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Business Analysis is the set of tasks, knowledge, and techniques required to identify business needs and determine solutions to business problems. Solutions often include a systems development component, but may also consist of process improvement or organizational change. The person who carries out this task is called a business analyst or BA. Business analysis as a discipline has a heavy overlap with requirements analysis, but focuses on identifying the changes to an organization that are required for it to achieve strategic goals. These changes include changes to policies, processes, and information systems.
Examples of business analysis include:
Ultimately, business analysts want to achieve the following outcomes:
One way to assess these goals is to measure the return on investment (ROI) for all projects. Keeping score is part of human nature as we are always comparing ourselves or our performance to others, no matter what we are doing. According to Forrester Research, more than $100 billion is spent annually in the U.S. on custom and internally developed software projects. For all of these software development projects, keeping score is also important and business leaders are constantly asking for the return or ROI on a proposed project or at the conclusion of an active project. However, asking for the ROI without really understanding the underpinnings of where value is created or destroyed is putting the cart before the horse.
Whether you need business process analysis for strategic planning, to reduce waste, or to define software requirements, Finlegal will help you see through the fog. Our experienced team work with your organization to analyze, assess, document, and define your business processes. Our approach focuses on identifying essential business requirements in the context of helping organizations to achieve strategic goals. We work with you to first, model business processes as they stand. We then assess areas for improvement, and work collaboratively to with you to define appropriate changes to processes or information systems.
Systems analysis is reserved for the study of systems that include the human element and behavioral relationships between the system's human element and its physical and mechanical components, if any.
The systems analysis process is an iterative one that cycles repeatedly through the following interrelated and somewhat indistinct phases:
The process includes feedback loops in which the outcomes of each phase are reconsidered based on the analyses and outcomes of the other phases. For example, during the implementation phase, constraints may be uncovered that hinder the solution's implementation and thus cause the mathematical model to be reformulated. The analysis process continues until there is evidence that the mathematical structure is suitable; that is, it has enough validity to yield answers that are of value to the system designers or the decision maker.
Project Management is the discipline of planning, organizing and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives. The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals and objectives while adhering to classic project constraints—usually scope, time and budget. The secondary—and more ambitious—challenge is to optimize the allocation and integration of inputs necessary to meet pre-defined objectives. A project is a carefully defined set of activities that use resources (money, people, materials, energy, space, provisions, communication, motivation, etc.) to achieve the project goals and objectives.
Like any human undertaking, projects need to be performed and delivered under certain constraints. Traditionally, these constraints have been listed as "scope," "time," and "cost". These are also referred to as the "Project Management Triangle," where each side represents a constraint. One side of the triangle cannot be changed without affecting the others. A further refinement of the constraints separates product "quality" or "performance" from scope, and turns quality into a fourth constraint.
The time constraint refers to the amount of time available to complete a project. The cost constraint refers to the budgeted amount available for the project. The scope constraint refers to what must be done to produce the project's end result. These three constraints are often competing constraints: increased scope typically means increased time and increased cost, a tight time constraint could mean increased costs and reduced scope, and a tight budget could mean increased time and reduced scope. The discipline of Project Management is about providing the tools and techniques that enable the project team (not just the project manager) to organize their work to meet these constraints.
Training of Personnel and Compilation of Training material
We can assist in a web based solution designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities.
The solution contains the following modules which may be of great assistance in your organisation:
1. Assignment Module
2. Chat Module
3. Choice Module
4. Forum Module
5. Glossary Module
6. Lesson Module
7. Quiz Module
8. Resource Module
9. Survey Module
10. Wiki Module
11. Workshop Module
Change Management
Change management is a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state. The current definition of Change Management includes both organizational change management processes and individual change management models, which together are used to manage the people side of change.
Organizational change management includes processes and tools for managing the people side of the change at an organizational level. These tools include a structured approach that can be used to effectively transition groups or organizations through change. When combined with an understanding of individual change management, these tools provide a framework for managing the people side of change. Organizational change management processes include techniques for creating a change management strategy (readiness assessments), engaging senior managers as change leaders (sponsorship), building awareness of the need for change (communications), developing skills and knowledge to support the change(education and training), helping employees move through the transition (coaching by managers and supervisors), and methods to sustain the change (measurement systems, rewards and reinforcement).
Team Building
Team building training refers to the selection, development, and collective motivation of result-oriented teams. Team building is pursued via a variety of practices, such as group self-assessment and group-dynamic games, and generally sits within the theory and practice of organizational development.
When a team in an organizational development context embarks upon a process of self-assessment in order to gauge its own effectiveness and thereby improve performance, it can be argued that it is engaging in team building, although this may be considered a narrow definition.
The process of team building includes:
To assess itself, a team seeks feedback to find out both:
To improve its current performance, a team uses the feedback from the team assessment in order to:
Dataflow
Turn disparate data into actionable information. With the Data Flow™ Solution, you can streamline workflow, gain valuable customer insights, and make better business decisions - with a documented, repeatable, automated process that's easy to define, easy to query and even easier to use.
Data Flow™ makes it easy to rapidly access, connect, integrate and analyze data from a wide array of applications, databases and data files. By eliminating the need to write custom extract programs, you can implement solutions in hours rather than weeks or days. Data Flow™ handles the widest variety of data formats, from legacy applications to Web-based technologies. Available modules include Mainframe, AS/400 and R/3 (SAP).
Unlike systems that require you to perform “join functions” within the database, Data Flow™ enables users to join two or more sources in memory. Consequently, you can more easily analyze or perform operations on data from multiple sources. The unique architecture of the Data Flow™ engine enables users to see the results of their data integration plan as the plan is running. In this way, you can avoid costly mistakes by inspecting the results and modifying the plan before populating the target database.
Because Data Flow™ is an end-to-end data integration solution - from data access and manipulation to analysis and reporting - users do not have to integrate components from multiple vendors, thus reducing the complexity and implementation time. Data Flow™ is readily adaptable to other applications, even if an implementation utilizes third party technology. As a result, the integration and deployment of Data Flow™ is straightforward and easy to accomplish. So you can implement complete solutions in days, not months.
Data Flow™ was designed from the ground up to support both business and technical users. Its intuitive interface allows individuals to become familiar and productive with the technology quickly. In addition, because all components come from the same vendor and can even reside on the same server, upgrades and system maintenance are seamless. The technology offers users the ability to join an unlimited number of heterogeneous data sources without writing the data to an intermediate staging area. Data Flow™ can natively support legacy applications, Web-based technologies and leading third-party applications such as SAP.
Data Flow's modular architecture allows you to seamlessly add features as your business needs evolve. Additional modules include:
Data Flow's massively parallel, multi-threaded design allows it to process huge amounts of data using all of the computing power available on multiprocessor UNIX and Windows servers. To maximize throughput, Data Flow™ processes data as a continuous stream of in-memory blocks. No intermediate disk I/O is required. Data Flow's transforms simply operate on the block in memory and then pass it on to the next transform in the pipeline. New threads are spawned automatically as data sources are opened, as data paths branch and as data “sinks” are created. This ensures that raw server power is efficiently applied to tackle complex data integration problems.
Data Flow™ offers a powerful process-oriented transformation environment where users can build data flow plans utilizing reusable components to perform complex data manipulation tasks. These tasks include joining information from multiple data sources, transposing data sets, time-data manipulation, string manipulation, lookups, data warehouse key generation, advanced matching and many more. This high-performance application environment allows users to utilize a rich set of pre-built transformation objects by dragging and dropping them on screen to build the transformation flow logic. The transforms can also be easily customized to create specific business transformation rules that can be shared and reused by all developers. Most importantly, this process-oriented transformation approach provides an environment for visualizing solutions for complex data transformation problems.
Data Flow™ enables users to reference data using business terms. This facilitates a more collaborative environment as business users can understand the transformation logic utilized by the IT department. Additionally, Data Flow's patented technology lets users incrementally incorporate additional transformations with no interruption to existing business processes.