial and non-financial outcome evaluation criteria.
      - Limitations
        
        • The information to conduct proper decision analysis may not be available in time to make the decision.
        
        • Many decisions must be made immediately, without the luxury of employing a formal or even informal decision analysis process.
        
        • The decision maker must provide input to the process and understand the assumptions and model limitations. Otherwise, they may perceive the results provided by the business analyst as more certain than they are.
        
        • Analysis paralysis can occur when too much dependence is placed on the decision analysis and in determining probabilistic values.
        
        • Some decision analysis models require specialized knowledge (for example, mathematical knowledge in probability and strong skills with decision analysis tools).
- - - - Decision Tables
      - Decision Trees
      - Decision Requirements Diagrams
  - - - • Decision models are easy to share with stakeholders, facilitate a
        shared understanding, and support impact analysis.
      - • Multiple perspectives can be shared and combined, especially when a diagram is used.
      - • Simplifies complex decision making by removing business rules management from the process.
      - • Assists with managing large numbers of rules in decision tables by grouping rules by decision. This also helps with reuse.
      - • These models work for rules-based automation, data mining, and predictive analytics, as well as for manual decisions or business intelligence projects.
    - - • Adds a second diagram style when modelling business processes that contain decisions.This may add unnecessary complexity if the decision is simple and tightly coupled with the process.
      - • May limit rules to those required by known decisions and so limit the capture of rules not related to a known decision.
      - • Defining decision models may allow an organization to think it has a standard way of making decisions when it does not. May lock an organization into a current-state decision-making approach.
      - • Cuts across organizational boundaries, which can make it difficult to acquire any necessary sign-off.
      - • May not address behavioural business rules in a direct fashion.
      - • Business terminology must be clearly defined and shared definitions developed to avoid data quality issues affecting automated decisions.
- - - - • Existing source material may be used as a basis for analysis.
      - • The business analyst does not need to create content.
      - • Existing sources, although possibly outdated, can be used as a point of reference to determine what is current and what has changed.
      - • Results can be used to validate against the results of other requirements elicitation techniques.
      - • Findings can be presented in formats that permit ease of review and reuse.
    - - • Existing documentation may be out of date or invalid (incorrect, missing information, unreadable, unreviewed or unapproved).
      - • Authors may not be available for questions.
      - • Primarily helpful only for evaluating the current state, via review of as-is documentation.
      - • If there is a wide range of sources, the effort may be very time-consuming and lead to information overload and confusion.