This is our second in an ongoing service to keep you apprised of what is happening in the world of Business Analysts, System Analysts, Requirements Analysts and others who perform this vital function. We continue to be immersed in our never-ending search for truth, wisdom and the perfect requirement.

In this missive we tackle the value equation and make a number of statements about our research. The four-page worksheet will walk you through the steps of our thinking and document each of our sources. You will have to enter at least two values to get the numbers calculated for your situation. The values are the number of people in your organization who perform the BA/SA role and either your total IT or total IT maintenance budget for the year.

Dan Myers and Tom Hathaway,
Managing Partners

What Is the Value of a Well-Educated, Capable Analyst?

First, what does it mean to be well-educated and capable? Great question! If there are not more questions, class is dismissed. No, wait! We do have an answer: Requirements definition consists broadly of three activities.

Capture	Elicit, gather, discover, trawl for, find, "whatever" the requirements
Clarify	Write requirements and gain mutual understanding and agreement between the analysts and the subject matter experts
Confirm	Manage, prioritize, identify risk levels, and verify the testability of requirements

All analysts will make errors in one or more of these areas. Based on research by Barry Boehm (see references in the attached spreadsheet) a capable analyst makes 30-50% less requirements errors. What makes them more capable? More techniques and tricks of the trade in their repertoire. Where do they get these tricks and techniques? Primarily from experience and/or training. Studies show that training can increase the capabilities of an analyst by one to two levels in a 5 level scheme). This assumes they are allowed to apply the presented techniques within a reasonable time frame.

Cost of Correction Curve

So how much is it worth to make fewer errors? Research has shown that the cost to find and fix a requirements error in production (maintenance developer’s job) costs 100 — 200 times what it costs to find and fix the same error in requirements definition (business analyst’s job). Other research has shown that the average cost to fix a requirements error in production is about $14,000. Wow!

This means that the value of a capable analyst depends on how many mistakes they don’t make! This is definitely a weird way to think about things, but the numbers speak for themselves.

It might sound too good to be true, so open our worksheet and play with it. We think you will find it very interesting!

Introducing Virtual Workshops

In the interest of making our world-class training opportunities available to a larger audience, we at RSG decided to launch a new initiative and venture deeper into the wonderful world of the web. Our research into web-based training, however, indicated a tremendous lack of high-quality learning experiences available on this media. We did find a thundering herd of "page-turner" offers disguised as training, but also discovered that the success rates for this attempt at "quick-and-dirty" use of the technology were negligible to non-existent in transferring the kinds of skills that business analysts need.

As a result, we are pioneering our version of effective e-Learning which we are calling "Virtual Workshops". A VW (gotta have an acronym, right?) will be a subset of, or a complete seminar from our current curriculum that is broken down into 90-minute segments and presented in an electronic, highly interactive workshop. The exercise component will be emphasized and/or expanded to ensure that the participants are actually doing the things we teach and are able to take those skills back to the daily grind. Our inaugural offering will be "How to Write Effective Requirements: A Virtual Workshop for the Business Community" (see sidebar for the schedule).

The focus of this session is on the Subject Matter Expert role. We feel that the most critical contribution you can make to your next project is to get your SME’s into this session. It would be awesome if the SME and BA actually spoke the same language. . . and it only takes four 90 minute sessions out of your and their work week. We will report on the results of our experiment in upcoming editions.

Tom Hathaway and Dan Myers
Managing Partners

Future Feature: "A Requirements Determination Skills Deficit"