BA Rocks!

On the 4^th of Dec Canberra hosted the Australian Business Analysis Association (ABAA) User Group Meeting and Christmas Drinks. It was an excellent opportunity for those interested in business and system analysis to get together and discuss the development of the profession. Matthew Hodgson from SMS Management and Technology presented on user-centred design and prototyping. Matt delivered a very inspirational and passionate presentation and I’m sure we now have new BA converts to prototyping.

In his presentation, Matt suggested that “as business analysts, we’re often focused on eliciting business requirements for systems, managing the relationships between the business owners and the vendors and developers of the technology. Unfortunately, we sometimes forget that what we’re doing is delivering a system that is for users. This results in us delivering the ‘what’ in terms of requirements, but forgetting that there’s a very strong need to find out from the people who will use systems the ‘how’ it will work for them”.

Matt works as an Information Architect and this is exactly the head-space that drives IA activities. In his presentation Matt suggests that IA and concept design can help “to determine navigation paradigms that are truly usable and accessible and systems that are designed to meet people’s needs in an intuitive way, rather than systems by developers that you have to ‘learn’ how to use”. Matt also stressed that “User-centred design seeks to change all that by putting the user as the focus of all project activities, from scoping, to analysis and requirements gathering, all the way through design and delivery”.

I think Matt makes raises some really interesting points about the focus on User Centred design, that as BAs we should consider. I believe it is really important to remember when you are developing requirements that as Business Analysts, we are NOT the Users. It’s not about us, it’s about the Users and what they need and how they will interact with this system. By using iterative prototyping, you can uncover the User’s need in consultation with them and use prototyping as a means of communication and eliciting and refining requirements. This will ultimately save a lot of development time and money.