6E's for a Business Analyst

A requirement, at the very basic level, is a change.

BA is the person who drives the requirement from a conceptual stage to material form. BA always requires wearing many hats at the same time, being a functional expert (client’s person) in project team and an application expert for clients.

BA being a person to elicit, analyze and document the requirements often plays a very critical role in the project execution.

Embracing change - BA should be the person who will visualize the changes first, then convert these changes in tangible form and help business and other stakeholders to understand and bring change to reality. Thus, he/she enables stakeholders to embrace the change.

Engaging stakeholder: This is critical focus area. There should be warm and cordial relationship between different BA and stakeholders. This will be very helpful in avoid any communication gap and lack of understanding. Also, this will ensure that all the critical information flows smoothly from stakeholders to BA and implementation team. BA should ensure to make them part of implementation as much as possible. Frequent demos and prototypes will help stakeholders to understand system better and propose changes, if any, at early stage itself.

Efficient and Complete Communication – It is utmost important that all stakeholders are on the same page and have access to information/documents available. This will help to avoid misunderstandings if any and to mitigate risks on time.

Enhanced Artifacts: BA should not consider BRD, FSD are just for documenting requirements. The success of project will depend on these documents. Hence, these documents should be such that they provide meaningful insight about the application to clients. A detailed BRD serves many purposes. Users can refer to steps mentioned in BRD for usage of application. Users can refer to different technical/functional constraints mentioned while using application. 

Also, the same BRD can be used by development team to develop application and by testing team to test application.   Because of lot of details BRD can become verbose and hence, boring. So, BA should focus on making BRD more interactive and scenario driven.

Early Risk identification and elimination - The sooner the risks or potential failure areas are identified; the less will be impact on project health. BA should focus on exceptional scenarios, alternate scenarios and the scenario's which could possibly fail.

Empowerment to team members - BA/PM should make promote their contribution and welcome their suggestions. Make developers/testers feel part of project. Often they are the people who point out technical challenges/limitations in advance. Also, they can highlight the conflict and impact of different changes. Also, it would be good if they are part of clarification sessions.

Change is inevitable and at times more complex than imagined, a BA can help you to get safely. 

Indian Media: How fair and transparent?

Indian Media: How fair and transparent?

The role of media in any democracy is very critical since it highly influences the opinion of public. Most of the times, people blindly follow whatever is reported in media assuming it is true or factual.

Therefore, the media whether it is print media or digital media is naturally expected to report the news unbiased and without any personal prejudices and interest.

But, some recent revelations in 2G scam and use of ‘paid news’ during the election times has turned the focus on the way of functioning of the media. The role of media has been questioned in several occasions like the coverage of 26/11 attack on Mumbai. The scrutinizers are themselves being scrutinized for the political affiliations and source of money and advertisement.

Following are the some of the corrupt practices being followed in Indian media which puts a big question mark over the integrity and credibility of Indian media.

Paid News

“Paid News is an industry that is run by the owners of the media. Media and journalists are different. Media is business, journalism is not”

P.Sainath, the Magsaysay Award winner for journalism, had once said in a function in Mumbai.

The difference between news and advertisement has sharply decreased over the years and the separation between news and views has disappeared. Some creative advertisers design the copy of advertisement in the shape of a news item to promote their product. It merges with the contents of news page confusing readers as to distinguish the news from the advertisement.

Three news papers from Maharashtra had published one news item Ashok Chavan, then Chief Minister of Maharashtra during the election time. The item was attributed to the newspaper’s "Special Correspondent," making it clear this was a news story. The story showered praise on the Chief Minister of Maharashtra for having achieved so much for so many in so few months.

The very same story appeared word for word under different headlines in these three regional papers on different days just before people of Maharashtra went to vote for assembly elections.

Politicization of media

Many regional media channels are either started by the political parties or they are affiliated with one of the political party from the state. They report the events took place from the angle which will benefit one particular party they are associated with.

In Maharashtra, ‘Saamana’ newspaper is mouthpiece of ShivSena whereas other newspapers such as ‘Lokmat’ and ‘Sakal’ are known for their association with Congress and Nationalist Congress Party respectively.

In Andhra Pradesh, the largest circulated Telugu Daily ‘Eenadu’, with two TV channels in Telugu, supports Telugu Desham Party and opposes Congress. The ‘Saakshi’ Newspaper and TV Channel, is recently started by Y S Jaganmohan Reddy which supported Congress during election time.

Thus, the influencing media in Andhra Pradesh has been vertically divided to sub-serve the interest of two major political parties, making it difficult or impossible to know the real ‘news’ in its neutral sense.

The news channels at the national level have the tendency of reporting in favour of the ruling party at the centre.

Election time packages

In 2004 elections in AP, the reporters and advertisement executives from various media houses collected huge amounts of money to write favourable stories.

Earlier, it was limited to a couple of newspapers in a few districts. By 2009, this corruption was institutionalized, newspapers fixed targets for each district bureau, collected huge amounts of money.

Each and every political party candidate was forced to enter into some package deal with the tabloid newspapers as the continuous campaign of winning stories of their rival candidates created a psychological edge and left a worrying factor in their cadre.

In selling absolute falsity or ascertaining the victory of a candidate as daily news in package deal, there is a concerted effort to unduly influence the voters in almost all constituencies. The newspapers had offered different packages such as

1.            Regularly writing favourably on front page,

2.            Writing favourably in regular succession on front page with colour photo,

3.            Writing regularly with colour photos all through the campaign session, i.e., from date of nomination to date of polling with interviews, news analysis, campaign trails etc.

4.            A package to write favourably and also to do negative campaign against his rival candidates.

5.            An informative interview of the candidate with photos on condition that they should purchase 25,000 copies of the newspapers besides some consideration.

The coverage package for a price was meant to include dedicated news space of the election campaign with pictures and other material of the party’s choice.

This practice by the media is a travesty of democracy. It is a wholesale fraud on the concept of media coverage of elections and it vitiates the very process of free and fair elections.

The views of every party and every candidate contesting in the elections should be heard and reflected in news. But, this practice where parties or candidates are asked to buy coverage packages is primarily meant to generate revenue for the media organizations.

The media being fourth pillar of democracy assumes the greater and important role to play in the success of democracy. The media should function as a watchdog over the other three pillars of democracy which are Legislature, Executive and Judiciary.

A fair and transparent would definitely be a checkpoint for corrupt practices and inefficiencies in the governance of the country.

Here, in this country, media itself is facing a credibility crisis. How can the work done by media be credible? Who is responsible for this condition, the arrogant and power hungry politicians or the self-obsessed and ignorant public of this country?

Crowd Sourcing

Introduction

Colgate-palmolive, a giant packaged goods company needed a way to inject fluoride powder into a toothpaste tube without it dispersing into the surrounding air. Melcarek (a registered user at InnoCentive.com) solved a problem that stumped the in-house researchers at Colgate-Palmolive.

Melcarek earned $25,000 for his efforts. Paying Colgate-Palmolive’s R&D staff to produce the same solution could have cost several times that amount– if they even solved it at all.

This was one of the examples which demonstrate power of Crowdsourcing, a term first coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 “Wired “magazine article "The Rise of Crowdsourcing”.

What is meant by Crowdsourcing?

Ø  Crowdsourcing means crowd-out sourcing. It can be described as “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call.” 

Ø  That means crowd sourcing is a procedure to use the power of crowd. So it is very powerful because always two heads are better than a single one and similarly the heads of a mass of people are better than a few. 

Ø  The difference between crowdsourcing and open source is that open source production is a cooperative activity initiated and voluntarily undertaken by members of the public. In crowdsourcing the activity is initiated by a client and the work may be undertaken on an individual, as well as a group.

Ø  Crowdsourcing taps into the global world of ideas, helping companies work through a rapid design process. You outsource to large crowds (hence the word: crowdsourcing) in an effort to make sure your products or services are right.

Ø  This phenomenon crowd sourcing is often used as a contest hosted by companies to award people who wins a challenge given by the company.

Types of crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing may produce solutions from amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, or from experts or small businesses which were unknown to the initiating organization.

Jeff Howe has differentiated four types of crowdsourcing strategies:

Ø  Crowdfunding - describes the collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who network and pool their money and other resources together, usually via the Internet, to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations.

Ø  Crowdcreation – This type of business model is used by businesses such as Current TV to create news segments and video ads.

Ø  Crowdvoting – In this model, people vote for their favourite T-shirt design at apparel maker ‘Threadless' Web site.

Ø  Crowd wisdom - The wisdom of the crowd refers to the process of taking into account the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than a single expert to answer a question.

Advantages of crowdsourcing

ü  The cost will be cheaper- The task to be done is crowdsourced to a sea of heads.

ü  Ideas come in rather fast  - Thinking power of so many people often yields promising results

ü  Hassle free - No need to maintain those employees and no need to track the whole process in development.

ü  Great marketing tool- recently LG has outsourced to get next mobile phone model designed. LG drew more eyeballs via the news that went viral about LG crowd sourcing.

ü  Less expenditure on R & D - To get new products developed companies have to invest in R&D. And in case if the experiment fails you lose. Contrary to this in crowdsourcing the same thing can get done in a cheaper way.

ü  Talent comes searching for you- After outsourcing the task, Talent comes searching for you.

Disadvantages of crowdsourcing

v  Ideas are open -the ideas of a crowd sourced challenge is open so there is a high chance of it to get leaked out

v  Disputes- will be there so one cannot replace it with the existing business model

v  Wrong marketing- At times Crowdsourcing can result in wrong marketing by passing the bad word of mouth publicity. Take for examples an automobile company tries to Crowdsource its next model design. In case if the end product is proved not good from the comfort aspect and not good in aesthetics, then people will simply say that the company nowhere takes quality seriously and rather tries to Crowdsource to get the work done in pennies.

v  Crowdsourcing the wrong thing – The critical information can be leaked if it is crowdsourced.

v  Copyright issue – There can be a situation like Nokia can claim that the artwork that LG has used by crowdsourcing is a Nokia copyright.

v  Hidden costs - Culling through 50,000 submissions takes vastly more time than considering the top 5, 10 or 25 suggestions offered by a professional naming company

Examples of Crowdsourcing  

Ø  The best example is Wikipedia, one of the top 10 largest websites.

Ø  Dell Idea Storm where customers vote for what products they want Dell to do next – this is how Dell’s recent introduction of Linux laptops happened.

Ø  Get Satisfaction which is “people-powered customer service”.

Ø  Netflix, the online video rental service, uses crowdsourcing techniques to improve the software algorithms used to offer customer video recommendations

Way ahead

Ø  Crowdsourcing is a great tool for any business. So from well planed and well maintained crowdsourcing a company can gain a lot.

Ø  Organizations reinforce similar approaches and inside-the-box thinking. When you're looking for something truly different, the crowd can lead you down a less travelled path.