Business Analysis in COTS Environment- Part 1

Summarizing the Process:

1. Ideally, the business process re-engineering(BPR) should happen and the business should be made aware of what the COTS tool can offer and changes that may be required in their current way of doing the business.

2. Ideally, the Business Analyst should be fully aware of the capabilities and functionalities of the COTS tool and help business identify the functionalities that the tool can offer.

3. Ideally, Agile methodologies should be adopted to built COTS based system to enable system development adapt as per business needs.

4. Ideally, the OOB features should be implemented with phased and with incremental releases.

5. Ideally 80-20 principle should be followed. 80% features coming OOB and 20% through custom development.

But system development is rarely Ideal. Often a COTS tools are chosen because some smart sales guy managed to influence the CIO or the manager in charge and now it has become a company standard. As a BA you were not involved early in the process and have little experience with the COTS tool and the dead line is too aggressive, now what do we do. We will get to that later. But there are some things to keep in mind:

1. There will always be a mismatch in business needs and what COTS can offer. It is good to know both.

2. There will be a constant negotiation between development teams and the business on what should be done OOB and how much custom code should be written, facilitate these discussions.

3. Ultimately both will have to mid somewhere in middle, a little between of custom code, a little bit of requirement changes and a lots of OOB.

... Stay tuned for more.