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ABIP

Dec 2016

Busniess Intelligence Portal process for Andalusia Group for Medical Services.

  1. BA/UX/BI Vision

    Andalusia

    We understand that building a BA/UX team in a BI unit has special attributes, since BI is all about “how we got here”, then BA in the same context should be more about “how we will get to the future”, in other words, BI and BA are tightly-coupled, and both are standing back to back with UX for a good reason. We can summarize the key elements that sits on top of our scope as follows:

    1. Predictive Analysis:

      Being a BA in such context focuses more on making use of historical statistics and reports in order to drive decision making through predictive models, and that's one of our primary goals to achieve.

    2. BI Portal Ownership:

      Collecting additional inputs on top of HIS (Hospital Information Systems) sources is essential to present more accurate indicators that provides assistance in driving decision making.

    3. Usability is a must:

      If our BI portal is not easy to use, no one is going to benefit from any of the BI reports from the first place.

      4. The above values are being communicated for the first time to BA team a month ago, expecting full team adoption to those values with reflection on the BI portal in 3-6 months. The following table highlights the value of merging skillsets in sequence:

      UX BA/UX BA/UX/BI
      Addressing usability issues and proposing intuitive solutions.
      Think reports and coupling actual indicators with current performance and planned targets.
      Advanced predictive models to drive decision making.
  2. BA/UX Process

    BA/UX Process

  3. ABIP

    ABIP stands for Andalusia Business Intelligence Portal, the name is the new proposed name for the current portal available at http://ems.andalusiagroup.net

    The goal is to renovate the project from ground up by performing business re-analysis and usability evaluations to achieve the following:

    1. Using the tracking module at the heart of the integration between all other modules.
    2. Merging quality measurement tools (formerly known as OMS) as a key module.
    3. Adding portability attribute by modifying navigation, dashboard, and enabled features based on user role.
    4. Improving usability issues by eliminating nested popups and cluttered navigation, on the other hand, refactoring information flow, reducing required call for actions, and transforming input scenario to a horizontal sequential order.
  4. Agile Practices

    Scrum is the elected Agile framework by Andalusia for managing production releases at all production pipelines. Arguably, it kills the presence of both BA and UX according to the following:

    1. BA is not PO

      “While Scrum focuses on value driven development it does not address business analysis activities in detail and many of these activities occur as implicit steps in the scrum framework” – Agile Extension of the BABOK Guide

      “Within a sprint, business analysis activities focus on eliciting the requirements for the sprint backlog items being worked and the acceptance criteria for those items. This approach is frequently referred to as just‐in‐time requirements elicitation; developing only what is required for the current sprint and only done to the level of detail required to enable the team to build the product and acceptance criteria” – Agile Extension of the BABOK Guide

      The above information clearly stating that a BA is not originally the same person as a PO. Instead, it suggests doing requirements elicitation in real-time to groom the backlog, assuming that the initial requirements are fairly short. In other words, a BA is the right-hand for the PO at best (this is not exactly the current strategy adopted by Andalusia, and it kills the value of analysis either way).

      Additionally, BA is not a decision maker from the first place, and since decision making is essential to a PO, then treating BA as PO will put the backlog prioritization at risk.

    2. Abandoned UX activities

      “Agile teams are more proficient in executing the development process, but the compressed timescale forces some to abandon user research and degrade the resulting user experience” – Doing UX in an Agile World: Case Study Findings - Nielsen Norman Group

      In addition to the above summary, Agile severely challenges UX in terms of inadequate resources with the absence of user research and usability testing.

      The most efficient approach to leverage UX in Agile is that the UX must work at least one step ahead of the sprint (exactly as I did propose in a form of short iterations with the stakeholders before starting any development process), which means it's not perfectly complied with Agile Scrum.

    3. Multitasking distraction

      When BA is acting as a PO, s/he gains more focus on development process details referencing only user stories (which is too short as requirements), and less focus on requirements elicitation techniques (weather due to time-boxing or distributing attention), causing shortage at the BA team, and leaves less room for adopting change requests in other projects, or assessing the UX team for improving other features (even in the same project).

      In short, less quality attributes in favor of a fast development output.

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