In anticipation of her co-presentation at Building Business Capability in Vegas, Oct 31, – Nov. 4, 2016, we asked Charise Angderson, Senior Business Analyst at Deloitte, a few questions about pursuing business excellence. Check out her interview in relation to her BBC co-presentation entitled, Enabling Operational Excellence with Non-Functional Requirements.

Q: In what ways do you see your group helping your organization pursue business excellence?

A: The Global Technology Services Business Solutions Group delivers innovative technology solutions which enable Deloitte practitioners to deliver value to clients. As a Business Analyst within this group, I play a pivotal role in analyzing the viability of solutions, eliciting effective requirements, and assessing organizational impact.

Q: Can you describe the challenges you face or have already overcome in establishing more robust business capabilities for your organization?

A: I see the Business Analyst as a change agent. As such, we are responsible for distinguishing industry trends from industry inflections, or paradigm shifts. That’s the first challenge. The second challenge is then to rally support and ultimately buy-in across the organization in order to push for the change that’s required per the demands of the industry. Both of these challenges require dedication and constant study of the business and industry, but also the skilled pairing down of information to what’s absolutely necessary to provide value to the business.

Q: What are your short-term goals for becoming more agile?

A: Our organization has adopted agile for a number of years now so our short-term goals are to continue to learn and improve on how we deliver business value through agile development. We continue to advance our automation technologies, such as test, build, and deploy, so we can focus on value-adding tasks. Using lessons learned to develop and mature our standard processes and central repositories also help our teams become more agile by making us more efficient.

Q: What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned in the past year?

A:  Non-functional requirements are just as important as functional requirements and should be defined as early as possible (i.e., Sprint 0). Too often, project teams are eager to start development once business stakeholders sign off on functional requirements and find out late in development they need to address certain non-functional requirements such as security or privacy which results in rework and unplanned extended development cycles.

Q: What do you see as the most important goal or trend for business analysts and other professionals to keep in mind?

A: Business Analyst must be change agents.  We are nearing the end of the Digital Age and at the crux of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. Practitioners are no longer interested in sifting through mounds of data. That’s too time-consuming. They’ve become disinterested in multiple clicks / pages to get to the information they really need. There’s an urgent demand for information presentation. There’s a strong call for content intelligence. The list of required changes continues. The Business Analyst must be able to not only confront these types of industry demands, but work as trailblazers, pioneering the efforts for their organization to meet these demands.

Q: What’s the latest method/process/tool you’ve implemented to help your business operate more effectively? Have you seen any results yet?

A: The recent launch of an amplified Non-Functional Requirements Program will help our business operate more effectively. The new Program not only facilitates DevOps culture, but enables greater scaling of the tools and processes associated with managing NFR analysis.

Q: If you could go back 5 years in time and give some professional insight or advice to yourself, what would it be?

A: Be a trusted advisor to customers. This means not readily accepting or denying customer requests, but seeking to understand what customers truly need and how to deliver them value to do business.

Q: Sneak preview: Please tell us a take-away that you will provide during your talk at the Building Business Capability (BBC) conference this year?

A: In our presentation, we will share the steps practitioners can take back to their organizations to implement an NFRs program that will lead to operational excellence and create a DevOps culture.

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Don’t miss Charise’s co-presentation, Enabling Operational Excellence with Non-Functional Requirements, at Building Business Capability on Friday, November 4, 2016 from 9:00 to 10:00 am. Click here to register for attendance.