Project initiation checklist for business analysts
Before getting into requirements gathering, a BA needs to collect certain information and produce documents to ensure a smooth start to the project. This article details what needs to be done, and provides a summary checklist.
When a new project begins, there’s a lot of steps a business analyst needs to perform before detailed requirement gathering and analysis can be carried out.
In order to ensure effective communication and a good level of stakeholder engagement, it’s important to find out about key stakeholders, key business function/process owner, and business end users, and define how you’re going to communicate with them:
- name, contact details
- communication style
- role and attitude
- frequency of communication
- log of communications
- communication granularity level
- interests – common ground to share
- problem description
- business unit(s)
- affected business processes/enabling services
- solution urgency
- project timeframe (start/end, phases)
- project scope
- known risks
After that you need to analyse the current state of affairs and produce a document detailing:
- business function
- business processes
- findings (pain points/severity)
- existing enabling business services (along with security requirements, sensitive data, technology lifecycle, architectural constraints)
You also need to establish a plan for BA activities:
- analysis scope
- requirement gathering approach
- naming conventions
- requirements management & traceability
- change management
- agreed list of deliverables
- document management (version control, status, location)
Of course, you’ll need to learn the details of the project team:
- roles, names, contact details
- responsibilities within the project
- communication of BA artifacts
You’ll need to understand or establish workflows for review and approval of your work, and finally collaborate on the project vision document with the project manager. The project vision document should include:
- problem statement
- key objectives
- approach
- project scope
- expected outcome
- acceptance criteria
- stakeholder analysis
- high-level requirements
- business context
Another situation where a checklist is handy is when you get a project handed over from another BA. You need to make sure that you get all the relevant information from them. We’ll write up what should be in the handover checklist in the next post.
This checklist is OK but is too expansive.
All these factors cannot be specified before initiating the project. It would be helpful to segregate which of them have to be ascertained in the first week, second week, third week …etc.
Also there should be templates to describe the actions to be taken and data / Information to be captured analyzed and reported.
Good templates and checklists are very valuable to work systematically and report / monitor / control the progress.
Thanks for the comment. The checklist is written for a BA who’s already assigned to a project where a project initiation document already exists. It is then a matter of familiarising with the information.
As far as templates go, I agree, and this is why we’ve made a document template kit for business analysts.
where can I find this document template kit?
It’s also worth mentioning that many organisations (especially the larger ones) will already have document templates that must be used, and it saves time to ask about these up front.
Hi Susana, you can find out about the template kit here: http://aoteastudios.com/products/business-analysis/business-analysis-template-kit/
as a mentor to entry level BAs i find these documents and other resources is really awesome
Thanks for sharing the checklist …its useful ….
Thanks a lot for sharing the list.