Having the right team around you: Top 10 reasons you need a BA for on-boarding

Retailers often have complex and legacy IT systems that simply cannot plug & play. That is, not without having the right team and the right knowledge to pull the project off successfully. So whether you’re considering offering retail finance for the first time or adding a lender to your panel, you’ll need a collaborative team to ensure success.

Our objective is to get your new consumer finance programme up and running quickly. We’re always working to tight timelines and our retail partner’s business is depending on it. Imagine going to buy a new sofa and no credit options being available. It would be disastrous for their bottom line and for their customer experience. With certain purchases the expectation is that credit options are available.

To be successful and ensure a smooth consumer finance launch, it’s essential that our team has a strong relationship with the retailer and a thorough understanding of what they need. The project and ongoing business relationship rely upon building a good partnership and shared understanding. Business Analysts facilitate this and here are the top 10 ways we help.

1. Provide liaison between all the parties involved to ensure that all voices are heard. The business analyst is a neutral facilitator and helps to resolve any conflict of perspective.

2. Collect requirements from each party. The business analyst uses their skills to elicit any wants, needs or requirements with an open mind so that all parties are engaged in the project.

3. Balance the needs of the various parties. Once all the requirements are gathered, the BA analyses them to see if there are any duplicates, conflicting requirements and if the scope is still the same.

4. Check business requirements against technical requirements and capabilities. After agreeing the business requirements, the BA checks these against the proposed solution to make sure that the needs of the all parties are met. The business analyst also helps in the negotiation when a requirement cannot be met or needs to be changed.

5. Negotiate any compromises or conflicts to get the right result. Business analysts are communicators that bring everyone together and negotiate a solution that all are happy with. Or at least understand why something can’t be delivered.

6. Make sure that documentation is understandable to everyone. There is nothing worse than having to read a very technical document in language you cannot interpret. The technical teams want to understand the detail and technical implications of the requirements whilst other stakeholders want a clear and concise document in plain language. The BA presents information in a digestible format for all parties. During a recent project it was the BA who turned a technical solution for reconciliation and settlement into documentation that everyone could understand and agree to.

7. Manage changes before and during the implementation. Change happens, so we have to get used to it. BA’s help everyone understand the change, it’s need and impact. Importantly, the BA must also document change so it’s visible to everyone involved.

8. Manage the communication to ensure complete understanding. Large, text-based documents are often hard to read and boring. Trust the BA to create documents & models that aid understanding and enable challenge. A picture can often tell a thousand words and a process map can show the customer journey better than text.

9. Be a shoulder to cry on. Inevitably, things don’t quite go according to plan and people can get frustrated and emotional. That could be anybody in the project, but particularly the project manager, the lead developer and the key stakeholder. Your BA will be your rock throughout the process and give you a sounding board when things get rough.

10. Get you home safely after the celebration. After the successful implementation, your business analyst will be a part of the crucial celebration and ensure you get back safely to where ever you might think you want to be. It’s all part of the service.

Get in touch @ www.ikano.co.uk/retail-finance/contact-us

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