Hire Business Analysts for Enterprise Programmes

Most of the cost of a programme is decided in the specification, and the specification is the part most often treated as paperwork to be got through. “The system should allow the user to approve” is not a requirement. It is the title of one. Who approves, on what basis, what happens to the thing they did not approve, what the next person sees, and what an auditor can reconstruct six months later — that is the requirement, and if nobody writes it down the developer will decide it by accident.

The second failure is describing the process as it is documented rather than as it is run. The documented version has no exceptions in it. The real one has a supervisor who overrides a price by phone, a spreadsheet that tracks the twelve orders the system cannot represent, and a rule everyone knows that is written nowhere. A system built from the documented version goes live and immediately acquires a shadow spreadsheet, because the exceptions never went away.

So the useful analyst is the one who asks what happens when it goes wrong, and keeps asking. Anyone can describe the happy path. The requirements live in the exceptions, and the exceptions are where the arguments — and the change requests — come from later.

We staff analysts to work inside your process rather than around it: your tooling, your ceremonies, your definition of done, and your people signing off what they will have to live with.