Business & Data Analysis Consulting

This consulting package entails assessing the maturity of an organization's business analysis practice including its organizational structure, processes, technology, as well as assessing the practice's overall effectiveness to the organization. Procept also identifies high-level goals that the business analysis practice should work towards attaining.

Procept uses the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) of Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and also best practice frameworks such as the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABoK). The typical duration of this type of consulting engagement is two weeks, leading to a maturity assessment report.

Ffor this consulting offering, Procept works with clients to prepare a compelling business case using the following approach:

• Determine the business problem or enhancement opportunity.
• Complete the problem analysis.
• Identify viable solutions.
• Evaluate each solution and recommend an optimal solution.
• Document the outcome of these steps in a suitable template selected from Procept's library of past business cases.
• Present the information to management for consideration and approval.

Procept ensures that the recommended solution addresses the business problem and is cost justifiable. Procept also validates other associated benefits from implementing its recommendations including compliance, litigation, support for current and future technologies, and improvements to productivity.

Procept's business analysis consultants help organizations document and re-engineer business processes to align with the business goals and/or current legislation and relevant policy contexts. Procept also improves the organization's effectiveness and efficiency in serving its clients — both internal and external. The re-engineered processes Procept creates provide complete ownership to the staff and management and support a continuous improvement framework.

Procept uses a variety of tools to gather data to map the current as-is process including reviewing business and/or IT strategy documents, meeting minutes, process templates, etc.; one-on-one interviews; facilitated workshops; and focus groups. Procept looks to identify the root cause of performance issues and pays special attention to relationships between policies, processes, procedures, current performance indicators, and metrics.

The future to-be processes are drafted after conducting comprehensive analysis of the current process maps and researching industry best practices from similar and different industries. Through facilitated workshops, the Procept BA consultant presents the draft to-be processes to management for discussion and finalization.

Once the to-be processes have been finalized, the consultant will conduct a gap analysis and then will provide an implementation plan.

Deliverables from this service commonly include:

• Current process map with as-is processes.
• Future state process map with to-be processes.
• Gap analysis report.
• Implementation roadmap.

Often, clients who do not have adequate staff capacity or expertise to perform certain functions seek to outsource that work to vendors; however, the clients' lack of capacity often means that they simply do not have the time available to prepare requests for proposal (RFPs) and then evaluate vendor responses.

This consulting offering provides Procept consultants to work with clients to gather requirements for an initiative, such as the implementation of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Procept consultants use various techniques for eliciting requirements from the stakeholders involved in the initiative. The consultants document the requirements using methods such as use case diagrams, data flow diagrams, activity diagrams, process flowcharts, entity relationship diagrams, where appropriate.

Procept can assist your team in creating an RFP document and can also help evaluate responses from vendors or solution providers using a customized evaluation tool based upon models taken from Procept's own internal template library.

Where existing business analysts need additional help or support, Procept provides a number of offerings to address common needs.

CBAP Exclusive

Appropriate for those preparing for the CBAP examination who have identified knowledge gaps, this package include a self-assessment mock exam, a one-on-one half-day session, up to two hours of telephone coaching, and email support until the candidate writes the CBAP exam.

Training Exclusive

Need to upgrade a knowledge area of skill but don't want to attend a traditional course? This one-on-one package can range form one day to a full six-day session. Services can be provided on-site or virtually. You can choose topics from almost any of our listed courses.

Career Accelerator

This offering includes one-on-one coaching for business analysts who have already attended our courses or who have achieved their CBAP (or similar) accreditation and who want to stimulate their career progress. This is intensive, customized coaching that can range from one to twelve months in duration. It typically includes:

• Career assessment and goals.
• Career development plan.
• Review and discussion of your project plans, schedules, risk registers, etc.
• One hour of coaching each week (via telephone, Skype, or in person).