Analysis Planning

Some business problems are quite simple, and analyzing suitable solutions can easily be managed by a single analyst. In such cases, because there is no communication within an analysis team and overhead is minimal, creating a formal plan for how to carry out the analysis is unnecessary. In contrast, major changes involve complex process modifications and information system updates. These projects can include dozens of people, and the analysis itself can span many months and require multiple team members. In such an environment, analysis cannot be done ad hoc. It must first be clear who will be involved and how, who the decision-makers will be, what the overall analysis approach will look like, how activities will be timed, and what outputs will be produced. This is all part of analysis planning. Despite the word "planning," it is not a one-time activity performed only at the beginning. Planning typically occurs multiple times to continuously address changing conditions as the team gains more detailed information.

Stakeholder Analysis

The first step of planning is figuring out which stakeholders are relevant to the change, meaning who we need to talk to in order to understand the requirements. This involves identifying all entities potentially impacted by the change. There is nothing worse than being approached by a highly influential person bringing crucial requirements right after the entire analysis has finished. Being agile and welcoming change is one thing, but being ignorant—failing to do a proper stakeholder analysis and missing core information that could have been easily spotted at the start—is another.

There are various classes of stakeholders, such as software end-users, subject matter experts, sponsors, senior managers, project managers, developers, operations staff, and auditors. All of them are important for the smooth running of the project. They will typically not all be known right from the start, so analysts will identify them along the way. At the beginning, however, the analyst should at least know who the sponsor is and who the right people are to help understand the business problem and constraints.

Stakeholder Engagement

An essential part of stakeholder analysis is understanding the roles of individual parties in the context of the change, their level of power and influence, and the type and frequency of collaboration and communication with them. The analysis should establish why stakeholders are essential to the change, how the change influences them, and how they will participate.

Analysis Governance

On an average project, there are many different stakeholders with varying opinions and priorities, making it unlikely for such a heterogeneous group to always reach an agreement. As a result, it is necessary to decide who will be responsible for setting priorities and who will approve changes—in essence, creating a governance process.

A governance process describes how approvals and prioritization decisions are made for requirements and designs.
(source: BABOK)

Analysis Plan

An analysis plan defines what analytical tasks will be performed, by whom and when they will be carried out, what the analysis deliverables will be, and how formal they need to be. An analysis plan is typically created only for larger projects where the volume of stakeholders, communication, and outputs is significant enough to justify the overhead and formality connected with creating and following a plan.

The overall method followed when performing analysis work is called the analysis approach. It defines how and when analysis tasks are executed, the fundamental techniques to use, and the deliverables to be produced. Depending on the environment, the approach can be lightweight—creating informal artifacts and focusing on personal communication and collaboration—or it can be more rigid, following a formal process and producing predefined documents. Of course, it can also fall anywhere in between. The selected approach depends on the type of organization, the chosen development process, the level of uncertainty on the project, the number of stakeholders, and the size of the change. The general trend is to move more toward lightweight approaches, but the specific situation should always be assessed before selecting the analysis approach.