I recently hosted an industry luncheon with senior Business Analysts’ and one of the topics of conversation was templates. The question is how helpful are templates and how much are they hurting us?
My take is that templates are helpful to the extent that they provide consistency but become problematic when BA’s can’t see outside their parameters. For example, if I need to do a Context Dataflow Diagram to scope my project and there isn’t a place in the template to put it – does that mean I shouldn’t do it? I would argue, no – we need to use whatever analysis techniques help us think outside the box and apply critical thinking skills to our projects.
I recommend thinking of the template as a guideline but don’t be limited by it. Use the techniques and format that is going to help you communicate more effectively with your stakeholders and elicit all the core requirement components (data, process, business rules, external agents).
3 Comments
Kimberly
What do you think about the idea of checklists rather than templates? Could they be better? Worse?
Craig,
Great question. I am going to give you the classic BA response – it depends. I think it depends on what you are using the checklist for vs. a template. I think a checklist can be helpful to make sure you have identified all the areas of scope that need to be documented for a project, or to identify the characteristics of excellent requirements but I think a template serves a different purpose.
The template is typically used to create consistency in documentation and also to serve as a guideline in terms of what needs to be documented. From that perspective, templates can be helpful.
Where I see the problem is when BA’s don’t go outside those parameters. I think we should use any and all techniques we need to when doing analysis and anything that is going to help us think differently or more creatively.
I am not sure if I answered your question but I think checklists and templates are two different things and serve two different purposes.
A peeve of mine is how unusable some templates or checklists can be due to lousy formatting, artificial constraints within a Word or PDF form, and other usability factors. I have seen some very good frameworks that were rendered practically worthless because of this. The resulting “documentation” reverts to emails.
Another way to look at templates versus checklists is the value or type of response desired. A checklist is usually “yes” or “no”, or perhaps a picklist of standardized values. A template typically allows for free-form responses of much greater detail and length.