First an apology. It has been over 3 weeks since my last post - and yesterday a commenter on that post wrote:
Great teaser, please, release the other posts of the new series ASAP
Thanks, Kerber, for the prod. As an excuse, I’ve been very busy recently putting into practice the ideas I promised to write about!
Let’s start with a technique that has been around for many years now but is not as well known as it should be - the Business Motivation Model. This is now an OMG specification (http://www.omg.org/spec/BMM/1.0), although it originally started life with the Business Rules Group, who were responsible for the key concepts.
The BMM fills a vital gap in the business analyst’s armoury. Indeed, it is a technique that, in conjunction with the right supporting framework (which I will be describing in the rest of this series) is capable of elevating business analysis above the low technical concerns in which it is currently mired. The BMM allows you to provide a formal basis for business change planning - not just IT system implementation but any form of initiative, project or venture. Indeed, a key benefit for IT people of using BMM is that it places the high-level focus directly on high-level business drivers, rather than on low-level technical concerns.
Surely, I hear you say, no modern development project would fail to take account of business issues - indeed, no modern development project would fail to put business issues firmly in the driving seat. Here I must interject a hollow laugh. Where projects have an IT element, most “high-level” documents purporting to address strategy, benefits, requirements, change planning, and so on are thinly disguised computer system proposals - the IT element hijacks and dominates everything else. This may be because IT is more familiar territory to the people who draw up these documents, or because business analyis techniques often come from an IT world and are thus IT-oriented. The end result, however, is that most projects that are IT-related become IT projects, and thus fail to deliver the full business benefits originally promised.
It is the responsibility of the business analysts who become involved at an early stage to remedy this situation - and doing so will have the pleasant side-effect of increasing their own credibility, since they will then become business change agents rather than factories for system architectures and program specifications. Most business analysts of today are in fact “systems analysts”, which is not a healthy situation either for the business or for their own careers.
How does the BMM help? It provides a metamodel with which you can capture the “ends” (vision, goals and objectives) of a proposed business change, together with the “means” to those ends - mission, strategies (with associated tactics), and policies (with associated rules) - and the “influencers” whose “assessments” drive, guide and control the work involved. Simple but powerful stuff. My own experience with BMM is that it provides just the right amount of rigour - enough to help understanding, but not too much to prevent flexible use in different circumstances.
You don’t need tools to use BMM. If you use the IBM Rational Suite, there is a RequisitePro template for BMM available from IBM. However, you can adopt the analysis techniques and document your findings using any word processor or spreadsheet.
TAKE AWAY
Despite the potential value offered by BMM to enterprises of all types and sizes, its take-up has been slow. Some people find it confusing - there are feedback loops around Influencers and Assessments, for example, and it can be hard to retrofit BMM to existing projects. The lack of good explanatory documentation does not help here - and in general, the OMG could do a lot more to encourage adoption of BMM.
There is also a deeper concern about incompleteness. In my own work, I use BMM as an element of the GOOD methodology (see http://human-interaction-management.info) to provide a route to action and integrate multiple change planning efforts. In future posts, I will say more about the other techniques that you need in order to put BMM to best use in the early stages of an initiative, project or venture.
Stay tuned, and I’ll try not to leave such a long gap before the next post 