Introduction

Write a Business Analysis Report, of about 2500 words in length for a business case study. This report will include business requirements documentation with modelling artefacts such as:

• Business use-case diagrams
• System use-case diagrams/templates
• Package diagrams
• Class/object diagrams
• Structure diagrams
• Activity diagrams
• State-machine diagrams
• Decision tables.

The assignment comprises of two parts (Part A, worth 10% and Part B, worth 20%). You will give an oral presentation of your assignment at the end of completion of your assignment.

You are given a generic case study (see Appendix), which you will adapt to a particular industry scenario of your choice. The first part (Part A) of this assignment is to critically analyse different types of business problems and the contexts in which they exist in this chosen scenario. The discussion will take the form of a well-researched and justified Business Analysis Preliminary Report, containing an introduction to the scenario, identifying the problems and recommending the appropriate business processes for a prototype system as a solution.  The main purpose of the exercise is to analyse the requirements of the case scenario and identify end-to-end business processes using business object oriented modelling (BOOM) framework and techniques in order to arrive at a plan for the suggested system.  With this preliminary business  analysis you would develop for Part B, the final business requirements document with detailed set of  artefacts for the suggested system.  You will use SAS Studio/ SAS Enterprise Miner to draw the process flows. Your report should be well supported with in-text citations and full references from respected sources. You should include academic journals, books, theses, trade magazines and well-respected sources of related Internet material as you find to be relevant. There should be a minimum number of FIVE (5) relevant references in your report, and only ONE (1) of these sources may be from a website.  You must follow proper Harvard style referencing; including inline citation.

Part A deliverables to be included in the Business Analysis Preliminary Report:

(DUE WEEK 7 – 10%)

1. Write an introduction to the industry scenario of your choice describing the business problems and a simple SWOT analysis of the business situation
2. Prepare an organizational chart identifying the functional areas
3. Develop a stakeholder map and explain the roles and responsibilities of the stakeholders interacting with each other and the prototype system for the business problems of the industry scenario
4. Draw a context diagram that  confirms the scope of the system and necessary integration requirements in your business analysis
5. Model business use cases: Prepare business use-case diagrams that confirm the functional scope of the proposed solution
6. Model system use cases: Prepare system use-case diagrams that support in automating the business use cases identified above and complete your business analysis preliminary report.

Recap the Steps of B.O.O.M:

Initiation: Make the business case for the project. Work also begins on the user experience and on drafts of architectural proof of concepts. The prototyping effort during the Initiation phase should be risk-driven and limited to gaining confidence that a solution is possible.

As a business analyst, you will carry out the following steps in BOOM for Part A:

1a) Model business use cases

1b) Model system use cases

Week 7 deliverables An electronic copy to be uploaded before Friday 5pm.

Please attach a copy of the Marking guide to your hardcopy of submitted report.

For Part B, you will carry out the following steps in BOOM:

1c) Begin structural model (class diagrams for key business classes)

1d) Set baseline (BRD/Initiation)

Discovery: Conduct investigation leading to an understanding of the solution’s desired behavior. (On iterative projects, requirements analysis peaks during this phase but never disappears entirely.) During this phase, architectural proofs of concept are also constructed.

2a) Behavioral analysis

1. i) Describe system use cases (use-case description template)
2. ii) Describe state behavior (state-machine diagram)

2b) Structural analysis (object/data model) (class diagram)

Part B deliverables to be included in the Business Analysis Final Report:

(DUE WEE12 – 20%)

In the second part (Part B) of this assignment, you will develop and apply appropriate solution processes based on object oriented analysis techniques and recommend your solution that can monitor and evaluate changes to the workflow of end-to-end business processes. To achieve this, you will complete the behavioural and structural analysis of the business case scenario by completing the remaining BOOM initiation and discovery steps given above.  Perform the following tasks:

1. Prepare use case description for the system use cases developed in Part A
2. Complete the class and object diagrams developed in part A
3. Develop the state-machine diagrams by modelling the business processes of your case scenario in the form of  “as is” processes in BPMN. Keep in mind that the purpose of this BPMN diagram is to serve as a means of communication between the employees in the helpdesk, the clients of the helpdesk, and the business and IT analysts who have to re-design and automate this process. Using  SAS Studio/ SAS Enterprise Miner to draw the models of the workflow processes.
4. Classify the activities in this process into three categories: “value adding” (VA), business value-adding (BVA) and non-value-adding (NVA).
5. Calculate the cycle time efficiency of the “as is” process assuming that:

• Submitting and registering a new request takes 5 minutes on average.
• Requests spend on average 1 hour waiting for a Level-1 staff to check them. This applies both to new requests and to re-submitted requests.
• Checking if a new request is “known” takes on average 10 minutes. In 20% of cases the request is known. In this case, it takes about 5 minutes for the Level-1 staff to communicate the resolution to the client. Once this is done, the request is marked as “closed”. On the other hand, if the request is not “known”, the request is automatically forwarded to Level 2.
• New requests spend on average 2 hours waiting for a Level-2 staff to evaluate them. Level-2 staff take on average 20 minutes to evaluate a new request.
• Level-2 staff take 5 minutes to prioritize a request.
• The time between the moment a request has been prioritized, and the moment the request is picked-up by a Level-2 staff member is 20 hours.
• The time required to research and resolve a request is on average 2 hours.
• The time to write the resolution to a request is on average of 20 minutes.
• Once a Level-2 staff has written the resolution of a request, it takes on average 20 hours before a the request is fetched from the job tracking system by a Level-1 staff.
• It takes on average 20 minutes for a Level-1 staff to send to the client a problem resolution previously written by a Level-2 staff.
• It takes on average 20 hours between the moment a resolution is sent by the Level-1 staff , and the moment the resolution is tested by the client.
• It takes the client around 10 minutes to e-mail the test results to the Level-1 staff.
• In 20% of cases the request is not resolved, and it needs to be forwarded to Level-2 again. In this latter case, it takes about 2 minutes for the Level-1 to forward the request to the Level-2 staff. Unresolved requests that are forwarded in this way are automatically marked as “prioritized since they have already been prioritized in the previous iteration.

Hint. Cycle time efficiency is equal to theoretical cycle time divided by total cycle time. To calculate theoretical cycle time, only take into consideration time spent in “actual work”, excluding waiting times and non-valued-added activities.

6. Write an issue register for this process.
7. Propose a set of changes to improve this process. Give a justification for each change.
8. Draw a “to-be” BPMN model that incorporates your proposed changes.

Week 12 deliverables An electronic copy to be uploaded before Friday 5pm.

Please attach a copy of the Marking guide to your hardcopy of submitted report.

Note on Plagiarism: Plagiarism will not be tolerated. All reports and prototype websites must be original. Each student must submit a signed statement of originality available as a coversheet with the report.

Week 13 Oral Presentation (10%). The oral presentation will be marked based on clarity of the presentation, ability to focus on key issues and appropriate use of business analysis concepts and BOOM artefacts for their chosen industry case scenario. The students must demonstrate their proposed model meets the business requirements of the case scenario. All students must equitably participate during the in-class presentation.

Appendix: Generic Case Study (Help-desk system)

Consider the following process performed by a helpdesk office that handles requests from clients. The clients are employees and different stakeholders of a company.  (You are required to choose any industry scenario for this company). There are about 1000 clients in total. A request may be a business process related query such as processing a customer after-sales request or an IT-related problem that a client has, or even an access request (e.g. requesting rights to access an IT system). Requests need to be handled according to their type and their priority. There are three priority levels: “critical”, “urgent” or “normal”.

The current process works as follows. A client calls the help desk or sends an e-mail in order to make a request. The help desk is staffed with five “Level-1” support staff who typically are junior people with less than 12 months experience, but are capable of resolving known problems and simple requests. The hourly cost of a Level-1 staff member is AUD 40.

When the Level-1 employee does not know the resolution to a request, the request is forwarded to a more experienced “Level-2” support staff. There are three Level-2 staff members and their hourly cost is AUD 60. When a Level-2 employee receives a request, he/she evaluates it and assigns it a priority level. The job tracking system will later assign the request to the same or another Level-2 staff depending on the assigned priority level and the backlog of requests.

Once the request is assigned to a Level-2 staff member, the request is researched by the Level-2 employee and a resolution is developed and sent back to the Level-1 employee. Eventually, the Level-1 employee forwards the resolution to the client who tests the resolution. The client notifies the outcome of the test to the Level-1 employee via e-mail. If the client states that the request is fixed, it is marked as complete and the process ends. If the request is not fixed, it is resent to Level-2 support for further action and goes through the process again.

Requests are registered in a job tracking system. The job tracking system allows help desk employees to record the details of the request, the priority level and the name of the client who generated the request. When a request is registered, it is marked as “open”. When it is moved to level 2, it is marked as “forwarded to level 2” and when the resolution is sent back to “Level 1’ the request is marked as “returned to level 1”. Finally, when a request is resolved, it is marked as “closed”. Every request has a unique identifier. When a request is registered, the job tracking system sends an e-mail to the client. The e-mail includes a ”request reference number” that the client needs to quote when asking questions about the request.

The helpdesk receives approximately 50 new requests per working day.

The current process is known to be error-prone. The most frequent types of errors include:

• Many requests take too long to be processed. Clients need to call often to remind the helpdesk that their requests are still unresolved
• When the client asks what is the status of a given request, oftentimes the helpdesk gives an incorrect answer. In other words, the Level-1 helpdesk staff are unable to accurately determine what is the status of every request.
• When reviewing the list of open requests, the Level-1 staff often find many requests marked as “open”, but these requests are in fact already resolved.

PART A Marking Guide (Business Analysis  Preliminary Report for an Organisation)

Additional Feedback

Rubrics used for assessment (Scale 1-5)

Legend for Student Learning Outcomes

1. explain the key concepts of business analysis planning and monitoring
2. explain and relate key concepts and applications of business object modelling framework and techniques
3. critically analyse different types of business problems and the contexts in which they exist to develop and apply appropriate solution processes based on object oriented analysis techniques
4. recommend, monitor and evaluate changes to the workflow of end-to-end business processes
5. formulate and create the necessary artefacts for developing business requirements documents, in line with a business object modelling framework

PART B Marking Guide (Business Analysis  Final Report for an Organisation + Oral Presentation)

Additional Feedback

Rubrics used for assessment (Scale 1-5)

Legend for Student Learning Outcomes

1. explain the key concepts of business analysis planning and monitoring
2. explain and relate key concepts and applications of business object modelling framework and techniques
3. critically analyse different types of business problems and the contexts in which they exist to develop and apply appropriate solution processes based on object oriented analysis techniques
4. recommend, monitor and evaluate changes to the workflow of end-to-end business processes
5. formulate and create the necessary artefacts for developing business requirements documents, in line with a business object modelling framework