Question
Green-Chem has hired you as a Business Analyst, you will be responsible to conduct business requirements, decompose solution requirements into effective design definitions, you will
Green-Chem has hired you as a Business Analyst, you will be responsible to conduct business requirements, decompose solution requirements into effective design definitions, you will gather and organize business requirements, analyzing data requirements, performing systems analysis and design activities, and supporting system development, testing, and delivery efforts. This position will be responsible for supporting all phases of the system development life-cycle.
DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
May include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Facilitate and organize meetings with functional users and business managers to document procedures and to gather functional requirements
- Perform analysis and design activities for applications to be delivered
- Analyze data needs and create data models for applications
- Participate to enhances applications following established methodology
- Continually seeks opportunities to increase customer satisfaction and strengthen client relationships
- Assist in creating automated business process workflow
- Coordinate system signoff and meet all other change management requirements
- Research and resolve help desk issues that relate to the core application. (use Pareto)
- Provide quality assurance support during and after implementation
- Provide user training for individuals and groups
- Fully supports company goals of continuous improvement and operational excellence at strategic and tactical levels.
Company background
Green-Chem is a global manufacturer and supplier of materials that improves life every day. Headquartered in Houston with operations in Asia, Europe, North America, and South Africa. Green-Chem directly employs over 4000 people and owns assets over $4 billion dollars. During the last 2 years, Green-Chem has acquired four companies in the same market place; now it is going through "growing pains" particularly due to the duplication of office productivity software, collaboration software, and enterprise software, as well as business process. In order to solve this problem, the CIO, CFO, and CEO, decided to setup an executive committee to improve overall efficiency of the company, and decided to hire a consulting firm to conduct an "As-Is" analysis, and chart out a "To-Be" roadmap in alignment with the strategic goals and objectives of the company. Some of the highlights of this study "PCAB" include:
This study recommended items 4, 5 and 6 as the "Quick Hit Items", this initiative can be taken over by a small team of 6-7 members; team is to make recommendation in 3 months.
Table 1
Items | Time in Months | |
1 | Migration of SAP ERP to cloud based S4/HANNA (within 2 years) | 24-36 |
2 | Standardize on one vendor systems for plant management and for regulatory compliances | 24-36 |
3 | Keep Microsoft Office (Excel, Access, PowerPoint), plan to upgrade to Office 2019, recommended due to the fact enormous number of processes are being run using this technology | 24-36 |
4 | Standardize an collaboration Zoom, WebEx, Google Meet, MS Teams, Google Gmail, or Microsoft Outlook | 3-6 |
5 | Standardize cloud based office productivity systems Microsoft Office365 or Google Docs | 3-6 |
6 | Standardize business intelligence tools. (Currently, Excel, Access, PowerBI, Tableau, and SAS are used.) | 3-66 |
You are tasked to conduct requirement analysis and make recommendations to the senior executive committee. Your role is to work as the Senior Business Analyst/Assistant and report to project manager (Zara Ann). You will gather and organize business requirements specific to this project, the deliverable will be to make recommendations on items listed on Table 1 - items 4, 5, and 6.
The following information will help you (Business Analyst):
Project: Office Productivity, Collaboration, and Business Intelligence (PCAB) Standardization
Table 2: Provides percent of widely used software in the corporation and user satisfaction rate (1=high, 2=medium, 3=Poor)
Office Productivity Software Cloud | Collaboration Technologies - Email - Calendar | Business Intelligence | |||||||||||
Desktop Microsoft Office 2016/2019Productivity | Cloud Microsoft Office365 Productivity | Cloud | Mail Calendar | Microsoft | Zoom | Cisco | Microsoft | tableau | Misc. | ||||
MS (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access) | Microsoft 365 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access (PC), Publisher (PC) | Google Docs (Docs, Sheet, Slide, Forms) | Chat, Meet, and Gmail | Chat, Teams, and Voice | Zoom | WebEx Product tool include one click integration with MS Office, etc. | Power BI | Tableau | SAS | ||||
1 75% | 3 25% | 2 20% | 2 30% | 3 50% | 1 30% | 1 20% | 2 35% | 1 50% | 2 15% | ||||
User Satisfaction Rate and Current Usage % in Green-Chem | |||||||||||||
Satisfaction Rate: 1=highest 2=medium 3=lowest | |||||||||||||
*Microsoft = MS
Key Stakeholders and Project Sponsors
Project Sponsor-Member Executive Committee: CEO Andy Chen
Project Sponsor-Member Executive Committee: CFO John McNamara
Stakeholder-Member Executive Committee: CIO Andy Chen: Neil Kroger
Stakeholder Senior V.P. Plants --Member Executive Committee: Jim Davenport
Stakeholder Senior V.P. Global Operations--Member Executive Committee: Albert Garcia
Stakeholder Project Manager: Zara Ann
Stakeholder Team Member - Solution Architect: Neil Kaspersky
Stakeholder Team Member - Senior Business Analyst: Yourself.
Stakeholder Team Member - Systems Analyst: Nancy Hewitt
Stakeholder -Team Member - Training & Development: Roxana Guerrero
You Business Analyst are responsible to create a Stakeholder/Project Register
Deliverable 1: List in a table using MS Word, key stakeholder names, job titles, email address, phone numbers, and level of participation (Weak, Strong, Very Strong).
You are responsible to setup a communication plan
Deliverable 2: You will specify the frequency of communication, i.e. weekly, monthly, or biweekly. This plan will be provided to all stakeholders at the kick-off meetings. A short meeting must take place between team members, preferably for half an hour at 9:00 AM in the morning (Monday-Friday). The meeting must be recorded and archived on Project Shared Drive to be accessible to all team members. Your deliverable will be Meeting Agenda only.
Requirements:
Project Goals and Objectives
As Green-Chem has acquired several companies during the last two years, the goal of this study is to eliminate productivity tools duplications. Office productivity tools on premise or cloud based programs such as Google Docs or MS 365
- Collaboration/email/calendar/meeting tools - recommend only one tool instead of several communication tools
- Business intelligence tools - recommend only one tool for enterprise business analytics; there may be exceptions to meet the needs of an organizational unit.
- Use Table 2 - provides user approximate usage and satisfaction rate. You should conduct surveys to get current feedback from:
- subject matter experts
- power users
- Knowledge workers.
Deliverable 3: You will create asoftware satisfaction survey, which helps you measure your software's ease of use, collaboration capabilities, and security features among other things.Deliverable will list survey questions, not more than 7, for sample, all key stakeholders, department managers, subject matter experts (SMEs) must be included, other survey recipients must be drawn from a stratified sample size of 200.
Deliverable 4: You as the Business Analyst will create a Requirement document
- Develop an organizational chart to help you put their roles into perspective, include only key stakeholders
- Develop a RACI matrix for this study, format follows:
Tasks - Responsibilities R=Responsible-performs work A=Accountable-reviews or approves R's Work C=Consulted, has the information to help the R complete work I=Informed needs to be notified of results, but not consulted | *Product Owner |
Approves Deliverables | |
Requests and approve change | |
Approves requirements process to be used | |
Veto proposed solution | |
Note: check page 8 for product owner assignment, use pg. 13 for deliverables #4 |
Deliverable 5
- Elicitation: In business analysis, it refers toa structured approach aimed to "draw out" information and forge a consensus among Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) regarding the requirements of application/software development. Another method is to read and analyze product reviews, vendor website, Gartner, Forrester, and several other sources,which provide valuable analysis in comparing software products. You can use some of the following:
- Research Technique -benchmarking and market analysis
- Experimental Techniques - prototyping, observation
- Collaborative Based Techniques - Interviews, survey/questionnaires, requirement workshops.
Note: Develop a short table to list above techniques and time spent in hours on each activity
Some thoughtful considerations
- Business leaders and technology partners wants to know more about the project, which typically means understanding what's in it for them. Make sure you provide benefits that you can use in interviews, workshops, etc. with these stakeholders to seek confirmation of their expectations.
- Before engaging the stakeholders for requirement scope definition, you have performed basic analysis and looked into user stores, and frequency of complaints in the help-desk system related to the software under review. Refer to Pareto diagram on Page 152 in your textbook. Develop a Pareto diagram, following is sample, use your own data, and draw diagram. Part of Deliverable 5
Software | No of Complaints 2021 |
Office 365 | 250 |
Google Doc | 140 |
Zoom | 215 |
WebEx | 275 |
MS Teams | 300 |
Google Meet | 250 |
Tableau | 175 |
PowerBI | 225 |
- You conduct workshops using Zoom, WebEx, etc.. to define scope:
- Prioritized expected benefits (ease of use, time to train, integration with other products) -compare:
- Office Productivity - Google Docs vs Office 365
- Collaboration - MS Teams, WebEx, Zoom, Google Meet
- Business Intelligence - PowerBI vs Tableau
- Barriers to an enterprise-wide management solution
- Prioritized expected benefits (ease of use, time to train, integration with other products) -compare:
Note: You may include that MS 2019 office productivity tool should not be replaced, as it is vital to support business processes, Excel and Access are embedded in organizational business processes, may be can be looked at some future date.
Deliverable 6:You will develop the Requirements Scope Document, using the following guidelines:
- Introduction
- Document Audience
- Purpose of Document
- Business Opportunity
- Project Objectives
- Increase productivity
- Reduce cost (licensing, training)
- Reduce enterprise risk (access authorization, compliances)
- Vision Statement
- Problem Statement
- Incompatibilities
- Learning curve
- Support Cost
- Benefits
- Single source of truth
- One system
- Ease of document sharing
- User adoption
- Ease of use
- Enterprise-wide standardization
- Improved processes
- Single source of truth
- Stakeholders/Sponsors
Project will only be successful if stakeholders and sponsors are engaged
Deliverable 7.Your deliverable will include a comparison table, with headings for office productivity, collaboration, and business Intelligence.
- Office Productivity - Google Docs vs Office 365
- Collaboration - MS Teams, WebEx, Zoom, Google Meet
- Business Intelligence - PowerBI vs Tableau
Sample Table comparing databases from two vendors Microsoft and Oracle, use this table to compare - Office Productivity, Collaboration, and Business Intelligence software
Microsoft SQL Server Database | Oracle Database |
Total Score out of 10 8.0 | Total Score out of 10 6.5 |
User Satisfaction 3.0 | User Satisfaction 2.0 |
Pricing Model 1.0 Free Monthly Subscription Annual Subscription One-time Payment | Pricing Model 1.0 Free Monthly Subscription Annual Subscription One-time Payment |
Technical Support 1.0 | Technical Support 0.5 |
Performance | Performance |
Vendor Credibility/Financial 2.0 | Vendor Credibility/Financial 2.0 |
Training 1.0 Face-to-Face Recorded Videos Written Simulation Train the Trainer | Training 1.0 Face-to-Face Recorded Videos Written Simulation Train the Trainer |
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