A business analyst plays a key role in the delivery of projects and technology products. When teams define and plan how the BA will interface with the initiative, it’s deliverable and it stakeholders early on in the timeline they can maximize the potential value output of all activities. Effective planning is a multiplier on output in nearly every situation. Planning in the context of the delivery of a complex system is a must.

We can work toward effective business analysis planning by think about what questions we need to ask ourselves and our teams to ensure we are all on the same page.

• How are we going to approach BA (Plan driven or change driven)
• Who are the stakeholders? what do they need and what do we need from them? (Stakeholder engagement)
• How are we going to make decisions (Governance)
• Where are we going to put the information we create (Information management)
• Should we be updating the approach as we go? (Performance improvements)

We could break the above down further into the components of a good BA plan

• Information we need (Inputs)
• Decisions we need to make (Tasks)
• People who need to be involved (Stakeholders)

We could then go further and with the above information and decisions locked in we could create some documentation or Mental Documentation which we can then continue to use throughout the initiative (Outputs). You could maybe think about the outputs of this activity as - without documentation we did do planning but did not come away with a plan.