The plan business analysis information management activity is used to create an approach to accessing and storing business analysis information.
When conducting business analysis activities such as elicitation, a lot of information would be generated. All of this information has to be collected and stored.
Some of the activities that can generate information include: requirements, designs, solution options, elicitation results, stakeholder comments and scope statements.
Information management involves the following:
a. How these information should be organized.
b. How detailed the information should be.
c. The relationship between the information.
d. How the information is used in the enterprise.
e. How the information should be accessed and stored.
f. What characteristics of the information that needs to be maintained.
Information management ensures that the business analysis information is organized in a manner which would be useful and easily accessible.
There are some tasks which help with planning business analysis information management and they are:
1. Organization of business analysis information: The organization of the business analysis information is the responsibility of the business analyst in charge of the solution.
The information has to be organized in a manner which makes it easy to access and use.
2. Level of abstraction: The level of abstraction involves determining the level of detail to be provided in the business analysis information.
Level of information detail differs based on the needs of the stakeholders, the complexity of the information and the importance of the change.
3. Plan traceability approach: This is used to plan how the information would be traced.
Planning how the information would be traced depends on the following factors : the complexity of the organization, the number of requirements involved, the organizational standards and the costs of tracing these requirements.
4. Plan for requirement reuse: Long term requirements can be structured in a way that can help with reuse. Reusing requirements can save an organization time, effort and money.
Examples of requirements which are reusable include: quality standards, regulatory requirements, business rules and service level agreements.
5. Storage and access: Information can be stored in numerous ways, storage decisions depend on numerous factors.
These factors include who must access the information, how often they need to access this information, how the information should be accessed.
Organization standards also influence the storage decision
6. Requirements attributes: These are the attributes of the requirements which help with managing the requirements.
Requirements can be isolated or linked to other groups of requirements so their attributes help with traceability.
Some commonly used requirements attributes include: author, complexity, priority and status.