6 Ways Business Analysts Minimize Project Rework

Minimizing project rework is one of the values that hold close to everyone’s heart as a business analyst. Even with the best of business analysis practices, there will be times when you miss or misunderstand minor requirements or where the business learns something new between requirements and development that leads to changing important requirements.

As an effective business analyst, the kind who might reasonably be expected to miss a requirement here and there, you will be minimizing rework in the best possible way.

Discover Business Context

You must investigate the business context before defining specific software features. It might be by understanding the business need, exploring the business process, but you don’t look at software features in isolation. You look at how they matter and why they matter.

Ensure Stakeholders Understand

Second, you ensure stakeholders understand what they are getting before they get it. Requirements are always change because the stakeholder did not really understand the requirements in the first place. Effective business analysts use visual models to help confirm the requirements.

Include All Stakeholders

Third, you ensure all possible stakeholders are included in the process. If you see a link to accounting, you get a representative from accounting involved before conducting your final requirements review.

Resolve Disagreements

Fourth, you take care to resolve disagreements before code is implemented. It is also one of those effective business analysis practices that can actually feel like it’s taking more time instead of less, but it pays dividends in terms of costs later on.

Analyze the Requirements

Fifth, and this goes to the heart of what we do as business analysts, you analyze requirements. This means you discover connections, such as data fields that show up on reports but are never collected, and go beyond the requirements stakeholders tell you they want to also identify the requirements they will need.

Establish Reasonable Schedule Expectations

Finally, you push back on development or project management when they are asking you to deliver requirements now (or yesterday) but they are simply not ready yet. I once made the mistake of passing on requirements a week too early. It was my first agile project and development convinced me that changes would be embraced.