Business Analysis
We Love to Ask Questions
Business Analysis is the art of asking the right questions, of the right people, and then cultivating their answers into valuable insights crucial to the success of the project. Our analysis efforts are informed by decades of direct communication with key stakeholders acting daily to drive their business forward. We’ve gathered a great deal of our domain knowledge from shippers, terminal operators, superintendents, forest product manufacturers, trucking dispatchers, intermodal-rail carriers, gate clerks, yard clerks, crane operators, top-pick operators, and everyone in between. We love meeting and talking with people to understand how they operate, how they prioritize work, and especially to understand their pain-points. We value those interactions because we learn something new every time.
Concise Documentation
Our Business Analysts create the precise deliverable you need while maintaining awareness that the people we’re speaking with need to maintain their daily responsibilities. We work with your team to schedule interviews and observation sessions in a manner that fits your organization and project effort. Detailed engagement planning is key to efficient utilization of each stakeholder’s time.
All documentation is written in a clear and concise manner that is aware of its audience and intent. We utilize a variety of software to display information in its most impactful and useful form.
We offer a variety of business analysis services to be used as standalone deliverables, or as key components of larger projects. Examples include:
Operational Playbooks
Do you know how your business operates? We can develop detailed documentation that describes your operational processes. This documentation can be used in Disaster Recovery (DR), training, employee onboarding, and as an asset for mergers and acquisitions.
RFP Creation & Response
Accomplished with a mix of project management and business analysis. RFP support includes scheduling, client site assessment(s) to determine requirements, documentation of requirements, and vendor communication management, all to enable data-driven decision-making.
Site Assessments / Requirements Gathering
We dedicate knowledgeable Business Analysts to perform a full site assessment. This results in documentation that acts as a full accounting of your requirements that can then be used by the TOS vendor to perform a gap assessment and validation of functionality required to operate your terminal. This often includes a requirements traceability matrix, process flow diagrams, and swim lane diagrams.
As-Is and To-Be Process Documentation
If you’re planning an operational change, it is first helpful to have a record of the current processes. First, we develop detailed documentation that describes your existing operational processes. We then work with stakeholders to build a new set of documentation that reflects the planned change. This is tremendously beneficial within strict change management regimes.
Persona Creation
Hardware and Software vendors often rely on personas to understand their users. A persona is a semi-fictional creation that describes your users’ behaviors, goals, experiences, and needs. We can perform this analysis to front-load the effort so that your chosen vendor has more information available, sooner in the project.
