Revealing that Business Change Academy’s Business Analysis Practice course principles are helping her clients to better consider the holistic picture of their business strategy, Jeanette Venter, Project Manager at Aurecon, is positively guiding her key business stakeholders to make the right project decisions when moving forward.
“While facilitating a workshop to unpack detailed requirements with my client — who has high-interest and high-influence — I drew the POPIT model on the whiteboard, from the learnings I acquired on BCMG’s Business Analysis Practice course.
Referring to each element of POPIT, I highlighted to the project team the need to ensure that the IT solution works within the bigger environment, and was able to ask pertinent questions regarding the organisational context, processes impacted and people affected,” says Jeanette.
This approach to managing project stakeholders helped Jeanette make a breakthrough, as towards the end of the workshop, another key stakeholder requested sessions with end-users to discuss their perspective.
“In my role I always try to maintain that the ‘client is always right’, meaning at times I need to subtly influence them.
The techniques I learnt on BCMG’s training helped me achieve what was needed — my client began to recognise the other stakeholders situations. Not just by deriving new requirements, but also by their willingness to understand the change’s overall operational feasibility,” says Jeanette.
The typical disconnects between different stakeholder perspectives can leave organisational disconnects between strategy and tactics, which ultimately cause fundamental problems with the implementation of business system changes.
Jeanette shares that “Resistance to change is one of the biggest challenges we face, and it is a significant obstacle to overcome. We are the ‘middle man’, having to balance the business needs and keeping the client happy, whilst understanding the end user’s challenges and managing their frustrations. And it’s our job to close that gap.”
Not only did Jeanette put the strategic business analysis theory into practice, she was also able to use the outputs from the workshop create quality project deliverables and expedite project delivery. “In addition to POPIT, we also drew the high-level business processes on the whiteboard, which I later formalised in Visio, and we then workshopped them again a second time round to ensure understanding and agree that we were making the right key decisions’” says Jeanette.
Jeanette found the course content extremely relevant, and believes that any project manager or business analyst involved in business systems projects will benefit from the training. She says,
Many projects are typically considered to be IT projects, but realising the true implications for the business environment goes a long way to making everybody happy!”
You can read more about Jeanette’s training experience here and learn more about the Certificate in Business Analysis Practice here, which leads to the BCS International Diploma in Business Analysis.
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