Ducks In a Row Consulting Services Inc has proven competencies in:
- IMPROVING SYSTEMS AND PROCESSES, INCREASING CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
Consultants will recommend process improvements to streamline and enhance processes considering improvements to quality, customer satisfaction and savings.
- UNDERSTANDING AS-IS BUSINESS PROCESSES, INDUSTRY MASTER SYSTEMS AND THEIR DATA FLOWS
To gain understanding of the "as is" state, the consultants will review project documentation ( ex. prior project documentation, technical and functional specifications, database models, infrastructure diagrams, etc.) and come up to speed on your project. Effort will be made to understand the existing business processes and/or software application(s) coupled with it. Interviews with stakeholders will validate the mapped business processes and data flows for analysis. Business process diagrams, data flow diagrams, story boards and any other necessary project documentation will be created for future reference and enable a full understanding of both the functional and technical aspects of your project.
- UNDERSTANDING AND EVALUATING EXISTING REQUESTS FOR ENHANCEMENT OR OPTIMIZATION
To gain understanding of the requested improvement or enhancement, the requests will be analyzed in light of the diagrammed "as is" business process and the existing state of the supporting software applications. Sources of requested enhancements such as found by repeated requests in help desk tickets (pareto analyses), performance and latency issues and other relevant sources of data will be reviewed.
- CONDUCTING ROOT CAUSE ANALYSES
To determine the underlying issues, root cause analyses will be performed through interviews and using tools such as The five whys, fishbone diagrams and other tools.
- GATHERING REQUIREMENTS
Requirements in the following areas will be considered:
- Business Requirements. Business requirements are the overall needs of the business for making the project happen. Requirements that fall into this category are more foundational, long-term needs that support the long-term goals of the organization.
- Solution Requirements. Solution requirements are more product-focused and drill down a little deeper. They can be functional or non-functional, and they ensure that the end result of the product satisfies both what the product needs to do and what the product should do. The business analyst typically creates a requirements traceability matrix assuring that the requirements will be validated in all use and test cases.
- Stakeholder Requirements. Stakeholder requirements describe your key personnel that signs off on milestones, produces the work, finalizes deliverables and more.
- EVALUATING AND STRATEGIZING SOLUTIONS
For software solutions and enhancements, a deeper dive into the technical side may be required. Business analyst consultants are liaisons between the business users that request improvements and technical developers that code solutions. Having come up to speed on the project, the analyst will devise a solution and create a story board and wireframe diagram that contain all of the proposed changes. The analyst may also create clickable prototypes as a tool that demonstrates a proposed solution and present it to business users. This clickable prototype may be reviewed and iterated upon to assure that the business users accept the solution. Once preliminarily accepted, the business analyst will hand off the resulting documentation to the developers with all needed technical and functional requirements including wireframes and data models needed for the developer to program a sound solution. In some cases, the business analyst, knowing the changed data requirements, may propose modified data models that meet the data requirements.
- RESEARCHING SOLUTIONS, CREATING COMPETITOR ANALYSES
Ducks in a Row business analyst will research relevant technologies, perform competitive analyses and collaborate with technical teams to propose innovative solutions, analyze tradeoffs while providing targeted functionality, usability, reliability, performance and supportability. This includes the selection of key performance indicators (KPI).
- CREATING NEEDED PROJECT DOCUMENTATION
The business analyst consultant uses various diagnostic tools that can be added into project documentation. The business analyst consultant may create:
- Activity Diagrams
- Business Process Diagrams
- Block/Swimlane Workflow Diagrams
- Business Use Cases and Diagrams
- Cause and Effect Diagrams (Fishbone)
- Class Diagrams
- Data Flow Diagrams
- Decision Tables
- Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD)
- Flowcharts
- Functional Decomposition Chart
- Pareto Diagrams
- Requirements Attributes Tables
- Requirements Traceability Matrices
- Sequence Diagrams
- System Use Case Diagrams
- CREATING USE CASES
The business analyst typically creates use cases to show that the required functionality is satisfied by the proposed solution. Use case diagrams with detailed steps are created for this purpose.
- CREATING TEST CASES
Each use case is converted into a test case that will o be executed once a solution is developed. Business analysts may conduct or coordinate quality test cases.
- COORDINATING/PERFORMING QUALITY ASSURANCE/QUALITY CONTROL TESTS AND RESOLVING DEFECTS
Business consultant may work with the QA/QC team to oversee testing and work with development team to resolve any QA/QC found defects and release updates back into the test environment once completed.
- COORDINATING BUSINESS ACCEPTANCE TESTING
The business analyst consultant will coordinate and oversee acceptance testing performed by business users. Business users will test the solution in a test environment and ultimately sign off on the solution, verifying acceptance.
- SCHEDULING RELEASE INTO THE PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT
Once the solution in accepted, the solution will be scheduled to be released into the production environment.