Overview
It is a very common situation when a company has an idea for a new software solution and even has the required budget for its implementation but the management is not ready to proceed to the step of the project realization. As a result, the idea can just become irrelevant and obsolete even without being transformed into a real solution.
Why does it happen so? Any project is associated with financial investments. To make a decision on its feasibility, business owners want to be confident in its high ROI. And the problem is that a lot of managers are not aware of the possibility to do it with the help of IT business analysis services.
In this article, we’d like to tell you about the benefits and new opportunities that you will be able to leverage if you decide to conduct a business analysis before proceeding to the realization stage.
What is an IT business analysis?
IT business analysis services are aimed at understanding business requirements and goals, identifying possible solutions for the set tasks, and estimating their viability under ongoing market conditions.
In other words, thanks to conducting such analysis, you will see whether your software product will be able to help you satisfy your business needs and fill in the existing market gaps.
What phases does business analysis include?
As a rule, it includes several stages.
Project discovery. First of all, BA specialists will closely cooperate with stakeholders to have the possibility to deeply understand the existing business pains and goals. For doing that and gaining all the required information, they typically conduct workshops and interviews.
Requirement gathering. The BA team needs to structure all the data and present it in the form of convenient documents. Business analysts should make sure that all the requirements are well understood and clearly prioritized.
Requirement audit. After that, experts will conduct a software requirement audit to identify any inconsistencies or gaps.
Business process analysis. It is necessary to analyze how workflows at the enterprise are organized and how a future solution will complement, facilitate, or help to replace them.
Analysis of product-market fit. This step is focused on defining user needs, specificity of the target market, and the existing competition. Here, it is required to gather user feedback, consider market trends, and conduct market research. All this should be done for making sure that a future solution will be able to address the existing market demands and help users to solve their tasks.
How much does it cost to conduct IT business analysis?
The questions about costs and timeframes are always among the most popular ones that we get from our customers. And though the final amount may depend on some variables like the specificity of your project and the exact volume of work, you should clearly understand that the inclusion of this service won’t greatly affect the entire project budget.
A team for conducting a business analysis typically includes the following specialists:
- a project manager;
- a business analyst;
- a frontend developer;
- a backend developer.
In some cases, it may be required to expand the team with specialists with niche expertise who will be able to provide specific insights. It means that the service costs will be calculated based on the number of experts involved and their rates.
As a rule, our team will need 13-14 business days to gather all the required data, analyze it, and provide you with detailed reports, recommendations, and a further plan.
What will you get thanks to IT business analysis services?
Quite often companies skip the step of IT business analysis just because they do not see any value in it. Managers believe that this step will just increase the total project cost and will require extra time. Nevertheless, acting as an IT partner for businesses, at Softacom, we always do our best to explain what opportunities and benefits can be provided thanks to business analysis. And we do this not just because we want to make you pay more. Vice versa, we want to help you pay less by minimizing a lot of risks for you.
In our practice, we saw a lot of cases when BA helped to avoid a row of serious strategic mistakes and, consequently, significant financial losses.
If you also have any doubts related to the necessity to include this stage in your project realization process, we highly recommend you attentively read the points mentioned below.
Overview of your project with a clear concept. The business analysis team will help you to structure all your thoughts and requirements to get a clear picture of your project. Thanks to this it will be possible to plan your budget, understand what team composition will be required, and what deadlines and timeframes can be set. Thanks to this, you can minimize the risks of budget overrun.
Action plan. You will get a high-level roadmap that will help you to understand how to move further. You will see whether you’ve chosen the right direction for developing your business with the introduction of a new software solution, or whether you need to modify your plans in accordance with the ongoing market conditions.
Expert opinion. This is one of the most valuable outcomes of the business analysis stage. That’s why it is crucial to cooperate with specialists with outstanding expertise, deep knowledge of your industry specificity, and an excellent understanding of market trends. Over the years of our work in the software industry, we’ve managed to accumulate all the required skills that allow us to objectively analyze and estimate the viability of future software projects.
Detailed project requirements. The project team will prepare a document where all the requirements (including the tiniest details) will be described. When you proceed to the project realization, these requirements will help developers fully understand what you expect to get.
Clear descriptions of all the tasks. Based on the elaborated requirements, business analysts will prepare tasks with descriptions for the development team.
Project documentation. Some companies ignore the necessity to prepare project documentation as they believe they will never use it. Nevertheless, even if your development team won’t turn to it at the initial stages of project creation, it will be of great use in the long run. For example, when in some years you will need to enrich your app with extra features or you will decide to update it or migrate to a newer technology, these tasks will be greatly facilitated. Thanks to such documentation, even those developers who have never worked with your software will be able to understand how everything works without conducting a detailed code review and other time-consuming processes.
When you work with us, you should know that after performing a business analysis, you are not obliged to proceed with the realization just immediately. You can take your time to think. And moreover, if you decide that you are not ready to launch this project, you can easily reject this idea without any liabilities.
What experts think
At Softacom, we fully realize the risks of launching a project that will be uninteresting to users and will fail regardless of all the made investments. That’s why when our customers contact us and share their ideas for their future solutions, we always offer them to conduct an analysis and estimate the project’s chances to succeed. Only when we see that the solution will meet the business demands and industry standards, we move to the step of discussing the requirements and start the preparatory stage.
If our experts detect that a company won’t be able to reach its business goals with a project in its current state, we always offer ways to enhance a solution and adjust its functionality to the ongoing market demands.
Yury, a CEO at Softacom with 10-year experience in the industry, and over 30 successfully launched projects, believes that business analysis is one of the key stages of the software development process. Namely, it helps to create a solid foundation for the entire project.
“When you clearly know the exact direction in which you should move in the development of your solution, that’s already 50% of success”, said Yury. “In my practice, I faced a row of situations, when customers took a decision to change the concept of their solution based on the results of the conducted business analysis and could have a look at their initiative from different perspectives. It became possible thanks to applying relevant experience and modern approaches and techniques. There are also some opposite cases when customers thought that their product was unique and nobody was able to provide a piece of advice. But at the end of the road, the planned results were not achieved and did not satisfy them. Such a situation wouldn’t have happened if they had worked with business analysts. I believe that a business analyst is a person who is able to create the same and clear picture of the product, feature, or just a simple task in each stakeholder’s mind, using different techniques to push people in the right direction. In other words, that’s a person who reduces project costs, anticipates risks, and saves the nervous systems of all involved stakeholders. And I believe that it is really crucial to detect the existing issues or gaps as soon as possible to timely take the required measures and choose another option. Thanks to expert analysis and a clear plan of action, customers can find the best approach to their project realization and eliminate a lot of financial risks.”
If you also want to be on the safe side with your solution, we highly recommend you conduct an IT business analysis before investing money in the development.
