Why is it important to understand the Business Objectives before you start a project?

Assume this scenario:

• You are hired as a new Business Analyst by a company.
• You are excited to start to work and dive straight in.
• You begin by shadowing an experienced BA on a few projects to understand the current workflow.
• You get your own project and start work on it enthusiastically.

You perform the following tasks on your project

• Get the project details
• Schedule meetings and interviews with users
• Understand project scope
• Define and Document detailed requirements
• Design a detailed and exhaustive design solution
• Get the project implemented
• Test the project

Once the project is ready you demo it to the project sponsor.

The demo is successful as the project meets all the approved user requirements. You have worked hard and built a fantastic software.

You are satisfied and happy with the demo and finally, ask if the executives have any questions.

An executive asks, “ This is a great solution but how does it solve our problem of poor sales from the website generated leads?” (example from this post)

You as a Business Analyst feel stumped and respond by saying that there wasn’t any requirement to target the poor sales.

The sponsor informs that it was the most important goal and the primary objective of why the project was approved and sponsored.

You are very embarrassed and the project is a complete failure. It’s a great product but doesn’t solve the business problem, doesn’t meet the business need and objective. A huge loss of time, money, and effort.

To avoid the above scenario don’t skip the process to identify the primary business objective and don’t dive straight into the requirements gathering phase.

Before you begin any work on a project first get the answers to the following questions:

1. What is the purpose of the project?

   1. Why was the project approved and budget allotted?
   2. What are the goals and objectives of the project?

2. Where is the ROI?

   1. What are the critical aspects and components that this project solves?

3. In the eyes of this project, what is success and how will it be measured?

   1. If you don’t know what success looks like then you’ll not know what to aim at.
   2. Success should be factual and quantifiable.
   3. In our example, the lead creation time was reduced from 8hrs to 20 seconds. This helped the sales rep team to contact leads early and it resulted in 22% increase in sales.
   4. Establish the current baseline and how much it takes currently (8 hrs)  and the target to be reached. There may be requests for many features and enhancement and other efficiencies but your main goal is to always solve the main problem. Always aim for it and stay on track.

The post is  based on my notes and understanding from this BA tutorial