Friday, January 19, 2007

How I Plan to carry out my first assingment as BA.

Its been almost 9 month since I have joined this company but the ride have been amazing perticulary in terms of variety of work I have done. So here is my new assingment and a big responsibilty comes along. The new project I have been assinged is for a US based pharma giant and I will be working on requirement analysis .... alone and later after one month will be joined by a UI designer for prototyping and design.
Puzzeled by the kind of responsibilty shouldered to me by the Genral Manager, the project manager who happens to be a very sweet lady just returned after getting married, asked me to share my plans of How I plan to carry my first assingment as a Buisness Analyst?

So here is the summary of the discussion that took place between me and the manager:

1. The goal is to automate all the form based business process of the company using Adobe's LiveCycle.
2. So my homework will be understanding Adobe LiveCycle fully and knowing its capability, I am already on it(thanks to Sangeeta, the tech lead, it going good!).
3. The requirements needs to be captured using use case model and requires use of Rational Rose, understanding the tool is my other assingment and whatever Parag Sir tought me in Symbi is going to come handy. I am also reading Cockburn's book on the same.
4. The moment I am at the client's premises I plan to gather full understanding of the 'As-IS' process first. This will be done by reading documents and with interaction with users.
5. The outcome has to be a document which clearly states the 'As-iS' process.
6. After understanding the 'as-is' process , I will come out with set of questions which needs to be answered.
7. After this I plan to hold series meetings with stakeholder(which will be identified by the client), condition being all the stakeholders need to be present together in the meeting so that their isn't any conflict of thought later on.
8. These meeting will be used to clear doubts, listening to there pain points, requirements, I wont be talking about technology and feasabilty here.
9. Each meeting will end by me summarizing it and scheduling the next meeting :) and senduing the MOMs.
10. The outcome would be a User requirement specification which contains a high level documentation of the requirement.
11. The next step will be prepration of detail requirements in terms of Use cases.
12. I am Planning to use the pattern suggest by Cockburn to complete this task.
13. Reviews should happen at regular interval.

This is what I plan and explained to Shikha( the PM, by the way I will be working with all female team!) and she seems to be satisfied but I sense lots of gaps in the plan. Though I am planning to have session with a senior business analyst here I will appreciate if people can help me plan better.
I will be writing more on this as the process starts and I learn more.

6 comments:

Somya said...

Good going ranjan...you seemed to have chalked out atleast the must do's in a very systematic manner. All the very best for your assignment.

#@®$#@ said...

all the best dude.........

Sahi idea hain, put out everything on the blog and expect some help ;)
not at all a bad idea

Ranjan said...

Somya: I have chalked out a bit I am very confused and ore mervous than excited.

harsha: thanku...and your post on 'love' was unepected!

Anonymous said...

Are u a software engineer? I mean do u have an engineering degree? No offense..I have recently seen that people with a non engineering background do not think all that well like a SW engineer.

Ranjan said...

Hmmm... intresting
Well Can you let me know .. how does a software engg. think?
I am not a Software Engg. but... have some knowledge of the field... I dont know how a software enggs thinks...but i definately know how a software engg. should think.

Anonymous said...

I am kind of frustrated with "non software engineers" who get into s/w companies without any basic knowledge. I have heard of such complaints in a lot of companies in India as well as in the USA.I strongly feel that software companies should hire only s/w engg.

I think people should understand that not everybody can write "good" robust code.