What is Lean Business Analysis?

Lean Business Analysis is focused on increasing efficiency by making incremental improvements to software and capturing customer feedback early and often. This minimizes waste in the product development cycle. Lean Business Analysis prioritizes experimentation over elaborate planning, and celebrates continuous, incremental improvement. It eliminates much of the bureaucracy that accompanied traditional Business Analysis.*

Overview :

Question 1 : Why do we need to make incremental improvements and get customer feedback early?

It can easily explained by the famous image below. We will see that we are on the right track if we regularly develop and test the small parts and requirements of the project and get customer feedback at every step.

Question 2 : Why do we need to minimize waste in the product development cycle?

The answer will be the cost of the project. The most important goal is to fulfill the necessary needs and demands that the customer will use when the project is completed.

In fact, this is one of the foundations of the Lean approach. After Henry Ford switched to the Lean Manufacturing system in 1913 to increase mass production, Eiji Toyoda took this systematic one step further in the 1950s and contributed to its current state. Among its basic principles is the article “An approach that eliminates unnecessary resource consumption (does not add value to the organization) in production and other processes”.

Question 3: Why we should prioritize experimentation over detailed planning?

The answer will be time. Applying Agile and Lean thinking along with detailed requirements discovery, analysis, and acceptance testing to your software development process will help the IT requirements definition process evolve rapidly.

In the analysis processes, faster progress is supported with small comprehensive user stories that bring together small and meaningful pieces instead of comprehensive user stories that produce meaningful outputs as a result of long researches and plans.

Question 4: Why do we need to eliminate much of the bureaucracy that accompanied traditional Business Analysis?

In an ever-changing world, we can find the answer in accepting that requirements are constantly changing. For example, advancing the waterfall method, which is one of the traditional business analysis models, may cause the following problems;

· Misunderstanding of the requirement

· Incorrect analysis of the requirement

· Change of requirement over time

However, with the Lean analysis approach, it is possible to detect and prevent many of these problems at an early stage.

Question 5: How Does It Work?

· Have a team that can organize its own work and is open to communication.

· One of the other most important things is to set a minimum viable product (MVP) and a PBL clearly clarifies user stories and acceptance criteria.

· Apply Lean Thinking is one of the most important foundations. Thus, by applying the Lean approach, we prevent too much time loss that may arise in the above question and answer content.

· Get feedback. Conducting continuous testing and receiving feedback from the Product owner and customers will help us understand that we are on the right track.

Conclusion:

In a rapidly changing world, we must also change our traditional approaches.

We can use the lean analysis approach for any applicable requirement, without forgetting that time and cost are the most important determinants due to the nature of every business.

In this method, which we are generally loyal to, we can create analysis models suitable for us and perform needs analysis faster with methods such as 5n1k. All the issues questioned above are to understand the need correctly, to minimize unnecessary costs and to produce useful outputs.

Analysis is key as it is one of the early stages of development processes. We should not forget that it is always important to move forward with correct and understandable lean analyzes without forgetting that a wrong analysis leads to a wrong development, a wrong test, and as a result turns into an unacceptable business requirement.

References:

· businessanalysisexperts.com :An Overview of Lean / Agile Business Analysis

Author: Pınar Candan

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