Seilevel Business Analyst Assessment Techniques
In working on improving your organization’s business analysis competencies, it’s useful to formally assess current business analyst skill to form a baseline. This would be wise to do prior to implementing any kind of training, mentoring, or methodology practices so that the plans of improvement can be tailored to the areas of greatest need, and so you can later measure the success of any implemented plan.
Knowledge Tests
The first and probably easiest type of assessment is to test business analysts’ knowledge. You can use basic training course tests that are designed to see if BAs understand fundamental business analysis concepts. This is also a good way to see what requirements terminology your team uses and is familiar with already.
When Seilevel administers this BA assessment, we test the areas of requirements core concepts, elicitation & facilitation, and requirements models knowledge and use. While the results don’t provide detailed assessment information, they will allow a baseline for basic knowledge across a large set of BAs. Being able to recall and test well on the subject is one thing, but being able to apply the skills is another. So the next two parts of a Seilevel assessment actually analyze BAs while they perform work.
Requirements Documentation Reviews
Another type of business analyst assessment we like to do is documentation reviews, where we select a sampling of requirements documents from across the organization with a variety of project types and authors. We then review these requirements documents against a set of predefined criteria.
For example, we look at basic things like whether listed requirements all have unique IDs, to more complex things like whether they are using specific models throughout the requirements document. We then use an assessment worksheet and review documentation against a standard set of criteria. It’s not necessary to review every page of every requirements document, but rather a broad sampling for general results.
Elicitation Observations
The third business analyst assessment is actually observing business analysts as they facilitate elicitation sessions, and evaluate their performance. This type of assessment is the most subjective, though Seilevel has 4 or 5 standard criteria on which we evaluate, and attempt to have the same observer on each observation session for rating consistency.
During these evaluations, our consultants look for: the capability to facilitate a session, keeping it on track, the ability to think on their feet, engaging the entire audience, ability to handle challenging participants well, and the ability to do all the above while still eliciting requirements from everyone.
If a business analysis organization as a whole is relatively immature without a lot of expert-level analysts or is limited to choosing only one type of assessment, we suggest using the requirements documentation reviews as the primary assessment tool.
