The Problem with BA Tools - Part 2
The Failure of Requirements Management Tools

This is part two of a two part article exploring the problems with BA tools. View Part 1: The failure of MS Word

For many organisations the challenge of accurately capturing and communicating business objectives and translating these into layered business requirements is still the most significant obstacle to project success.  While most recognise the need for effective requirements management, communication, versioning and traceability, the adoption rates of requirements management tools remains comparatively low, why? After all these have been designed for exactly this purpose?  The reasons can be summarised as:

• Do not support the BA process and require a paradigm shift for the BA who use MS Word to capture, manage and communicate requirements.
• Do not facilitate effective communication and engagement - Tools are focused on management of small pieces of text with assigned attributes only and largely ignore the supporting information required to effectively communicate them.
• Designed for technical teams, not business users.  Many existing requirements tools began life as solutions for technical users (e.g., source code version control or bug tracking), and continue to cater predominantly for these.  Some require adaption, 3^rd party plug-ins and customisation to support just some of the BAs tasks. 
• Difficult to use and often very expensive with high and sometimes hidden associated implementation, consultancy, training and support costs.
• Largely ignore best practice - Leaving  you to implement as best you can or are highly prescriptive (e.g., tools specifically to support ‘Agile’ or ‘RUP’ project teams) which are not flexible enough to adapt for different types of projects .
• Inflexible Word output that generally leads to documents that are easily spotted as “tool generated” and/or documents that require a lot of manipulation and rework to present the document in a suitable format for stakeholders. 

The net result is that many organisations who have invested in such tools will often import requirements into the tool at the end of the project for completeness, but will not use a requirements management tool throughout the project, instead they rely on MS Word.

A passionate commitment for something better from BAs for BAs

As a practicing and passionate BA who is committed to building recognition for our role, I have been continually frustrated by this and the associated downstream problems.  Born from this frustration was a motivation to embark on a journey to build a BA product from the ground up.  Through close collaboration with the Business Analysts in the community who share a commitment to equip BAs with software designed specifically for their role.  Together we have designed and built Yonix.

Yonix is unlike anything on the market.  It is a powerful and richly featured stakeholder collaboration and communications platform for business analysis, described as a “talent amplifier for Business Analysts" Yonix enables you to:

• Work collaboratively, discuss ideas, resolve conflicts and get valuable review feedback from their stakeholders in a single place  - All the advantages of a collaborative web-based application and just as easy to use as Word and Excel.  But unlike MS Office products, you can create online requirements and analysis documents that can be shared with shared with your stakeholders.  Yonix supports real-time online collaboration.  Stakeholders can be invited in to Yonix to review analysis work and requirements online in real time which eliminates version control issues, misunderstandings and time-consuming updates!
• Share work and keep your team on the same page - Seamlessly capture, version and trace the relationships from business objectives to business requirements, to technical specifications and track how they change over time across co-located, outsourced or distributed teams, the extent of stakeholder engagement and the impact of communication gaps and conflicts on project outcomes.
• Save time, be productive, reuse and share knowledge (IP) - Capture requirements once then version and reuse them as often as they are needed.  The ability to tailor documents and views for stakeholders to undertake reviews review then publish them to Word or Excel at the click of a button.  Reuse documents, templates, requirements and stakeholders stored in Yonix’s libraries across multiple projects.
• Flexibility to define your chosen methodology - Configure Yonix to support your preferred process, familiar practices and template-driven best-practice approaches.  Yonix is working with Volere (www.volere.co.uk) to provide full support for the Volere Knowledge Model.  Volere also run frequent training courses on this and upcoming dates can be found on their website.
• Stay in control and ahead of the game - Visibility and control across co-located, outsourced or distributed teams.  Understanding of the linkages and flows of information in a project and the impact of communication gaps on project outcomes.

We are passionate about Yonix as a technology, but we care more about what it enables: easy, efficient requirements capture, communication and versioning, huge productivity gains, reduced risk of scope creep and rework, reduced risk of project failure and stronger business alignment through better communication and control in the analysis phase. If you’re interested in giving Yonix a try, we can get you started today, using a free, no risk, no obligation trial.

Jody Bullen
Yonix
www.yonix.com

“Jody is a highly experienced and award winning business analyst who has understands how to deliver business value through technology.   In 2009 Jody was awarded New Zealand Business Analyst of the Year, by Computerworld magazine.  Jody is passionate about business analysis and has presented many times in New Zealand and internationally.

He has extensive experience in researching and defining end-user requirements, business process analysis, automation and reengineering, creating business cases and developing requirement documents and functional specifications.

He has worked in, coordinated and lead business and technical teams in all phases of the Software Development Lifecycle across various industry sectors. 

Jody is now the CEO and founder of Yonix.   A company committed to making the job of the business analyst easier, through software designed specifically for the role and tasks.”