Marcel Britsch — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:21:01 GMT

Hi Holger,
interesting article, and I strongly agree that you do raise some very important points here. Having seen similar articles recently I just wanted to flag one thing that is often overlooked in those discussions:
Business Analysis.

Having worked with clients and agencies on a wide variety of online projects, I came to realize that quite often, the client’s reqiurements, as well as their strategic and technical capabitlities are often overlooked. Instead agencies create something nice with loads of usability, that not necessarily works for the client or satisfies the underlying requirement, or more important doesnt even meet client expecations.

I strongly believe that there is another element reuqired in those models above, that of the business analyst. We have made very good experiences in capturing business requirments, modelling use cases and then having the rest of the team, on that basis continue their work. (Of course the process is iterative and there are feedback loops).

The advantages are:
- better understanding of the client, and not only of the end-customer, but of the business you as an agency are actually working for
- being able to support the client’s business strategy and therefore add true value
- undestanding capabilities, risks, contraints and oportunities around all aspects of a project (how often do online projects not deliver because of a business process change that could not be achieved or due to a third-party integration gone wrong?)
- align the team and ensure common and consisten undestanding of project objectivs and success criteria
- baseline for client sign off, development and testing
and so on

The reasons why this aspect overlooked, I believe, are historical: Online media being considered less technical and more fluffy than software development. The funny thing is that this goes both ways: Application development requres not only business analysis, but also user experience design, and very design led projects als may need business analysis, even banner campaigns. In the end, there are client expectations to be met, so no project without business requirements – even if the agency defines them for / with the client – - and the more complex, technical or process heavy such products become…

I believe you actully have it in your model: It is the extension of the green line for techincal resource to the beginning of the project.
I personally believe that there should be a specific role tasked with the aspects I mentioned, which has, depending on the project, their main effort at the beginning of the project, and will then, depending on the type of project be involved furhter down the line more or less.

Have you had any experience with this?

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Marcel Britsch