Business Articles

Article / Updated 09-22-2022

In the business analysis profession, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. As you develop your project type, you need to know all the tools available to you; think through all the variables related to the people, project characteristics, and the process; and then determine what tasks you need to complete. Data warehouse projects A data warehouse is a solution that brings together information from diverse sources and puts it in a format that stakeholders can easily access when making complex business decisions. A data warehouse supports a company’s tactical and strategic goals. Data warehouses are useful for trend analysis, forecasting, competitive analysis, and targeted market research. Data is often summarized by specific subject area, function, department, geographic region, time period, or all of these. Most data warehouse projects fall into the “large project” category and result in a substantial project planning effort for you as the business analyst. These projects often have a company-wide focus. The business priority for the project depends on what critical decisions need to be made to address a business threat or opportunity. Include these types of tasks in your data warehouse project work plan: Identifying what information the data warehouse must contain, identifying who should have access to it, and making sure users have the right level of access. Identifying and prioritizing subject areas to be implemented. Managing the scope of each subject area iteration or release. Validating the data accuracy and consistency during the extract/transform/load (ETL) process. Defining the correct level of data summarization. Establishing a data refresh schedule that’s consistent with business needs, timing, and cycles. Researching and reviewing available commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) business intelligence tools used for complex reporting. Planning for a user-friendly, powerful desktop query tool for users to access data without IT assistance. Planning for the user training and support needed to learn how to use tools and access data. Ensuring thorough testing is done prior to user acceptance testing (UAT). Process improvement projects Companies find competitive advantages by looking closely at their business processes and determining whether they need to improve their business operations. Depending on the changes to be made, those changes may occur in small segments over a long period of time (evolutionary changes) or may be made at one time (revolutionary changes). As a business analyst, your evaluation of the business process may result in a recommendation for software changes, procedural changes, organizational changes, or personnel changes. The tasks you perform when completing a process improvement project include analyzing the current process, capturing metrics as a baseline, identifying the problems, and identifying solutions that fix those problems to achieve better performance. Reengineering — another approach to changing a business process — happens when you start from scratch to ask what the organization needs in order to succeed instead of fixing something that already exists. You ignore current roles, silos (compartmentalized departments in organizations), and outdated business rules, and challenge assumptions to create enterprise-wide changes. Reengineering implies that you’re innovating dramatically to design new, streamlined processes. Tasks related to process reengineering projects include the following: Performing root cause analysis to find out the real problem that exists within the business Brainstorming with the project team alternative approaches to address the problem area Choosing the best approach that solves the business problem Infrastructure projects Infrastructure projects are internal technical upgrades that impact systems, hardware, platforms, or tools in order to improve the technology that supports the business and the information technology (IT) efforts. Typically, these projects are called IT projects because they’re driven and sponsored by IT departments. Tasks to include on your work plan include the following: Assessing how software interface changes (even small ones) may impact usability Assessing how the project may impact user productivity and whether training may be required Determining whether any change to a work process needs to be made based on the project With infrastructure projects, the changes often affect stakeholders, external customers, or suppliers. Business analysts are involved to manage requirements and expectations of these changes among all project stakeholders. Here are some things to keep in mind: Business analysts sometimes underestimate or miscommunicate business impact, technical risks, and priorities, so be careful. In particular, don’t forget about implementation considerations and transition requirements (user training, timing, and support). Although infrastructure projects aren’t intended to change user functionality, user productivity often decreases during the learning curve as users get used to the new elements. Because these projects are technology improvements, they may often be delayed to make room for more business-critical efforts, assuming their delay doesn’t significantly impact the business. These projects may be initiated because vendor support is no longer available. Web development projects In today’s environment, many users expect feature-rich websites and applications accessible from anywhere with any web browser. They also expect functions to be delivered in short time frames. Think about the applications you use today, like online banking, social media, and shopping websites. Web development projects are customer-facing web applications that are targeted at consumers and are available inside or outside the organization. As such, they require some special considerations in your work plan. When planning for this type of project, make sure to prioritize the features and functions. Doing so allows the team to work on and implement the highest value features first. Using an agile approach (building a highly skilled, tightly knit, self-managed, and collocated team that stays with the project from beginning to end and delivers software quickly) works well for these types of projects. Key stakeholders involved in these projects include usability experts, marketing product owners, and a customer representative or surrogate representative, such as marketing or business analyst. The following are some tasks to include on a web development work plan: Eliciting usability and security requirements Use cases, user stories, wireframes, prototypes, and simulations Testing activities like UAT

Article / Updated 09-22-2022

The data flow diagram is a helpful diagram for business analysts that shows the parties and systems involved with a particular process, as well as the data and interfaces involved when dealing with external agents (those parties or systems that exchange information with the project but over which your project has no control). It’s most commonly used for the project level context diagram (or scope diagram). Although the data flow diagram is a graphic, as the name suggests, you can also use a text-based version called the external interaction textual template. You use these techniques to analyze and communicate. If text communicates better to your stakeholders, use the textual template rather than the diagram. Introduction to data flow diagrams for business analysis The data flow diagram consists of three basic symbols: circles, curved lines, and rectangles. Each symbol represents something different: Circles: The circles represent the process (or the function) that actually works to transform inputs into outputs. In the example below, the process involves taking in all the information from the guest (input) and sending it off to the reservation system (output). Curved lines: The curved lines represent the data flowing into and out of the process. These bits of data aren’t detailed data elements but rather a conglomeration of data called net flow. In the example, dates coming from the guest into the process are arrival and departure dates (including times), but instead of getting that detailed, the diagram simply summarizes them as “dates.” Rectangular boxes: The rectangular boxes represent external agents that are sources or recipients of data. Your project has no control over how these sources execute their internal processes (their work), and the project can only send data to and receive it from them. For example, you have no idea how the reservation system processes its data, but based on what you send the system, you get the availability and price information from it. Credit: Illustration by Wiley, Composition Services Graphics Here are some examples of when you should apply this technique: When identifying stakeholders (those external agents!) When scoping your project and figuring out your boundaries Like any analysis method, data flow diagrams have advantages and disadvantages. In the advantages column is the fact that the diagram is a very clear way to show the scope boundaries for the project so that everyone is on the same page with regard to the area being analyzed (the scope). It also highlights the items that aren’t part of scope and can be documented as “out of scope.” The disadvantages primarily have to do with reader understanding: The diagram doesn’t show sequence, so some businesspeople may have a hard time following it. The diagram presents the data flowing into and out of the project at a rather high level. It doesn’t show all the data elements, which may be problematic for detail-oriented folks. The data flow has kind of fallen out of favor because, outside the scope diagram, businesspeople don’t relate to the many levels of the data flow diagram. They prefer a workflow. Here’s how to create a data flow diagram: Identify the process you’re documenting (the circle in the middle of the diagram). Identify all the parties and systems (the rectangles) involved in the process. Elicit from the stakeholders the data (the curved lines) flowing among the parties, the systems, and the process. Have the stakeholders validate your diagram. The external interaction textual template for business analysis An external interaction textual template may sound complicated, but it’s really not. You use the same information you’d use for a data flow diagram but present it in a text table rather than a graphic. A textual representation may be preferable when your stakeholders don’t understand the diagram or when teaching them how to read it takes too much time. You can see that the left-hand column lists the external agents (the rectangles on the data flow diagram), and the middle and right-hand columns list the data itself (the curved lines on the diagram). Credit: Illustration by Wiley, Composition Services Graphics

Article / Updated 09-22-2022

You can use the Central Limit Theorem to convert a sampling distribution to a standard normal random variable. Based on the Central Limit Theorem, if you draw samples from a population that is greater than or equal to 30, then the sample mean is a normally distributed random variable. To determine probabilities for the sample mean the standard normal tables requires you to convert to a standard normal random variable. The standard normal distribution is the special case where the mean equals 0, and the standard deviation equals 1. For any normally distributed random variable X with a mean and a standard deviation you find the corresponding standard normal random variable (Z) with the following equation: For the sampling distribution of the corresponding equation is As an example, say that there are 10,000 stocks trading each day on a regional stock exchange. It's known from historical experience that the returns to these stocks have a mean value of 10 percent per year, and a standard deviation of 20 percent per year. An investor chooses to buy a random selection of 100 of these stocks for his portfolio. What's the probability that the mean rate of return among these 100 stocks is greater than 8 percent? The investor's portfolio can be thought of as a sample of stocks chosen from the population of stocks trading on the regional exchange. The first step to finding this probability is to compute the moments of the sampling distribution. Compute the mean: The mean of the sampling distribution equals the population mean. Determine the standard error: This calculation is a little trickier because the standard error depends on the size of the sample relative to the size of the population. In this case, the sample size (n) is 100, while the population size (N) is 10,000. So you first have to compute the sample size relative to the population size, like so: Because 1 percent is less than 5 percent, you don't use the finite population correction factor to compute the standard error. Note that in this case, the value of the finite population correction factor is: Because this value is so close to 1, using the finite population correction factor in this case would have little or no impact on the resulting probabilities. And because the finite population correction factor isn't needed in this case, the standard error is computed as follows: To determine the probability that the sample mean is greater than 8 percent, you must now convert the sample mean into a standard normal random variable using the following equation: To compute the probability that the sample mean is greater than 8 percent, you apply the previous formula as follows: Because these values are substituted into the previous expression as follows: You can calculate this probability by using the properties of the standard normal distribution along with a standard normal table such as this one. Standard Normal Table — Negative Values Z 0.00 0.01 0.02 0.03 –1.3 0.0968 0.0951 0.0934 0.0918 –1.2 0.1151 0.1131 0.1112 0.1093 –1.1 0.1357 0.1335 0.1314 0.1292 –1.0 0.1587 0.1562 0.1539 0.1515 The table shows the probability that a standard normal random variable (designated Z) is less than or equal to a specific value. For example, you can write the probability that (one standard deviation below the mean) as You find the probability from the table with these steps: Locate the first digit before and after the decimal point (–1.0) in the first (Z) column. Find the second digit after the decimal point (0.00) in the second (0.00) column. See where the row and column intersect to find the probability: Because you're actually looking for the probability that Z is greater than or equal to –1, one more step is required. Due to the symmetry of the standard normal distribution, the probability that Z is greater than or equal to a negative value equals one minus the probability that Z is less than or equal to the same negative value. For example, This is because are complementary events. This means that Z must either be greater than or equal to –2 or less than or equal to –2. Therefore, This is true because the occurrence of one of these events is certain, and the probability of a certain event is 1. After algebraically rewriting this equation, you end up with the following result: For the portfolio example, The result shows that there's an 84.13 percent chance that the investor's portfolio will have a mean return greater than 8 percent.

Article / Updated 09-21-2022

Can you make decisions swiftly and confidently when vast amounts of data cross your desk and inbox every day? How do you prioritize and rapidly respond in the midst of changing conditions? Well, you use the skills you already possess but may not be tapping into. Here's an interesting correlation: The way you process information as you drive a vehicle works for making an informed decision, as well. If you drive well enough to be 98 percent accident-free, chances are you're already a master of processing tons of data at high speed: You select pertinent information almost automatically and then use the information quickly and accurately. If you apply that innate skill to your decision-making, you can make informed business decisions without second guessing yourself. To sort from a sea of information, do the following. Focus on the outcome. Being clear about the end point does two things: Provides guidance for your intuition, enabling you to sift through all the available information to select what's important for the decision you need to make Gives you a solid anchor for your decisions that can accommodate opposing facts and perspectives If, for example, the end point is to stay under budget, then your decision and the data you use to inform your decision will be filtered based on that. If the end point is to produce a product that meets customers' unstated needs, then all the available information will be filtered using that criterion. The outcome anchors your decision making. Stop mentally concentrating on the issues and let your subconscious do the work for you. Your subconscious is faster than your conscious mind, and it works automatically when your focus is clear. When you turn the issue over to your subconscious, you gain speed and accuracy. Question and expose the beliefs you use to interpret how the world works. Beliefs, otherwise known as mental models — things you believe to be true but that may not actually reflect a widened view of reality — filter reality to confirm your previous experiences. Questioning your beliefs permits you to improve the accuracy of your analysis, jettison past connotations, and open up new possibilities. Observe your emotions. Step back to gain perspective and quiet the mental chatter so that you can accurately hear your inner voice. You'll gain a wider view of the situation and be able to see alternatives. It's really easy to fall prey to doubt or to rationalize your decision. If you're feeling fearful, you may think you have only one option or no options. In climates of high fear, when the rational dominates, making an informed decision requires that you achieve a calmer state of mind so that you can access your higher mental and intuitive functioning. After you analyze and review your options, select your decision, but before you commit, check in on how you feel about the option you've selected. Call it a heart check. Even when the solution is a totally new approach, you need to feel at peace with it. Making an informed decision requires that you work with both facts (actual data) and emotional information, and that you take steps to mitigate the effect of ingrained bias. Doing so requires that you commit to mastering all your senses and intelligences so that, in chaotic decision-making environments, you'll be able to balance data with open-minded experimentation and stay sensitive to cues that other decision-makers will miss.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 09-20-2022

Forecasting what will happen in the economic future is hard. Nobody gets it right all the time. However, with a grounding in economic indicators, you can improve your investment results and the profitability of your business.

Article / Updated 09-19-2022

Whether presenting as part of a team or alone, asking someone to evaluate your performance during rehearsal can help hone your presentation and skills. Ask a trusted colleague or mentor to watch your presentation — ideally someone who is similar to a typical audience member or can put himself in the audience’s state of mind. After your presentation, the evaluator can either complete this form or give you verbal feedback on the aspects of the presentation. Some of the questions relate to the content, so you can determine if you delivered your desired message, while others are about your specific performance. What was the title of my presentation? What three main points did I make? What is the call to action I want the audience to take? What parts of the presentation were confusing? Did I use any jargon or words that you didn’t know or understand? Which parts of the presentation are too simplistic or contain information that the audience already knows? Were my visuals interesting or boring, helpful or distracting? How did you feel during and after the presentation? Objectively describe me — during the presentation — in two or three words, such as professional, nervous, knowledgeable, warm, confident, cold, unorganized, pushy. Did I do any of the following: Talk too fast Talk too slow or in a monotone voice Pace or shift my weight nervously Display a nervous tic, such as grimacing or playing with an object

Article / Updated 09-16-2022

Building an engaged network on Twitter can have a huge positive impact on your employer brand’s recruiting efforts, particularly if you’re recruiting in fields such as knowledge workers, who tend to flock to Twitter. It’s an open platform, meaning anyone can see any content without necessarily following the account, so tweets have the potential of reaching a wider audience. If you don’t know the difference between a hashtag and a price tag, you may want to check out Twitter For Dummies, 3rd Edition, by Laura Fitton, Anum Hussain, and Brittany Leaning (Wiley). Picking up strategies by observing others Before you venture into any unfamiliar social gathering, whether online or not, hang out for a while and observe how others in the community interact. When you’re setting out to establish an employer brand presence on Twitter, observe other Twitter accounts that have strong positive employer brands and take note of the content they tweet, the tone or voice, and how they interact with potential candidates. You can find plenty of role models on Twitter; here are examples of a few good corporate accounts you may want to follow: @NPRjobs, @JoinTheFlock, @PepsiCoJobs, @MicrosoftJobs, @ViacomCareers, @InsideZappo, and @HootsuiteLife. Try following your peers and competitors on Twitter to find out what they’re doing to compete for talent. Check out the collection of more than 250 brand recruiting handles on Twitter. Using hashtags to source candidates for your employer brand Most employer branding efforts are designed around pull marketing (attracting prospects), but sourcing is a push marketing technique that involves proactively recruiting individuals with high-value skills and expertise. The focus here is on building a strong employer brand, but Twitter is also a good platform for recruiters and organizations to identify and engage with prospects who may not even be in the market for a new job. When posting job notices on Twitter, include function- or job-specific hashtags in your tweets (for example, #digitalmarketing, #PR, #webdesign, or #accounting). You can find function- or skill-specific hashtags by searching the web for “job seeker hashtags.” Tread carefully when using hashtags. If you’re oversharing jobs with event hashtags, you’ll likely face blowback for spamming. You can also use Twitter to source candidates by keeping an eye on hashtags relevant to positions you’re trying to fill. For example, if you’re recruiting Drupal developers, keep an eye on the hashtags: #Drupal, #DrupalCon, #Drupal8, and so on to see what these communities are talking about and to identify influential developers. If you’re recruiting marketing managers, keep an eye on #marketing, #digitalmarketing, #marketingresearch, #mktg, and so on. Plenty of tools are available to help you identify influencers within various hashtag communities. Here are a few to check out: Google Trends Audiense Hashtags Sourcing local talent? These tools and others enable you to search for people talking about relevant topics within a certain mile radius of your company. Engaging prospects for your employer brand When you’re posting tweets, which are essentially very brief, overlooking the necessity of offering followers something of real value is far too easy. Keep the focus on delivering valuable content. Share behind-the-scenes photos or videos to help prospects get a sense of what it’s like to work for your company. Share articles and resources about your industry. Join Twitter chats and share your insights and expertise. Interact with your followers. Try to respond to every @mention and question. Engagement and interaction are vital for building community. Getting your employees involved with your employer brand To fully harness the power of Twitter, get employees involved. Candidates don’t want to hear only from employer brand managers; they want to hear from peers doing the work they (prospects) may be doing for your company in the near future. They want to talk shop with the people who may someday be their colleagues. Great talent can recognize similar talent. Consider developing internal programs that encourage employees to share their knowledge and expertise in online communities where you recruit. By increasing their visibility in certain professional circles and establishing themselves as experts in those communities, your employees can expand their own professional networks while helping you identify and attract talented prospects. Prospects want to hear from your employees. That product manager you’ve been wooing wants to see tweets from your product team that will help them get a feel for the work, team atmosphere, culture, and so on. You may share supremely clever and compelling content on Twitter, but you’re still an HR guy or gal. You have an agenda to bring talent into your organization, so of course your posts are biased. Gauging your employer brand’s Twitter impact You can use any of several available tools to measure the reach, retweets, impressions, and so on related to your tweeting activity. You should also be measuring applications and hires coming from Twitter through your applicant tracking software (ATS). Use these tools to adjust your campaigns regularly. You may be tempted to obsess over your number of followers. Don’t let that be your primary indicator as to whether your account is successful. If you focus on providing valuable content and engaging your community, followers will come. Focus on this and you’ll have something better than followers; you’ll have brand advocates who bring you the best talent available.

Article / Updated 09-16-2022

You don’t have to wait until your multi-vari data are collected to start creating the multi-vari chart for Six Sigma. Instead, you can build the chart, incrementally, adding more to it as you collect more data. Multi-vari charts can be drawn by hand; in fact, the process operators themselves can create them, providing those folks with a critical opportunity to invest themselves in the discovery of the root cause and the development of the solution. A multi-vari chart looks pretty much like any other two-axis plot, with time moving from left to right on the horizontal axis and the measured process output metric plotted against the vertical axis. The multiple measurements of each unit are plotted together. Consecutive unit groupings move from left to right over time. A break in the horizontal progression of the chart indicates a temporal break in the process sampling. The multiple measurements taken on each unit are plotted as circles. A slightly modified circle designates the first, second, and third within-unit measurements. A solid line connects the multiple measurements within each unit and graphically indicates the magnitude of variation originating within each unit — the variation contribution from positional factors. An average point is plotted for each unit grouping. These unit averages are drawn as squares. If the multi-vari chart is drawn by hand, this average can be estimated. The average isn’t the center point between the maximum and minimum unit measurements; instead, think of it as the “balance point” between all the unit measurements. A long-dashed line is drawn connecting the averages of consecutive unit groupings measured. The up-and-down variation of this connecting line indicates the magnitude of variation between units, or the contribution of cyclical variation factors. A mark is plotted to show the overall average of the set of consecutive units measured. A short-dashed connecting line is drawn between the overall average points. The up-and-down variation of this connecting line indicates the magnitude of the variation between long breaks in time, or the contribution of temporal variation factors. Vertical lines are drawn along the horizontal axis to indicate the end of one temporal set of measurements and the beginning of the next. Each vertical divider embodies a relatively long duration of unmeasured process execution time. The sampling pattern repeats itself for three temporal occurrences. A typical multi-vari chart would continue for more temporal occurrences, always until enough process data are captured to match the historical levels of variation known to exist in the process. Each temporal occurrence contains the measurements of three consecutive units. Each cycle should contain at least three consecutive units, but up to five or six may be necessary. Each unit consists of three measurements of the same process characteristic. As with the temporal occurrences, having up to five or six measurements is sometimes useful. Interpreting a multi-vari chart To determine which category of input variable drives the performance of your process output, all you have to do is graphically decide which of the three types of variation — positional, cyclical, or temporal — displays the greatest magnitude of variation in your multi-vari chart. You can compare the variation types by homing in on each one separately. The vertical range of the positional variation — indicated by the height of the gray boxes— graphically depicts the magnitude of the process variation stemming from positional input factors. The vertical range between the unit averages — indicated by the height of the gray boxes — graphically depicts the magnitude of variation coming from cyclical factors. The vertical range between the temporal averages — shown again by the height of the gray box — graphically highlights the magnitude of the variation coming from temporal factors. Temporal factors are those that only change their input value across larger gaps of time but not within single units and not between consecutive units. You can see that the vertical magnitude of the cyclical variation exceeds that for the positional or temporal categories. That result is the voice of the process telling you that the real root cause of your process performance is associated with some factor whose input value changes between production or creation of consecutive units. The multi-vari chart proves that all other factors that change input value within single units or change input value over longer times don’t exert a significant influence on the performance of the process.

Article / Updated 09-15-2022

Financial statement fraud, commonly referred to as "cooking the books," involves deliberately overstating assets, revenues, and profits and/or understating liabilities, expenses, and losses. When a forensic accountant investigates business financial fraud, she looks for red flags or accounting warning signs that indicate suspect business accounting practices. These red flags include the following: Aggressive revenue recognition practices, such as recognizing revenue in earlier periods than when the product was sold or the service was delivered Unusually high revenues and low expenses at period end that can't be attributed to seasonality Growth in inventory that doesn't match growth in sales Improper capitalization of expenses in excess of industry norms Reported earnings that are positive and growing but operating cash flow that's declining Growth in revenues that's far greater than growth in other companies in the same industry or peer group Gross margin or operating margins out of line with peer companies Extensive use of off–balance sheet entities based on relationships that aren't normal in the industry Sudden increases in gross margin or cash flow as compared with the company's prior performance and with industry averages Unusual increases in the book value of assets, such as inventory and receivables Disclosure notes so complex that it's impossible to determine the actual nature of a particular transaction Invoices that go unrecorded in the company's financial books Loans to executives or other related parties that are written off A business that engages in such fraudulent practices stands to lose a tremendous amount of money when penalties and fines, legal costs, the loss of investor confidence, and a tarnished reputation are taken into account.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 09-12-2022

Meeting success requires a combination of proper meeting design as well as meeting processes that strive for inclusivity. In this handy Cheat Sheet are lists of best practices for leading in-person, virtual, and hybrid meetings. There's also a checklist of best practices for attending meetings. Also, when you're planning meetings, you need to think about the kinds of technology you'll need and what will be available to you.