Have you ever looked at a good idea, product or project and wondered why after a lot of investment, both human and capital, it turned out a failure judging by the success criteria? Statistics show that 68% of project failures can be attributed to poor business analysis and requirements elicitation. Proper requirements elicitation is a dying skill, especially in the ICT industry where most clients with ideas for start-ups think they just need a proficient developer to make their mental images of flying unicorns a reality. This brief write-up aims at highlighting the importance of business analysis in your product development and general business operations/processes.

Business analysts are often seen as surplus to requirements when giving birth to an idea or a start-up. Granted most times this is due to financial restraints, but it cannot be over-emphasized how vital they are to the success of a project, especially in emerging markets. Older legacy systems might get by without business analysts creating the illusion they are not as important as they really are. However, these systems have already gone through the business analysis process and have survived the test of time, therefore they require less in the area of business analysis, but bank heavily on their legacy knowledge.

Business processes have been designed and documented from the dawn of the industrial revolution (1760) to date, the most successful organizations have invested billions in refining their business processes and models, increasing efficiency and productivity. Organizations lacking business analysts often fall prey to the silver tongue of the salesmen, which explains why they pay a premium for infrastructure or services they do not really need.

Ideas, Products and Projects lacking a thorough process of business analysis inadvertently are setting up for failure and this behavior of de-emphasizing the importance of business analysis is becoming a troublesome trend especially in developing countries.

If you hire a business analyst for your product, service or solution development or even general business operations /processes you will realize you had loopholes you didn’t even know could exist. Business analysis is very integral to achieving the success criteria laid out at the beginning of a project, it is also one of the most important parts of creating or designing solutions tailored to satisfy specific needs. The Business analysis process is a necessary phase to determine the actual needs of the business in terms of, which processes should be refined, discarded or replicated. It offers concepts and insights into the development of the initial framework for any project. It stores the key to guide stakeholders of a project. This saves overall costs and greatly increases efficiency of any scale of business.

At Excite Panacea Limited, Business Analysts is one of the many hats we wear and we take the process of business analysis very seriously - from requirements planning, elicitation and communication to solution evaluation and validation- because we know that more often than not the success or failure of a project is decided from the onset. Dexterity and experience deployment is key, but nonexistent business analysis or faulty requirements gathering and design is sure to end in disaster.