Chapter 2 Understanding Your Business Goals

During the business analysis phase of the solution life cycle you define business goals by analyzing a business problem and identifying the business requirements and business constraints to meet that goal.

This chapter contains the following sections:

• About Business Analysis

• Defining Business Requirements

• Understanding User Behaviors and Patterns

About Business Analysis

Business analysis starts with stating the business goals. You then analyze the business problems you must solve and identify the business requirements that must be met to achieve the business goals. Consider also any business constraints that limit your ability to achieve the goals. The analysis of business requirements and constraints results in a set of business requirements documents.

You use the resulting set of business requirements documents as a basis for deriving technical requirements in the technical requirements phase. Throughout the solution life cycle, you measure the success of your deployment planning and ultimately the success of your solution according to the analysis performed in the business analysis phase.

Defining Business Requirements

The business requirements of your portal affect deployment decisions. Understand your requirements to make correct assumptions that affect the accuracy of your deployment estimates.

The reasons you are offering your portal have a direct affect on how you implement your portal. You must define target population, performance standards, and other factors related to your goals.

Use these questions to help you identify the goals of your portal:

• What is your portal’s biggest priority?

• What applications will the portal deliver?

• What is your target population?

• What performance standard is necessary?

• What transaction volume do you expect? What transaction volume do you expect during peak use?

• What response time is acceptable during peak use?

• What is the necessary level of concurrency? Concurrency is the number of users who can be connected at any given time?

• Should access to the portal be through the intranet or the Internet?

• Will your portal be deployed in one phase, or many phases?

• What are the business requirements of this portal? For example, do you want to enhance customer service? Increase employee productivity? Reduce the cost of doing business?

• What kind of portal do you need? For example, business-to-business, business-to-consumer, business-to-enterprise, or a hybrid?

• Who is your target audience?

• What services or functions will the portal deliver to users?

• How will the target audience benefit from the portal?

• What are the priorities for the portal?

(Optional) Use these questions to help identify your business objectives if you are deploying a secure portal:

• Do you need to increase employee productivity (by making your intranet applications and servers accessible over the Internet)?

• Do you need to provide secure access to your portal?

• Do you need to reduce the cost of ownership of an existing Virtual Private Network (VPN) solution?

• Do you want employees to access intranet applications such as Citrix and pcAnywhere from the Internet?

• Do you want your employees to explore intranet servers or machines from the Internet?

• Who is your target audience (all portal users, employees, or customers)?

Understanding User Behaviors and Patterns

Factors such as when users will use the portal and how users have used predecessor systems are keys to identifying your requirements. Study the people who will use your portal. If your organization’s experience cannot provide these patterns, you can study the experience of other organizations and estimate them.

Use these questions to help you understand users:

• How many end users will you have? What is the size of your target audience?

• Will users login to the portal at the same time each day? Will they use the portal at work or somewhere else?

• Are users in the same time zone or in different time zones?

• How long do you expect the typical user to be connected, or have a valid portal session open? What use statistics do you have for existing applications? Do you have web traffic analysis figures for an existing portal?

• How many visitor sessions, or number of single-visitor visits, are likely within a predefined period of time?

• Is portal use likely to increase over time? Or stay stable?

• How fast will your user base grow?

• How have your users used an application that the portal will deliver to them?

• What portal channels do you expect users to use regularly?

• Will users set up and participate in communities? If so, what will team behavior and use of the portal be like?

• What expectations about your portal content do your users have? How have users used predecessor web-based information or other resources that your portal will offer?

Facilitating Productivity

Facilitating productivity requires that you examine the ways that individuals, teams, and your organization as a whole are productive, especially if your portal will provide communities. Consider teams that are set up for the entire organization as well as for specific parts of the organization and for short-term or long-term projects.

• How do individuals organize their daily work environments?

• How do new employees become productive quickly?

• How do new services become known?

• How do they become popular?

• How do employees find new documents?

• How do employees work with others?

• How do individuals work with others?

• How do individuals create ad-hoc teams?

• How do members of teams communicate?

• How do teams archive their ad-hoc or temporary efforts?

• How do you target new services to the correct groups and individuals?

• How do you measure the success of new services?

• How do you define and monitor individual productivity? Team productivity? Organizational productivity?

• How do you help improve individual productivity? Team productivity? Organizational productivity?