All BABOK Techniques - Advantages & Disadvantages

Disadvantage: Process Modelling

Process models can become extremely complex and unwieldy if not structured carefully. Complex processes may involve enough activities and roles to make them almost impossible for a single individual to understand.

Advantage: Data Mining

Reveal hidden patterns and create useful insight during analysis—helping determine what data might be useful to capture or how many people might be impacted by specific suggestions. • Can be integrated into a system design to increase the accuracy of the data. • Can be used to eliminate or reduce human bias by using the data to determine the facts.

Advantage: Use Cases and Scenarios

Use cases are good at clarifying scope and providing a high-level understanding of user behavioral goals, normal situations, alternatives, or exception paths through an activity or business process.

Advantage: User Stories

User stories create an environment of customer ownership of features and prioritizations in an incremental, iterative development environment. They may eliminate the need to provide functional requirements in some environments. User stories also require that the value delivered by the story be clearly articulated.

Disadvantage: User Stories

User stories may not be the best technique for some environments with regulatory restrictions or when an organization mandates documentation. This modeling technique may not be effective when participants are not co-located. This technique does not explicitly address how to document non-functional requirements.

Disadvantage: Prototyping

Users may focus on the design specifications of the solution rather than the requirements that any solution must address. This can, in turn, constrain the solution design. Developers may believe that they must provide a user interface that precisely matches the prototype, even if superior technology and interface approaches exist.

Advantage: Brainstorming

Ability to elicit many ideas in a short time period.

Disadvantage: Acceptance and Evaluation Criteria Definition

Acceptance and evaluation criteria may express contractual obligations and as such may be difficult to change for legal or political reasons.

Strength: Business Rules Analysis

Clearly defining and structuring rules allows organizations to make changes to policy without altering processes. The impact of changes to business rules can be assessed more easily when they are documented separately from the processes they detail or the means used to enforce the rules.

Advantage: Functional Decomposition

Creates a conceptual model of the work that needs to be completed to deliver the new business solution.

Disadvantage: Data Flow Diagram

Data Flow Diagrams cannot easily show who is responsible for performing the work. They cannot show alternative paths through the same process.

Disadvantage: Decision Analysis

Decision analysis requires specialized knowledge and skills, including mathematical knowledge, an understanding of probability, and similar concepts.

Disadvantage: Functional Decomposition

Decomposing a problem without fully understanding the relationship between pieces of the problem may crate an inappropriate structure that impedes analysis.

Disadvantage: Brainstorming

Dependent on participants' creativity and willingness to participate. Organizational and interpersonal politics may also limit participation.

Advantage: Metrics and Key Performance Indicators

Establishing a monitoring and evaluation system allows stakeholders to understand the extent to which a solution meets an objective, and how effective the inputs and activities of developing the solution (output) were.

Advantage: Estimation

Estimation can help stakeholders make better decisions based on an improved understanding of the likely outcomes from an initiative.

Disadvantage: Document Analysis

Existing documentation may not be up-to-date or valid. Document analysis can be a time consuming and even tedious process to locate the relevant information.

Disadvantage: Interface Analysis

Interface analysis does not provide insight into other aspects of the solution since the analysis does not access the internal components.

Disadvantage: Vendor Assessment

It can be time-consuming to gather sufficient information from multiple vendors. Some information may not be readily available. Vendors with new and innovative products may score poorly because they do not have a significant history in the market.

Advantage: Interface Analysis

Knowing what interfaces are needed, as well as their anticipated complexity and testing needs, enables more accurate project planning and potential savings in time and cost.

Advantage: Organizational Modelling

Organization models are one of the few types of models any organization is almost certain to have defined. Even the simplest organization has to define the reporting structures among team members in order to co-ordinate work between its people.

Weakness: Business Rules Analysis

Organizations may produce lengthy lists of business rules. Business rules can contradict one another or produce unanticipated results when combined. It may also be important to question existing business rules for continuing relevance to current and projected modes of organizational operations and structure.

Advantage: Prototyping

Prototyping supports users who are more comfortable and effective at articulating their needs by using pictures, as prototyping lets them see the future system's interface, while allowing for early user interaction and feedback.

Advantage: Balanced Scorecard

• Facilitates holistic and balanced planning and thinking. • Short-, medium-, and long-term goals can be harmonized into programs with incremental success measures. • Strategic, tactical, and operational teams are more easily aligned in their work. • Encourages forward thinking and competitiveness.

Advantage: Financial Analysis

• Financial analysis allows executive decision makers to objectively compare very different investments from different perspectives. • Assumptions and estimates built into the benefits and costs, and into the financial calculations, are clearly stated so that they may be challenged or approved. • It reduces the uncertainty of a change or solution by requiring the identification and analysis of factors that will influence the investment. • If the context, business need, or stakeholder needs change during a change initiative, it allows the business analyst to objectively re-evaluate the recommended solution.

Disadvantage: Data Modelling

• Following data modelling standards too rigorously may lead to models that are unfamiliar to people without a background in IT. • May extend across multiple functional areas of the organization, and so beyond the business knowledge base of individual stakeholders.

Advantage: State Modelling

• Identifies business rules and information attributes that apply to the entity being modelled. • Identifies and describes the activities that apply to the entity at different states of the entity

Advantage: Stakeholder List, Map or Personas

• Identifies the specific people who must be engaged in requirements elicitation activities. • Helps the business analyst plan collaboration, communication, and facilitation activities to engage all stakeholder groups. • Useful to understand changes in impacted groups over time.

Disadvantage: Item Tracking

• If not careful, the copious recording of data about items may outweigh any benefits realized. • It may use time that could be better spent on other efforts and stakeholders could become mired in details and statistics.

Disadvantage: State Modelling

• Is usually only used to understand and communicate about information entities that are perceived to be complex; simple entities may be understood without the time and effort required to build a state model. • Building a state model appears simple at the start, but achieving a consensus among domain SMEs about the details required by the model can be difficult and time-consuming. • A high degree of precision about states and transitions is required to build a state diagram; some domain SMEs and business analysis practitioners are uncomfortable trying to describe such a level of detail.

Advantage: Business Model Canvas

• It is a widely used and effective framework that can be used to understand and optimize business models. • It is simple to use and easy to understand.

Disadvantage: Backlog Management

• Large backlogs may become cumbersome and difficult to manage. • It takes experience to be able to break down the work to be done into enough detail for accurate estimation. • A lack of detail in the items in the backlog can result in lost information over time.

Disadvantage: Business Cases

• May be subject to the biases of authors. • Frequently not updated once funding for the initiative is secured. • Contains assumptions regarding costs and benefits that may prove invalid upon further investigation.

Advantage: Collaborative Games

• May reveal hidden assumptions or differences of opinion. • Encourages creative thinking by stimulating alternative mental processes. • Challenges participants who are normally quiet or reserved to take a more active role in team activities.

Disadvantage: Concept Modelling

• May set expectations too high about how much integration based on business semantics can be achieved on relatively short notice. • Requires a specialized skill set based on the ability to think abstractly and non-procedurally about know-how and knowledge. • The knowledge-and-rule focus may be foreign to stakeholders. • Requires tooling to actively support real-time use of standard business terminology in writing business rules, requirements, and other forms of business communication.

Disadvantage: Roles and Permissions Matrix

• Need to recognize the required level of detail for a specific initiative or activity; too much detail can be time-consuming and not provide value, too little detail can exclude necessary roles or responsibilities.

Advantage: Data Dictionary

• Provides all stakeholders with a shared understanding of the format and content of relevant information. • A single repository of corporate metadata promotes the use of data throughout the organization in a consistent manner.

Advantage: Business Cases

• Provides an amalgamation of the complex facts, issues, and analysis required to make decisions regarding change. • Provides a detailed financial analysis of cost and benefits. • Provides guidance for ongoing decision making throughout the initiative.

Advantage: Roles and Permissions Matrix

• Provides procedural checks and balances, as well as data security, by restricting individuals from performing certain actions. • Promotes improved review of transaction history, in that audit logs can capture details about any assigned authorities at the time. • Provides documented roles and responsibilities for activities.

Advantage: Process Analysis

• Ensures solutions address the right issues, minimizing waste. • Many different techniques and methodologies can be used and provide teams with great flexibility in approach.

Advantage: Concept Modelling

• Provide a business-friendly way to communicate with stakeholders about precise meanings and subtle distinctions. • Is independent of data design biases and the often limited business vocabulary coverage of data models. • Proves highly useful for white-collar, knowledge-rich, decision-laden business processes. • Helps ensure that large numbers of business rules and complex decision tables are free of ambiguity and fit together cohesively.

Advantage: Business Capability Analysis

• Provides a shared articulation of outcomes, strategy, and performance, which help create very focused and aligned initiatives. • Helps align business initiatives across multiple aspects of the organization. • Useful when assessing the ability of an organization to offer new products and services.

Advantage: Prioritization

• Facilitates consensus building and trade-offs and ensures that solution value is realized and initiative timelines are met.

Advantage: Scope Modelling

A scope model will make it easier to determine what should be in and out of scope for a solution, even when new requirements are identified or requirements change.

Disadvantage: Scope Modelling

A scope model will usually leave much of the detailed scope still needing to be investigated and detailed.

Disadvantage: Sequence Diagrams

A sequence diagram must be defined for each possible scenario. Strictly speaking, a sequence diagram requires a fully defined class model (see Data Model), although less formal sequence diagrams are often developed that represent user interface elements or interactions between actors.

Advantage: Acceptance and Evaluation Criteria Definition

Agile methodologies may require that all requirements be expressed in the form of testable acceptance criteria.

Disadvantage: Lessons Learned Process

All participants must be prepared to avoid any urge to assign blame during these sessions or honest discussions may not occur.

Advantage: Interviews

Allows the interviewer and participant to have full discussions and explanations of the questions and answers.

Advantage: Vendor Assessment

An effective vendor assessment reduces the risk of the organization developing a relationship with an unsuitable vendor and is likely to improve long-term satisfaction with the decision.

Disadvantage: Benchmarking (for strategies, operations and processes)

Benchmarking is time consuming. In addition, organizations may not have the expertise to conduct the analysis and acquire or interpret useful competitive information.

Advantage: Benchmarking (for strategies, operations and processes)

Benchmarking provides organizations with information about new and different methods, ideas, and tools to improve organizational performance.

Disadvantage: Use Cases and Scenarios

Business analysts are frequently tempted to describe most or all system behavior using use cases. Because many requirements can be captured in the use case format, there is frequently a temptation to use them to capture all requirements, even in situations where it is difficult to apply them or another analysis method might prove more effective.

Disadvantage: Metrics and Key Performance Indicators

Gathering excessive amounts of data beyond what is needed will result in unnecessary expense in collecting, analyzing, and reporting. It will also distract project members from other responsibilities. On Agile projects, this will be particularly relevant.

Disadvantage: Focus Group

In the group setting, participants may be concerned about issues of trust or may be unwilling to discuss sensitive or personal topics.

Advantage: Lessons Learned Process

Lessons learned are useful for identifying opportunities for process improvement and can help build team morale after a difficult period.

Advantage: Document Analysis

Leverage existing materials to discover and/or confirm requirements. A means to cross-check requirements from other elicitation techniques such as interviews, job shadowing, surveys, or focus groups.

Advantage: Data Flow Diagram

May be used as a discovery technique for processes and data, or as a technique for verification of a Functional Decomposition or Data Model that have already been completed.

Advantage: Process Modelling

Most stakeholders are comfortable with the basic elements of and concepts behind a process model.

Disadvantage: Non-functional Requirements Analysis

Non-functional requirements are often more difficult to define than functional requirements. Expectations regarding quality attributes may not be described and users of an application may find them difficult to articulate.

Disadvantage: Observation

Observation is only possible for existing processes and can be time-consuming as well as disruptive to the person being observed.

Advantage: Observation

Observation provides realistic and practical insight into the business by getting a hands-on feel for how the business process works today.

Advantage: Workshop

Requirements workshop costs are often lower than the cost of performing multiple interviews. A requirements workshop enables the participants to work together to reach consensus.

Disadvantage: Workshop

Requirements workshops that involve too many participants can slow down the workshop process. Conversely, collecting input from too few participants can lead to overlooking requirements that are important to users, or to specifying requirements that don't represent the majority of the users.

Disadvantage: Business Capability Analysis

Requires an organization to agree to collaborate on this model. • When created unilaterally or in a vacuum it fails to deliver on the goals of alignment and shared understanding. • Requires a broad, cross-functional collaboration in defining the capability model and the value framework.

Advantage: Root Cause Analysis

Root cause analysis provides a structured method to identify the root causes of identified problems, thus ensuring a complete understanding of the problem under review.

Disadvantage: Root Cause Analysis

Root cause analysis works best when someone who has formal training or extensive experience facilitates a team of experts. The primary concern revolves around the ability of the facilitator to remain objective, a critical element to effective root cause analysis.

Disadvantage: Estimation

Stakeholders frequently treat estimates as commitments and expect that, once an estimate is given, the solution team will meet the time and cost estimate.

Advantage: Non-functional Requirements Analysis

Success in meeting non-functional requirements will have a strong influence on whether or not a system is accepted by its users.

Advantage: SWOT Analysis

The SWOT analysis helps quickly analyze various aspects of the current state of the organization and its environment prior to identifying potential solution options.

Disadvantage: SWOT Analysis

The SWOT analysis is a very high-level view; more detailed analysis is almost always needed.

Advantage: Focus Group

The ability to elicit data from a group of people in a single session saves time and cost as compared to conducting individual interviews with the same number of people.

Disadvantage: Organizational Modelling

The primary limitation of organization modeling is not the technique itself, but rather the implications of including organizational redesign in the scope of a project.

Advantage: Sequence Diagrams

The sequence diagram may be used in object-oriented analysis to validate class diagrams against use cases, or to show the timing of interactions between entities within the system scope.

Disadvantage: Survey/Questionnaire

To achieve unbiased results, specialized skills in statistical sampling methods are needed when the decision has been made to survey a subset of potential respondents. The response rates for surveys are often too low for statistical significance. The use of incentives or enforcement means may be used to alleviate this.

Disadvantage: Interviews

Training is required to conduct effective interviews. In particular, unstructured interviews require special skills including facilitation/virtual facilitation and active listening.

Advantage: Decision Analysis

Using consistent financial justification techniques in all business cases provides decision makers with quantitative measures upon which to make project investment decisions.

Advantage: Survey/Questionnaire

When using close-ended questions, surveys can be effective for obtaining quantitative data for use in statistical analysis. When using open-ended questions, survey results may yield insights and opinions not easily obtainable through other elicitation techniques.

Advantage: Glossary

• A glossary promotes common understanding of the business domain and better communication among all stakeholders. • Capturing the definitions as part of an enterprise's documentation provides a single reference and encourages consistency. • Simplifies the writing and maintenance of other business analysis information including but not limited to requirements, business rules, and change strategy.

Disadvantage: Glossary

• A glossary requires an owner to perform timely maintenance, otherwise it becomes outdated and may be ignored. • It may be challenging for different stakeholders to agree on a single definition for a term.

Disadvantage: Balanced Scorecard

• A lack of a clear strategy makes aligning the dimensions difficult. • Can be seen as the single tool for strategic planning rather than just one tool to be used in a suite of strategic planning tools. • Can be misinterpreted as a replacement for strategic planning, execution, and measurement.

Advantage: Decision Modelling

• Decision models are easy to share with stakeholders, facilitate a shared understanding, and support impact analysis. • Multiple perspectives can be shared and combined, especially when a diagram is used. • Simplifies complex decision making by removing business rules management from the process. • Assists with managing large numbers of rules in decision tables by grouping rules by decision. This also helps with reuse. • These models work for rules-based automation, data mining, and predictive analytics, as well as for manual decisions or business intelligence projects.

Disadvantage: Decision Modelling

• Adds a second diagram style when modelling business processes that contain decisions.This may add unnecessary complexity if the decision is simple and tightly coupled with the process. • May limit rules to those required by known decisions and so limit the capture of rules not related to a known decision. • Defining decision models may allow an organization to think it has a standard way of making decisions when it does not. May lock an organization into a current-state decision-making approach. • Cuts across organizational boundaries, which can make it difficult to acquire any necessary sign-off. • May not address behavioural business rules in a direct fashion. • Business terminology must be clearly defined and shared definitions developed to avoid data quality issues affecting automated decisions.

Advantage: Backlog Management

• An effective approach to responding to changing stakeholder needs and priorities because the next work items selected from the backlog are always aligned with current stakeholder priorities. • Only items near the top of the backlog are elaborated and estimated in detail; items near the bottom of the backlog reflect lower priorities and receive less attention and effort. • Can be an effective communication vehicle because stakeholders can understand what items are about to be worked on, what items are scheduled farther out, and which ones may not be worked on for some time.

Disadvantage: Data Mining

• Applying some techniques without an understanding of how they work can result in erroneous correlations and misapplied insight. • Access to big data and to sophisticated data mining tool sets and software may lead to accidental misuse. • Many techniques and tools require specialist knowledge to work with. • Some techniques use advanced math in the background and some stakeholders may not have direct insights into the results. A perceived lack of transparency can cause resistance from some stakeholders. • Data mining results may be hard to deploy if the decision making they are intended to influence is poorly understood.

Disadvantage: Financial Analysis

• Because financial analysis is forward looking, there will always be some uncertainty about expected costs and benefits • Positive financial numbers may give a false sense of security—they may not provide all the information required to understand an initiative. • Some costs and benefits are difficult to quantify financially.

Disadvantage: Stakeholder List, Map or Personas

• Business analysts who are continuously working with the same teams may not utilize the stakeholder analysis and management technique because they perceive change as minimal within their respective groups. • Assessing information about a specific stakeholder representative, such as influence and interest, can be complicated and may feel politically risky.

Advantage: Risk Analysis and Management

• Can be applied to strategic risks which affect long-term value of the enterprise, tactical risks which affect the value of a change, and operational risks which affect the value of a solution once the change is made. • An organization typically faces similar challenges on many of its initiatives. The successful risk responses on one initiative can be useful lessons learned for other initiatives. • The risk level of a change or of a solution could vary over time. Ongoing risk management helps to recognize that variation, and to re-evaluate the risks and the suitability of the planned responses.

Disadvantage: Mind Mapping

• Can be misused as a brainstorming tool, and the related documenting of ideas and creating associations may inhibit idea generation. • A shared understanding of a mind map can be difficult to communicate.

Disadvantage: Process Analysis

• Can be time-consuming. • There are many techniques and methodologies in process analysis. It can be challenging to decipher which to use and how rigorously to follow them, given the scope and purpose.

Advantage: Mind Mapping

• Can be used as an effective collaboration and communication tool. • Summarizes complex thoughts, ideas, and information in a way that shows the overall structure. • Associations and sub-topics facilitate understanding and decision making. • Enable creative problem solving by articulating associations and generating new associations. • Can be helpful in preparing and delivering presentations.

Advantage: Data Modelling

• Can be used to define and communicate a consistent vocabulary used by domain subject matter experts and implementation subject matter experts. • Review of a logical data model helps to ensure that the logical design of persistent data correctly represents the business need. • Provides a consistent approach to analyzing and documenting data and its relationships. • Offers the flexibility of different levels of detail, which provides just enough information for the respective audience. • Formal modelling of the information held by the business may expose new requirements as inconsistencies are identified.

Advantage: Reviews

• Can help identify defects early in the work product life cycle, eliminating the need for expensive removal of defects discovered later in the life cycle. • All parties involved in a review become engaged with the final outcome; they have a vested interest in a quality result. • Desk checks and pass around reviews can be performed by a reviewer at a convenient time, rather than interrupting work in progress to attend a meeting.

Disadvantage: Business Model Canvas

• Does not account for alternative measures of value such as social and environmental impacts. • The primary focus on value propositions does not provide a holistic insight for business strategy. • Does not include the strategic purpose of the enterprise within the canvas.

Advantage: Item Tracking

• Ensures concerns around stakeholder requirements are captured, tracked, and resolved to the stakeholder's satisfaction. • Allows stakeholders to rank the importance of outstanding items.

Disadvantage: Data Dictionary

• Requires regular maintenance, otherwise the metadata could become obsolete or incorrect. • All maintenance is required to be completed in a consistent manner in order to ensure that stakeholders can quickly and easily retrieve the information they need. This requires time and effort on the part of the stewards responsible for the accuracy and completeness of the data dictionary. • Unless care is taken to consider the metadata required by multiple scenarios, it may have limited value across the enterprise.

Disadvantage: Reviews

• Rigorous team reviews take time and effort. Thus, only the most critical work products might be reviewed using inspection or formal walkthrough techniques. • Informal reviews by one or two reviewers are practical in terms of the effort required, but they provide less assurance of removing all significant defects than using a larger team and more formal process. • For desk checks and pass around reviews it may be difficult for the author to validate that an independent review was done by each participant. • If review comments are shared and discussed via e-mail there may be many messages to process, which makes it difficult for the author to resolve disagreements or differences in suggested changes.

Disadvantage: Prioritization

• Some stakeholders may attempt to avoid difficult choices and fail to recognize the necessity for making trade-offs. • The solution team may intentionally or unintentionally try to influence the result of the prioritization process by overestimating the difficulty or complexity of implementing certain requirements.

Disadvantage: Risk Analysis and Management

• The number of possible risks to most initiatives can easily become unmanageably large. It may only be possible to manage a subset of potential risks. • There is the possibility that significant risks are not identified.

Disadvantage: Collaborative Games

• The playful nature of the games may be perceived as silly and make participants with reserved personalities or cultural norms uncomfortable. • Games can be time-consuming and may be perceived as unproductive, especially if the objectives or outcomes are unclear. • Group participation can lead to a false sense of confidence in the conclusions reached.