As BA why should you care about a (BMC) BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS/ Product Canvas?

WHAT IS A (BMC) BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS?

BMC is a visual way to identify the highlights of your business and how they relate. Alexander Osterwalder developed the concept. By using BMC, you can develop a clear view of your customers, operations, value proposition, and finances. You can use it to identify target market areas and appeal to those segments. The BMC gives people a common language through which they can evaluate traditional processes and innovate in their business models.

When should one develop a Business Model Canvas?

BMC’s are created a the get go during the initiation of the project.

How to Develop a Business Model Canvas?

The BMC consists of nine building blocks. you brainstorm and research each of these topics when you fill out the business model canvas. The collected data can be placed in each relevant section of the BMC. So, the BMC is made when you start exercising.

8Key Partners Who are our key partners? Who are our key suppliers? Financial partners Technology partners Investors	6Key Activities  Maintain a platform Collect and analyze data What key activities our value proposition require?	2Value proposition  Which one of our customers? What we deliver values to our customers? Are we satisfying customer needs?Rating system	5Customer Relationship Personal with derivers when needed. Relationship between customer & organization	1Customer Segments   Most important customer Business travelers For whom the organization is creating value?
7Key Resources  App for drivers & riders	4Channels Social media Words of mouth App stores
9Cost Structure      Platform maintenance Advertisement	Research & Development	3Revenue Streams
		What values arecustomer willing to pay?	How would they prefer to pay?	Percentage of a transaction fee

1. Customer Segments

In this building block, you serve different customer segments. If you can, create one or more segments for each section. A reliable description of every customer you serve is entering here. They try to highlight the motivations of your customers, their problems, and capture their “summary” of who they are.

2. Value proposition

This is the heart of the business model canvas. And it represents your unique solution to the problem facing the customer segment or creates value for the segmented customer. Value proposals can be qualitative or quantitative. The value proposition must be unique or different from your competitors. If you are delivering a new product, it should be disruptive and innovative. And if you are offering a product that is already on the market, it stands out with new features and specifications. 

3. Revenue Streams

Revenue streams are defined as the way your business turns your value proposition or solution to a customer’s problem into a financial gain.

4. Channels

The channel contains the units you use to communicate your proposal to your department, as well as the units where you sell products and then serve the customer. Through what medium do you reach your target customers and make your products and services available to them? Which ones are more expensive? How do channels merge?

5. Customer relationships 

Here, you need to establish the type of relationship you have with each of your customer segments or how you will deal with your company on their journey. There are many types of customer relationships such as dedicated personal support, personal support, community, and automated services. Through a customer travel map, you can understand how your customer relates to your company. This will help you identify the different steps your customers will follow when communicating with your company. And it helps you to increase your understanding of how to earn, retain, and nurture your customers.

6. Key Activities

Important steps that are key to building an organization’s value proposition. An entrepreneur should start by listing the major activities related to his business. These activities are very important processes for business activities to be effective. Major activities are similar to revenue streams. It is important now to assess what activities will have their impact by adding or removing anything.

7. Key Resources

Resources can be classified as financial, physical, intellectual, and human. These are the resources of the company that provides value to the customers of the company. For an entrepreneur, it is important to start listing your resources. This will give you a clear idea of ​​what end product or service your company needs for the customer and what resources can be delivered, resulting in cost savings for your company. Once the final list of resources becomes available, the company can decide how much to invest in these key resources to maintain a sustainable business.

8. Key Partners

The main partner is a list of other external companies, you need to achieve your core operations and provide value to the customer.  If my business value proposition alone cannot be achieved, who should I trust to do this? For example, ‘If I sell foodstuffs to customers, I may need a local baker to supply fresh bread to my shop’. They are an important partner in achieving my business promise to the customer.

9. Cost structure

In this block, you will identify all the costs associated with maintaining your business model. You need to focus on creating and distributing your value proposals, generating revenue flow, and maintaining customer relationships. And it becomes easier to do so when you define your core resources, activities, and partners. The business focuses on minimizing costs (cost-driven) and delivering maximum value (value-based) to the customer whenever possible.

Final Thoughts 

Finally, it is important to stay ahead of the curve rather than the business plan and develop a business model canvas. Nine key elements of a BMC help to define the depth, concise, and clear definition of your business. It gives you the competitiveness to start a profitable startup, focusing on things other than product development.

Data Analysis on Sales

Business analysis is a skill and can go across multiple areas of the business. Data Analysis is one of these areas. As a thankgiving project I put together a sales insight project of sales data in India.

These are the following steps that I took:

• Connected a mysql data dump to power BI
• Analyzed the data by running sql scripts

• modeled the schema
• created a dashboard

Here was the end result:

Soft skills for Business Analysts

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Steps to become a tester from a Business Analyst

A tester is responsible to test the product and ensure that the test meets the requirements. The business Analyst is responsible for capturing the requirements of the product.  

Testers are involved in the life cycle of software development from the first phase until the program is released. They know more about the product because they are the ones who play a major role in improving the quality of the product. This makes the skill set of a tester a valuable asset. If the tester has a good knowledge of software progress processes and strategies, he or she can move to DevOps, automation, as a business analyst, or work as a manager. 

There are many reasons as to why the skills of a tester are well suited for the BA role. 

• Attention to detail: They are detail-oriented and are able to break down scenarios and “What About” situations. 
• Customer’s First: In any business, client service is paramount, and testers are required to keep client’s fulfillment as their priority. 
• Interpersonal Skills: Testers are familiar with requirements and write test cases. Communication and interpersonal skills are important for a tester and this is an asset that the tester can transfer over as a Business Analyst. 
• Documentation: During every step of the lifecycle of the project, testers will be involved in preparing documents such as development case testing, test planning, and feature reporting that is also needed by a business analyst.

Role of Tester and Business Analyst

	Role of Tester	Role of Business Analyst
Acceptance Criteria	The job of testers is to review the criteria of acceptance which is defined by the product owners and business analyst. Testers may also propose alterations to the admission process after consultation with the BA.	The interpretation of the admission process after consultation with the Teams and Business Groups is also a BA function.
Planning Sessions	Another role of the tester is to know the needs of the User Story from BA during the sprint editing meetings and discusses with authority, whether User Stories can be tested. The testers also provided a high-level evaluation of every User Story depends on basic learning.	In the sessions of Sprint Planning, BA describes the needs of the group and sets out the Product Owner’s expectations for the group
Test/Scenario Design	When the planning and evaluation for the Agile Project are completed, the evaluation team writes the Assessment Conditions followed with details.	Directly starting from the sessions of Sprint Planning, the role of BA is to explain any questions related to the requirements of development and testing.
Test Estimations	Depending on the knowledge of user issues, thorough test evaluations are performed using standard test evaluation techniques.	The role of a business analyst is to define and prepare a detailed document about needs after knowing the expectations from business shareholders.

If you are considering becoming a Business Analyst, here are 5 skills that you need to build upon:

1. Elicitation – As a tester, you are familiar with requirements and dealing with the business analyst or a product owner to understand requirements. The goal for you is to maybe shadow a Business Analyst to understand the role and what that would mean to you to elicit requirements.
2. Traceability – This one won’t be as hard for you because of the fact that you as a tester understand the importance of tying test cases to requirements. The goal would be for you to ensure that there is a link between requirements. 

3. Agility: With a changing landscape in business analysis, there are hybrid BA roles popping up like scrum masters playing the role of a BA, BA’s playing the role of a data analyst. The keyword is for you to be nimble and agile in this environment.

Interview with founder of Codebasics – Dhaval Patel

Click on the links to access Daval’s youtube channel:

Channel Link to Dhaval’s website: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh9nVJoWXmFb7sLApWGcLPQ/about?disable_polymer=1

Channel Link to Dhaval’s new channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb9AfI-bsXibgECEzyT7Bdw

Change Management and Change Leadership for Business Analysts

This is an interview with Yvonne Ruke Akpoveta

5 tips to Running virtual workshops

 

With COVID being at the forefront of everyone’s mind and the majority of people working remotely, remote working is here to stay atleast for a while. According to a survey done by buffer.com 98% of workers surveyed would not mind working remotely for the rest of their career. As a BA it becomes a challenge although the perks are many. Challenges arise as an outcome of eliciting requirements, brainstorming thoughts, and the day to day benefits of being in a room physically to notice body language. However with the new norm being virtual, here are some tips on running virtual workshops as a BA:

 

• Plan the approach ahead of time: Think through what you will be covering at a meeting ahead of time. This will help you facilitate meetings better.

• Create an Agenda: Once you have planned an approach put it down as an Agenda.

• Use Tools: Depending on where you work, you may or may not be allowed to use third party vendors. Listed below are a couple of tools to use while conducting virtual workshops.

 

 

Teams	Whiteboard and screen share to conduct meetings
Zoom	Collaborate using the screen share and other tools
Miron	People can vote using the tool and conduct other collaborative games
Google Meetings	You can screen share and is widely used since it syncs up well with other tools

 

There are many tools online but the purpose of the article is to give you a high level overview of running virtual workshops. 

 

 

• Set up Guiding Princiapls: Establish your guiding principals, such as request participants to turn on their camera’s during the session, establish norms around raising the virtual hand if the participants have questions or feedback etc. 

• Timebox conversations: If you have a finite time with you participants, set your expectations upfront that conversation will be timeboxed to x minutes, beyond that conversations or questions will need to be timeboxed.

• Follow up meetings with Action Items and next steps. This will bring closure to the meeting and align conversations around next steps.

 

 

3 Ways to Engage The Testers During the Requirements Cycle

How many times have you been on a project where the testers are not engaged in your requirements upfront and this could lead to a lot of confusion after the requirements are done.

This article provides ways for you to engage the testers earlier on in the effort.

Here are 3 ways to engage your Testers:

• Include your testers in the requirements walk through or closer to the requirements walk through’s. If you are working in an agile environment, typically your grooming sessions will provide a platform for the testers to be aware of and to ask questions on the project. However if they have questions beyond the grooming session it is preferred to have the testers sit in on your sessions.

• If the testing resources are constrained then record your sessions so that they can listen to the recordings if needed. With tools like teams and zoom it becomes easy to record the requirements sessions.

• Allocate a specific timeframe for your testers to ask their questions during the requirements gathering sessions. Remember that your primary goal is to gather quality requirements and ensuring that the requirements are bullet proof.

Remember Testers live on through the life of a project and treat them like your friends who will pole holes to the requirements.

The Agile Mindset

According to the IIBA: “The agile mindset is based on a common core of human values that include respect, courage, collaboration, continuous learning, customer focus, and value maximization. These values find their clearest expression in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (Agile Manifesto).”

 

The main aspects of an agile mindset include

• deliver value rapidly and consistently,
• collaborate courageously,
• iterate to learn,
• simplify to avoid waste,
• consider context and adapt to realities,
• reflect on feedback and adapt both product and process, and
• produce the highest quality products.

 

The agile mindset can be applied to any industry and even our personal lives. 

 

That being said what is the role of the Business Analyst in agile. Many folks have debated if the Agile Business Analyst role is going away. Here are a couple of high level job functions that an agile BA performs. There are three horizons that a BA plays a role in the agile methodology. The first two Strategy and the Initiate level will be discussed in another article. This articles focus is on the delivery horizon level. 

 

1. Work closely with the product owner and or solution architect to work with understanding the requirements from the business. 
2. Assist the Product Owner in prioritizing the backlog
3. Gather the detailed level requirements for the developers
4. In some instances the BA is responsible for facilitating the grooming sessions
5. Collaborate with the testers and or test manager to explain the requirements

 

Facilitating Meetings

Have you ever attended those never ending requirements meetings where people just talk over each other and multi task, which results in no decisioning? It all boils down to how does one facilitate meetings effectively to reach the objective that was set out originally.

1. Agenda: Prepare an Agenda for the meeting. This boils down to what are the objectives and outcomes that the team needs to achieve.
2. Stakeholders: Which stakeholders (Attendees) must you include to meet those objectives.
3. Timebox: How much time should each block of the agenda take and lay it out for the attendees.
4. Closing: Close the meeting by providing a Summary of what was discussed and next steps.
5. Publish Meeting Notes: Publish meeting notes and email it to the group. The notes should include the action items, who is responsible for those and when do they need to be delivered by.

No one likes chaos and the steps above could lead to an effective and constructive meeting.