50 Real Life Stories On Business Analysis: LN Mishra, CBAP, CSM Principal Trainer, Adaptive US

50 Real Life
Stories On
Business Analysis
LN Mishra, CBAP, CSM

Principal Trainer, Adaptive US
50 Real life stories for Business Analysis trainers
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50 Real life stories on Business Analysis
Acknowledgement
I thankfully acknowledge the contribution of many
individuals for their contribution during the preparation
of the book.
My thanks go to Ms. Fathima Suhair for her assistance to type-

set the contents.
my family members, wife Ananya, son Siddharth and daughter

Saianshee who always had the first right on my time. Without
their support and encouragement, this would have remained a
distance a dream.

50 Real life stories for Business Analysis trainers
Preface and Introduction

As a child, we all enjoyed listening stories from our elders.
The penchant for listening to stories remains till we die.
Using stories to explain a concept during a workshop is

a proven method to engage participants. At the same time,
participants remember concepts for much longer duration if they
listen to stories related to the concepts.
However, it is hard to find a good compilation of

stories which we trainers can take advantage of.
This book is an outcome of my professional career as a

trainer and consultant of 25+ years.
I hope you will enjoy the book.
If you wish to have a power point presentation version of the

book to use during your trainings, you can ask for the same by
writing to me.
I will be glad and thankful if you can share your

feedbacks and suggestions on the book.
Please your feedbacks and suggestions to

LN@AdaptiveUS.com.

About the author
LN Mishra (LN) has 25+ years of professional experience in

software development, requirements analysis, business analysis,
governance, risk and compliance management.
LN is a practicing trainer, consultant and business analyst for

more than 25 years. He was involved in multiple multi-country
large ERP implementation projects. He currently consults in
development of 2 large systems
- one of the largest paint companies in the world to develop
their next generation color management system and
development of a GRC system. He is also the product
manager for an enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance
management system (GRCPerfect) which is operational in
multiple client places.
He was involved in one of the world’s change management

program in PricewaterhouseCoopers, a leading management
consulting firm, in one of the largest privatization effort in India
for a public sector utility agency.
LN has conducted more than 200 workshops, both public and in

house in the areas of Business Analysis, Requirements
Management, Agile Project Management, software Project
Management, Six Sigma, CMM, ISO 9001, and ISO 27001. He has
also guided 30+ six sigma green belt projects in iGate, MACH
and Akzo Nobel.

LN holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM)

from IIM Ahmedabad, the too-most business management
school in India and Bachelor in Engineering (Honours) in
Electronics and Telecommunication from University College of
Engineering, Burla, India.
Major Awards/Recognitions:
✓ Certified Business Analyst Professional (CBAP) from IIBA,

Canada.
✓ Certified Requirements Engineering Professional (CPRE) from
IREB, Germany.
✓ Certified Project Management Professional (PMP) from
PMI, USA.
✓ Certified Scrum Master from Good Agile, USA.
✓ World Topper Certified software Quality Analyst (CSQA), 2000.
✓ Certified Lead Auditor for ISO 9001, ISO 27001, ISO 20000
and BS 25999.
LN lives with his wife, Ananya, son, Siddharth and daughter,

Saianshee in Bangalore, the IT capital of India.
Other books by LN

Table of contents
1. Our system should support pizza courier delivery approach 12
2. Our application does not work between 12 PM to 2 PM 13
3. MAISAI – The Japanese scientist 14
4. Emergency meeting for the entire business unit. 15
5. 600 bugs and counting! 16
6. We sold 500 tickets just for 7500 USD. 17
7. I can’t use your dashboard. 18
8. Numbers on system and excel are different. 19
9. Holy XXXX, Dan loses a prospect. 20
10. I dread our code base like a Dinosaur. 21
11. Papa, let me plan my birthday. 22
12. 4 months, still waiting for approval. 23
13. I can't open my requirements document! 24
14. Mom, I need to extend my stay by 3 months! 25
15. We are already late by 300%! 26
16. Let us get out of this project! 27
17. We are cancelling the project. 28
18. No buy button on our ecommerce web-site. 29
19. Go live postponed by 3 months. 30
20. There are 100 customers our customer care 31
21. How do you expect us to really work? 32

22. We are scrapping this product. 33

23. I need statistical analysis. 34
24. Our proposal acceptance ratio is just 10%. 35
25. All our user interfaces are rejected. 36
26. Now you can generate PLC automatically! 37
27. Our application usage is less than 10%. 38
28. Your BA said those are good ideas! 39
29. Time to change our product architecture. 40
30. Oops…the program is misbehaving in production. 41
31. Mid-night blues. 42
32. Relieve Rajesh on priority! 43
33. No one to support our application . 44
34. We are disconnected for 3 full days. 45
35. Oops…my PC has crashed 46
36. Honey, I will have dinner in office tonight 47
37. Oops…we missed the deadline again. 48
38. Return of the bugs… 49
39. One more change to design…. 50
40. Move us to another project. 51
41. All our programs have bombed. 52
42. No food, no cab, no A/C. 53
43. From school Principal to IT Professional. 54
44. Our application crashes every Friday afternoon. 55
45. Why did you forward this mail? 56

46. Our CEO is my client. 57
47. Without this, we are not going live! 58
48. Go left and Go right. 59
49. We have lost our complete appraisal data! 60
50. Stuck for last 6 months with use cases! 61

Cross-tab of contexts to user stories

Categor Story #
y
Agile way of working 5
Career planning 43
Communication 4,45,26
Code control 26
Configuration management 30,41
Customer management 17
Defect management 38
Elicitation 1,3,7,9,14,18,19,21,22,25,27,29,31,39,44,46
Impact analysis 6
Innovation 1
Internationalization 22
Lack of re-usability 10
NFR 7,21,22,25,27,29,31,44
Out of box thinking 1
Performance testing 31,34
Planning 11,33,34,36,37,42
Planning and monitoring 15
Requirements analysis 8,50
Requirements documentation 13
Requirements elicitation 20
Requirements validation 12
Risk management 32,34,35,49
Root cause analysis 2
Scalability 31,34
Stakeholder analysis 7,9,14
Stakeholder involvement 5
Stakeholder management 16,23,24,28,47,48
Team management 40
Usability 27,29

1. Our system should support pizza courier delivery

approach.
LN was baffled; he received a very funny requirement from a stakeholder, “Our

system should support Pizza courier delivery approach”.
The company doesn’t make Pizzas. It is into manufacturing of paint. What has
paint manufacturing got to do with pizza delivery?
However, while discussing with the stakeholder, he understood a very

interesting story behind the requirement.
“LN, do you like pizza?” “Of
course, John.”
“But do you make Pizza at home?”
“I did try but it turned out be a biscuit instead of Pizza”.
“Exactly, many people love Pizza but, they don’t make Pizza or when they try to
make Pizza at home the Pizza doesn’t come out well. Hence most people order
Pizza by phone or online and it gets delivered at their doorstep. They order pizza to
their taste such as with single cheese, double cheese, or with extra-toppings.
Our stakeholders also need exactly the convenience. Right now they are buying
ingredients from us. They are mixing it to make a color. In this process, they may
make mistakes and the blame comes on us.
So instead of selling them ingredients, if we could actually make the finished

product and get delivered to them, they will be happy. Paint
quality will be better and we will also make better margins on the product.” Tags: Elicitation,
Out of box thinking, Innovation

2. Our application does not work between

12 PM to 2 PM.
Meg, the chief architect of IPMPro, an enterprise project management system, received a
peculiar complaint. The users complained that certain functionalities of the system would
not work usually between 12 PM to 2 PM.
She was surprised as to how an application can behave during certain time of the day.
Can you think what could be the root cause behind this peculiar behavior? Root
cause
This application was hosted on the same server where client had hosted their intranet.
As the intranet usage increased during this period, this application could not get
required resources which were leading to failure of the system.
Tags: Root cause analysis

3. MAISAI – The Japanese scientist
Allen was really at loss, he attended a large project team meeting. Many Domain SMEs
had gathered to explain the requirements and kept talking about something called
MAISAI conversion.
Allen couldn’t make any sense make out of it. To him it looked like there was a Japanese
scientist who created a certain kind of formula and the team was discussing on
implementing that formula.
So he came out of the meeting and asked one of the Domain SME, “What is this
MAISAI conversion?”
Domain SME was bit surprised that Allen did not know this. She said, “Allen, this is nothing
but multi-angle instrument to single-angle instrument conversion. Old devices could capture
information on a single-angle. Newer generation devices can capture multiple-angles. That’s
why when data is fed into the old systems; it has to be converted from multiple-angle to
single-angle
Had Allen knew this abbreviation, the whole meeting would have made sense to him.
As Business analysts or as project team members, we must understand the terminology

used in business, which would help us in grasping what business is trying to
communicate.
Tags: Elicitation.

4. Emergency meeting for the entire business unit.
Jose, the account manager for a large telecom account for a large IT service provider, was
called in by his BU Head for an urgent meeting. He was surprised as Martin, his BU Head
asked him to organize an emergency meeting for 500+ staff members at 4 PM. This is
already 2 PM.
When Jose reached Martin’s office, Martin showed him a mail from the client.
One of team members has replied all to one the client’s mail, “Why the hell are you sending
such mails? You are spamming my mail box”.
Guess what, this mail also had APAC Regional Head of the client in the CC list.
Because of this team member’s irresponsible behavior, all senior management of the BU
had to get into a fire fighting mode.
Tags: Communication.

5. 600 bugs and counting!
Salma, Test Manager for the new banking system project at Zen Bank, was worried. The
vendor, a large IT services company, delivered the system after 15 months of off-shore
development.
Zen Bank business analysts had taken 5 months to prepare the requirements
documents.
Once Salma’s team started testing, in just about 1 months’ time, they have
discovered 600+ bugs and the count was increasing with each day of testing.
On enquiring with the vendor organization, they were NOT bugs as the requirements were
not stated clearly.
Salma knew for sure that product quality was not at all acceptable and the team may
need another 6 month’s extra time to fix the issues.
Tags: Stakeholder involvement, Agile way of working

6. We sold 500 tickets just for 7500 USD.
Michael, Operations Head for eTravel got a rude shock early in the morning. eTravel had
modified its web-site to attract holiday seasons travelers. Within 30 minutes of opening of
the sale, eTravel sold 500+ tickets. The bad news was average ticket price was just 15 USD
where as it should have been around 1500 USD.
On enquiring the cause, Michael learnt of the shocking revelation that each ticket was priced
15 USD instead of 1500 USD.
What happened?
One of the developers observed that all prices were mentioned with 2 decimals, such as USD
900.00, USD 1200.00. No product indeed had any pricing which contained decimal values.
This was intimidating for users. So, he removed these decimal values from the prices. One of
the partner web-site was treating the last 2 digits as cents, hence a ticket which was USD
1500, became USD 15.00.
Tags: Impact analysis, Systems Thinking.

7.I can’t use your dashboard.
Allen was proudly presenting the new dashboard from GRCPerfect, the enterprise
Governance, Risk and Compliance System developed by his organization. The dashboard
had nice RAB (Red - Amber - Green) indicators.
The prospect saw the dashboard, and said “Allen, I am color blind, and I am unable to
distinguish between Red and Green.”
Can you help Allen to resolve this problem?
Tags: Elicitation, Non-functional requirements, Stakeholder analysis.
Suggestion: Allen can use different shapes along with colors which will allow users with
color blindness also to be able to use the application.

8. Numbers on system and excel are different.
Allen had an interesting problem in hand. He was implementing the order management
system for a Spanish customer.
The total order values for the month shown on the system and the values shown after
downloading the report to his laptop were vastly different.
Reason behind:
Spanish number format exchanges comma and dot with British number format, hence
numbers look different.
Tags: Requirements analysis

9. Holy XXXX, Dan loses a prospect.
Dan reached office. He received a message from, Zen Systems, saying their pilot
enterprise risk management system is completely down.
He was baffled. He could not understand how an entire application went down. One
or two modules or reports may have some issues but the entire application being
down is a pretty big surprise.
He and technical architect, Lee rushed to Zen’s premise.
Dan enquired who all had used the application during the previous day. Ken, Jit,
Michelle, and Raghu had used the application.
On enquiry, Ken said that he deleted all users of the system to test a
functionality.
Dan asked, “Did you delete the admin account as well?” “Yes”,
replied Ken.
Dan said, “Why did you delete admin account?” Ken
had a cool reply, “It allowed”.
Dan remembered his manager’s saying, “Applications should not be fool proof –
they should be idiot proof”.
Tags: Elicitation, Stakeholder analysis

10. I dread our code base like a Dinosaur.
Mariam was worried. The code base for the product was growing very rapidly. The same
functionalities behaved differently in different modules.
For example, in defect management module, active employees for the project were
displayed. In risk management module, showed even users who are no longer part of the
system.
Worried about such a weird behavior which required multiple testing.
Solution: The business analyst of the system did not consider requirements which could be
re-used such as the feature mentioned above. Due to the same, developers coded very
same functionality multiple times, thus increasing the code base significantly.
Tags: Non-functional requirements, Lack of re-usability.

11. Papa, let me plan my birthday.
Allen was discussing about a travel plan with his wife. Being a professional consultant,
he always emphasized the need for planning.
Suddenly, Sam, Allen’s son came running to him and told him, “Papa, I would like to plan my
birthday”.
Allen was curios. Sam is just 6 years old and plan is a heavy word which
professionals find it hard to define.
Inquisitively, he asks Sam, “What do you mean by planning?” Sam
replied, “Planning is thinking and doing”.
Allen was indeed surprised, a perfect answer for the term. He was wondering, many of us
actually work in "Do and then repent" way.
Tags: Planning

12. 4 months, still waiting for approval.
Jan was deeply worried. She prepared her requirements document with lots of effort. She had
painstakingly prepared many requirements models such as activity diagrams, state chart
diagrams, user interfaces etc. for each of the features needed in the product. The document
had described detailed requirements for 20+ modules and it has become 400+ pages.
She has been following up with many stakeholders but it has not been of any help. Tags:
Requirements validation.
Solution: A humongous requirements document is extremely hard for stakeholders to

approve. So the better approach is to structure the requirements document into multiple
short documents so that stakeholders will find it easy to approve.

13. I can't open my requirements document!
Judy was indeed frustrated. The network is slow and it took couple of hours to download
the requirements document.
After that when she clicked on the requirements document, Microsoft Word pops out an
error message, “Word has failed to open the document”.
She checked the document size; it was more than 32 MB in size. Tags:
Requirements documentation

14. Mom, I need to extend my stay by 3 months!
It was getting quite cold outside as the month of December was approaching. However,
Dinesh was very relaxed as his first large Oracle Financials implementation for a
prestigious retail chain in Seattle was well on schedule.
He was confident that his team would complete the project in the remaining one month
and he would be backing home in India after 12 months of on-site stint.
His phone rang. Todd, Head of Legal function, wanted to see him. Dinesh had met Todd
only during the project kick-off. For subsequent project review meetings, no one from legal
function joined project review meetings.
When he met Todd, Todd's comments hit him hard. Todd told that most of the financial
reports developed by Dinesh’s team have to be rewritten to comply with US legal
requirements. With just under a month left, Dinesh and his team were now faced with the
daunting task of completely rewriting these reports that had taken over 3 months to create.
Tags: Stakeholder analysis, Elicitation.
Reason behind: The project team's inability to involve legal function in an

appropriate manner.

15. We are already late by 300%!
Piero was indeed worried. His previous project manager for “Organizational Competency
Management” moved out of the project. He has been made responsible to complete the
project.
Piero looked at the MS Project plan. The project started long 18 months back. The original
schedule was just 6 months.
He recognized that projects are indeed unknown ventures and do get delayed. But such a
delay was indeed a worrying factor.
Upon discussion with the previous PM, he understood that due to lack of
stakeholder availability for sign-offs, the project was getting delayed.
As per project management policy in the organization, all key stakeholders must be available
for signing off milestones. Thus was indeed a rare phenomenon to achieve.
Tags: Planning and monitoring

16. Let us get out of this project!
Subodh was furious. This is the 3rd progress review for the project. His organization has put
in lot of energy and time into the project.
During 3rd progress review, the sponsor made a killer statement, “Unless we support
multiple routing options, we cannot go live”. The sponsor’s tone was very tough. It was
quite clear that Subodh’s organization would need another 3 month’s work to complete
the same.
What really happened?
On that day, there was a long network outage for the client as civic authorities cut the fiber
optic connection. This had created a huge customer issue. Subodh’s project sponsor was
responsible for the business continuity planning for the organization. The sponsor was
obviously upset and it showed up during the review.
How Subodh handled the scenario
Subodh requested the sponsor to have a one on one meeting and he expressed his concern
on the stand taken by the sponsor. The sponsor was indeed apologetic about his behavior
and explained the situation to him. After the event, they mutually agreed to have a way to
handle the requirement and the project was successfully completed.
Tags: Stakeholder management, Conflict management.

17. We are cancelling the project.
Joy was upset. He was helping a mid-size IT organization to get certified for ISO 9001 and
ISO 27001. He had spent almost 30 days of effort
The client cancelled a project indicating it was no longer a requirement for the
organization.
After a few days, he received the information that the client had completed the project
successfully and the client received ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certifications.
When he checked with the accounts team, he found a very interesting fact, although project
schedule was 80% complete, client had made payment for 20% only.
Lesson learnt: Some clients take advantage of a vendor’s inability to go in for a legal option.
Evaluate a client before accepting the client.
Tags: Customer management.

18. No buy button on our ecommerce web-site.
Allen was very excited.
He had been discussing with his management the need for an ecommerce portal for their
organization. He prepared a business case for the same and management approved after
significant deliberation.
They paid 50% advance money to Zeon eCommerce, a reputed ecommerce organization to
build the solution for them.
Allen was confident that Zeon eCommerce would understand their requirements.
Once the solution was unveiled, to his surprise, there was no quantity field or buy button
on the page.
On discussion, Zeon eCommerce informed that they can’t do anything as the

solution was built on a platform.
Tags: Elicitation, Communication.

19. Go live postponed by 3 months.
Salala was very excited. His team has completed development and testing for the travel
insurance product.
This is the first product to be migrated from legacy system. The new application has much
better user interface compared to the legacy system. It required significant effort to train
users on the legacy system.
Wang, the country head for China business, asked Salala, “Do we have provision to send SMS
for up-coming expiry or renewal of the insurances?”
Salala was surprised; no such requirement was mentioned in the requirements

document.
Wang was also surprised, was he expected to tell such basic requirements to the
development team?
Tags: Elicitation.

20. There are 100 customers our customer

care center!
Murhaf was surprised. He was a bit late to the office. There were already close to
100 customers have queued up in front of the customer care center of CESCO
Divisional Office, the electricity supply agency for the state of Orissa, a province in
India.
Last week, his organization went live with the new billing system and the new bills were
distributed on last Friday.
To his surprise, all of the customers had received bills with 0 amount. They were puzzled as
to how their electricity consumption was 0 even when they were present during the month.
What actually happened?
Being an old area of the city, many consumers had old meters. These old meters had only 3
digits. Programmers calculated the consumption as follows:
(Final Meter Reading - Initial Meter reading)*Per unit rate.
Since consumption can’t be negative, when Final Meter Reading was less than Initial
Meter reading, they made it as 0.
Tags: Requirements elicitation
Solution: Programmers should have considered the number of digits in the calculation. For
example, meters with 3 digits will change their reading from 920 to 020 when the
consumption was just 100 units.

21. How do you expect us to really work?
Sashidhar was quite happy. His project went live on time. This was his first large multi-
country roll out for a critical system for his client department.
Next day, Rita, one of sponsors for the project has sent a high severity escalation.
Her team is unable to use the newly rolled out application.
Her team’s productivity has fallen sharply as the new application was 10 times slower
than previous application.
Previous application was built on client server technology, obviously had much better
performance.
With web-based application, application performance was expected to drop, but this level of
performance degradation was not anticipated.
Tags: Elicitation, Non-functional requirements.
Solution: Business analyst must have put the performance requirement for the newly
developed system.

22. We are scrapping this product.
Sandeep was sad. His dream project of developing a modern insurance system for his
organization, Able Insurances, has gone down the drain.
Able had already spent more than USD 2 million on this project. India, Sandeep’s country
was the first country to go live with the new system.
Although there are many regional languages, branches in India preferred the system to work
in English.
Sandeep evaluated multiple development platforms which could support rapid

development of user interfaces, workflows and business rules.
However, he never considered support for Chinese requirement as China was a

different business geography.
Tags: Elicitation, Non-functional requirements, Internationalization.

23. I need statistical analysis.
Allen met Surya, sponsor for Able's appraisal system project. Surya was worried that the
organization generates large number of emails. It was becoming quite unwieldy for the
appraisal function to manage 2000+ emails generated during one appraisal cycle.
Sheela, Head of HR function, wanted an online appraisal system which would

automate the email based process and remove the need for managing such large
emails.
Allen met Jose, Manager Benefits. Jose was responsible for managing salaries for the
organization. Jose wanted the system to implement statistical analysis capability. That
would help Jose to determine increments to be provided based on employee performance
linked to Gaussian (Bell) distribution.
Allen was worried as such functionality will increase the development cost by 150%. Tags:
Stakeholder management

24. Our proposal acceptance ratio is just 5%.
Safa was a worried sales head. Her team has been submitting close to 100 software
consulting proposals in last 1 year. Each proposal costed her organization between 2000 to
3000 dollars to prepare. This meant an outflow of approximately USD 250000 for the
organization.
However, the rate of acceptance for the proposals was just 5%. She enquired with her
friends in similar organizations. Their acceptance ratio was close to 15%.
What could Safa do to improve the proposal acceptance ratio?
Tags: Stakeholder management, Customer management
Solution: Safa analyzed that there is no cost or effort to the prospect when they ask for a
proposal. This tempted the prospect to ask for a proposal at the drop of a hat. Safa
introduced a practice of having an RFP document to be prepared by the prospect. By
introducing this change, she could avoid frivolous prospects from serious prospect. This
improved the sales acceptance ratio from 10% to 30%.

25. All our user interfaces are rejected.
It was quite late in the evening. Kim’s team struggled hard to complete the user interfaces
for a client project to build a contract compliance management system.
Next day morning, he had a rude shock in his mail box. The client had rejected every
single user interface that Kim’s team had prepared.
He was indeed puzzled as to why the client rejected all UIs. The UIs
looked perfect on his and on test system laptops.
Reason behind:
Development and testing happened on 15” laptop screen. Client uses 29” monitors for their
work.
Tags: Elicitation, Non-functional requirements

26. Now you can generate PLC automatically!
Michelle was proudly presenting her organization’s solution to a large prospective client.
After lot of difficulty, she had got time from the client.
There were 10+ senior managers from the client organization in the demo.
She explained the schedule management feature. One key feature of the product was to
automatically create project life cycles.
To her surprise, when it was time to demo the automatic PLC, she found that the PLC
button is no longer available.
Reason behind the situation:
One of the developers thought that the button was no longer needed and decided to hide
the button.
Tags: Communication, Code control.

27. Our application usage is less than 10%.
Ravi was reviewing the roll out of the Integrated Project Management system. ABC Tech’s
technology division designed and developed the Integrated Project Management system
spending 50 person-years of effort.
The system was released with much fanfare. However, even after 6 months of release,
approximately 10% of projects only have started using the system.
Ravi’s team heard several excuses from project managers: It is
additional work beyond our project works
It takes too long to add any data.
We are not trained to use the system. Clients do
not grant access to our PM system.
Ravi was wondering what could be done to improve the usage of the system.
Tags: Elicitation, Non-functional requirements, Usability

28. Your BA said those are good ideas!
Allen was reviewing the Change Requests for the Contractor Compliance System for a reputed
oil company. To his surprise, he found many new requirements for which the client has put an
estimated cost as 0 dollars.
This was surprising to Allen as those requirements were discussed after initial
requirements were drafted.
When Allen checked with the client project manager, the answer was simple, Allen himself
had said that those requirements were indeed good ideas.
When the business analyst himself agreed that the ideas were good, should not those
become part of system requirements?
Tags: Stakeholder management, Communication.

29. Time to change our product architecture.
Sujatha, the PL for developing an in-house tool for managing the audit program in the
organization, was angry. She was already working overtime.
Now there is another major change requested by the audit organization.
Stanley David joined as the new Department Head for the Delivery function. She decided to
change the organization structure from a function oriented structure to market oriented
structure.
Her team had designed the system based on the existing organization structure and
practices.
Tags: Elicitation, Non-functional requirements, Usability

30. Oops…the program is misbehaving

in production.
Liza was worried. The program she developed to consolidate invoices on a monthly basis for
an individual customer was not performing as expected in production. It was still creating
individual invoices for individual transactions. The program she had tested on test
environment was working perfectly fine.
The customer would be really angry to see multiple invoices as that would increase their
effort in entering into the systems and also making payments and matching the same.
Tags: Configuration management
Solution: The development did develop the program. However, the deployment team did
not move into production as it did not receive the same within desired time.

31. Mid-night blues.
Jose Maria, Country CTO of one of the world’s largest Electronic Appliances maker and
Praveen Gupta, PM for implementing an Order Management System realized the severity of
the situation. This was 1 AM in morning, 30th of June. Being the last day of the month and
Quarter, they had to ship about 10000 Laptops to various distributors. Already trucks were
queuing in the warehouse.
The new system was missing alternate serial numbers of Laptops that were to be shipped.
This would create not only legal problem while dispatching the goods, would also create
lot of problems in terms of warranty management in future.
The delivery team had always tested successfully for few serial numbers and the system
behaved perfectly fine.
Reason behind: The hardware for the server did not have enough capacity to handle the
required load.
Tags: Elicitation, Non-functional requirements, Scalability, Performance testing.

32. Relieve Rajesh on priority!
Anil, PM for the development project for automating workflows in the client organization
was visibly upset. Madhav, his DM, had asked him to release the most competent Technical
Leader, Rajesh to be sent on an onsite assignment.
There was an urgent requirement for a unique skill set at a different client place. And the only
suitable person in the unit was Rajesh.
Anil knew for sure that his project work will be affected by the absence of Rajesh but the
other requirement was also very critical from unit’s client relationship point of view.
Solution: Always identify and train backups for critical resources.
Tags: Risk management.

33. No one to support our application.
Daniel, Program Manager for a large multi-country ERP roll-out project was worried. The client
had decided to consolidate all IT operations to a centralized location.
However, other countries had different time span of work and different holidays from the
centralized operations.
Their work was getting severely affected as they did not get support on their workdays
which were a holiday in the centralized operations place.
Tags: Planning, Impact analysis.

34. We are disconnected for 3 full days.
Mohammed, Program Manager for a large multi-country ERP roll-out project was deeply
worried. The client had consolidated all IT operations to a centralized location.
The WAN link to the central server was down for more than 2 days. The whole
operations had come to complete stand still.
Neither the orders could be entered in the system nor could the items be
dispatched.
They had a back-up 128kb ISDN link which they had assumed will be useful in case of main
link failure. However, when they tried, application always hanged.
The WAN service provider said there is a failure in the fiber-optic cable which may take
another 2-3 days to repair.
Solution: Test backups for their efficacy.
Tags: Planning, Risk management

35. Oops…my PC has crashed
Xavier was assigned to develop a complex tax computation module for an order
management system. He had spent at least a week in understanding the requirements and
then another 2 weeks to develop the program and test the same. The program was meeting
necessary requirements.
When Xavier came back after the weekend, he realized that his machine was not booting
up. IT folks said the machine needed a new hard disk. Xavier was in real soup – delivery
was just a week away.
He had forgotten to put the program files in the file server as he was so deeply involved in
making sure that the he wrote a very elegant program which was completely bug-free.
Tags: Risk management

36. Honey, I will have dinner in office tonight.
Rajesh, PM for ABC Project was really down. For the 3rd time in the week, he was going to
leave for home very late in the night. He was frustrated with the Quality of work his team
members were delivering.
Customer had already escalated Quality problems. He has been sitting and helping his
team mates, sometimes he even solves the ticket himself.
He was quite clueless as to why this was happening and what he should do now?
Upon investigation, he found that many of the project team members had no training on the
product to be supported.
Tags: Planning
Solution: Ensure proper product orientation and training before taking up the system
support activities.

37. Oops…we missed the deadline again.
John was worried. He was assigned a task that was estimated to take 4 person-days of effort
but at the end of 4th day, his task was only 70% complete. He checked with other team
mates, every-one had problem with estimated vs. actual effort. He could complete the work
on schedule but would not be able to do required amount of testing.
Sahana, Project Manager was also clueless about the effort needed as there was no data
captured for similar projects executed earlier.
Upon enquiry, it was found that the team members used a thumb rule to estimate the work.
The thumb rule did not consider the skill level of the person solving the issue. This resulted in
gross under estimation.
Also the work allocation followed a first come first serve basis.
Solution: John should develop an estimation model which will allow him to properly estimate
the work taken up by the team. Allocate work as per the skill level of the person.
Tags: Planning.

38. Return of the bugs…
Venkat had a group review of his code by his peers.
He promised that all defects would be closed. However, shipment of the particular module
got postponed by a week.
After that he corrected the work and delivered. But surprisingly the code returned with 3
bugs which they had already identified.
Reason: Poor configuration management can result in old code overriding new
changes.
Tags: Configuration management.

39. One more change to the design….
Mukesh had built the program as per the Detailed Design. But Customer claimed that an
essential feature was missing from Requirements Spec which required a complete redesign.
The project was nearing completion and Mukesh knew he can’t falter on the deliverable.
Can you analyze the situation and tell what went wrong? Tags:
Elicitation

40. Move us to another project.
First phase of the project was over and the whole team had a bitter experience. The actual
effort was 40 % more than estimated. Even customer complained about non-inclusion of
some requirements and delivered project had too many bugs. He was wondering what went
wrong. There were too many changes that were not estimated earlier.
Tags: Team management

41. All our programs have bombed.
Jane was worried. All programs she wrote were working fine off-shore when she unit tested
them.
Chang, the on-site PL reported nothing was working in client environment. Again, there
seemed to be some problem in the version of the program they were working on.
Situation on ground:
Team was developing on MS SQL whereas Client was using PL/SQL.
Tags: Configuration management

42. No food, no cab, no A/C. How do we work?
Ron is assigned to manage a new Project. It is a Help Desk Project – Level 1 support to
users around the globe A 15-member team, they work in 3 shifts His organization made a
commitment to the customer that the work would begin 10 days from sign off.
Ron called the allotted Team members, explained about the Project. He allotted action
items to each of the team members to get the project going. 3 people were sent to the
customer’s place to understand about the existing support processes. With 2 days to go, the
team realized that to access the production system from offshore, they need machines with
special softwares.
After a tough negotiation, machines were obtained. When support commenced, the
team that works in the night did not have cab provision. Added to this, air
conditioning was switched off at nights, making working in the nights inconvenient.
A similar project was executed at another location about which the PMO team was aware
of. When Ron came to know of this, he called the PM, learnt the best practices and
challenges from that project.
The team heaved a sigh of relief when after a 2 month time of difficulty; things fell to a
smooth running.
Ron felt that the effort spent could have been easily avoided. Tags:
Planning.

43. From school Principal to IT Professional.
During my business analysis workshops, I have come across a very interesting question, "I do
not have experience in business analysis, and hence I do not get a job. I do not get a job;
hence I cannot have experience in business analysis."
This becomes a chicken and egg problem to solve.
I tell them amazing true story of one of my client place colleague. She became a Quality
Manager in software division of General Electric from being principal of a school, in less than
4 years’ time.
How could she achieve it? Which company would like to hire such a person who does not
any IT experience?
The situation is similar to this, you can take a long jump of 8 feet and the river is 30 feet
wide. What do you do?
When I ask this question in the session, I get many interesting answers like "I will build a
boat", "I will learn swimming". Good - but how much time or resource you need for that?
Possibly the most intelligent option is to find stepping stones in the river bed - These will
allow you to cross the river by resting temporarily on them.
She exactly did that, joined a role which utilized her administrative experience in a mid-size
IT firm and learned to ride the rope.
Keep taking small jumps - in few years’ time, you will find yourself in your dream role.
Tags: Career planning.

44. Our application crashes every Friday

afternoon.
When I worked with a leading IT service provider in 1999, we were 5000+ people. Today it
is close to 250,000 people organization - an increase of 5000%.We have invested 10 times
more on hardware but still the performance is very slow.
The application crashes or is not available for many users during Friday afternoons.
During Friday afternoons, most users submit their time sheet data.
What we did:
We moved processes from being online to off-line. We figured out that some of our key data
capture processes such as attendance, tasks, and defects can be captured through an email
based approach than entering the same through web-based front end.
This allows the application to put data into respective modules off-line. User does not
even need to login to the system. This makes the data capture process easier for users as
well.
Tags: Elicitation, Non-functional requirements, Scalability, Performance testing.

45. Why did you forward this mail?
Michael got a message in the evening around 7 ‘o’ clock to meet his supervisor John
immediately.
Michael got little worried. Why has John asked him to come at such time? “John,
what happened?”
“Michael, I had requested you to setup a meeting with a prospect. Did you forward the same
mail I sent you?
“Yes, I forwarded the mail that you had sent me requesting for a meeting with the client. I
believed that the mail train would provide back ground info.”
“Michael, why did you forward the mail without reading it? Unfortunately, there was a
negative statement made by one of the stakeholders. Customer was extremely angry with
our company and has escalated it our CEO”.
One must be very careful in writing mails as we never know where the mail may land. Tags:
Communication

46. Our CEO is my client.
Anita was busy with her work. She was indeed very happy that she was automating an excel
template which is used by her company’s CEO. Her PM said that it was for the first time they
are creating an application to be used by the CEO himself.
She looks back and to her surprise, she finds her CEO watching her work. “Good
morning Sir”
“Good morning Anita, glad to see you work with such focus. What are you working on?”
“I am automating the budget template used by you.”
“Good. Who else uses this template?”
“I do not know. My PM did not tell me.”
“Good. Who else uses this template?”
“Actually, no one else uses this template. I use this template only once a year. Do we need
to automate such a template?”
Anita realized that she should have checked these aspects before picking up the
requirement for implementation.
Tags: Elicitation.

47. Without this, we are not going live!
Allen was angry. Now suddenly, one key stakeholder has put a requirement which is not
designed into the solution. This will delay the project by another 2 months.
There has been number of project progress review meetings. The project has covered 80% of
planned schedule and effort.
The stakeholder did not bother to attend the review meetings. Allen
was not sure what to do this in this situation.
Solution: Stakeholders sometimes behave in a manner that is not appropriate. Hence, as a PM

or as a BA, we must prepare a stakeholder charter so that stakeholders behave in a desirable
manner.
Tags: Stakeholder management

48. Go left and Go right.
Allen was confused. The SPOCs from USA and Sweden are at complete loggerheads.
No party is willing to change their process. Each country says the practices that they follow
are the best and should be implemented in the system.
What should Allen do in this situation?
Solution:
Parameterize the country of the user and the application will guide accordingly. Tags:
Stakeholder management

49. We have lost our complete appraisal data!
Rita was worried. Her organization has been managing appraisal process using excels.
Her Benefits Manager, Gabriel had kept all appraisal data in his laptop.
While traveling, the laptop was stolen. Unfortunately, there was no back up of the data.
What should have Rita done to avoid such a situation?
Solution:
1. Keep data backup.

2. Move to an application so that data can’t be lost this way. Tags: Risk
management

50. Stuck for last 6 months with use cases!
Allen joined a new project to design an enterprise data management system. The client had
a legacy system which could not support new business processes. It was also becoming
difficult to maintain the application as finding developers with such old technologies.
The client decided to first move the data to a newer technology and later
implement business processes.
The team was trying to write requirements using use case template. Allen was really clue less
as to how to Use Cases could be used in the project as the project was primarily a data
migration project.
When he enquired with the Domain SME, she said, “Use case template is mandatory for all
projects in our organization.”
Solution:
✓ Use different approach to gather requirements such as matrix model.
Tags: Requirements analysis.
------------------------------End of document----------------------------------------

50 Real Life Stories On Business Analysis: LN Mishra, CBAP, CSM Principal Trainer, Adaptive US

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50 Real Life

LN Mishra, CBAP, CSM

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Price: USD 9.8.

©Adaptive US Inc. AdaptiveUS.com | 2

My thanks go to Ms. Fathima Suhair for her assistance to type-

my family members, wife Ananya, son Siddharth and daughter

©Adaptive US Inc. AdaptiveUS.com | 3

Preface and Introduction

Using stories to explain a concept during a workshop is

However, it is hard to find a good compilation of

This book is an outcome of my professional career as a

I hope you will enjoy the book.

If you wish to have a power point presentation version of the

I will be glad and thankful if you can share your

Please your feedbacks and suggestions to

©Adaptive US Inc. AdaptiveUS.com | 4

About the author

LN Mishra (LN) has 25+ years of professional experience in

LN is a practicing trainer, consultant and business analyst for

He was involved in one of the world’s change management

LN has conducted more than 200 workshops, both public and in

©Adaptive US Inc. AdaptiveUS.com | 5

LN holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM)

✓ Certified Business Analyst Professional (CBAP) from IIBA,

LN lives with his wife, Ananya, son, Siddharth and daughter,

©Adaptive US Inc. AdaptiveUS.com | 6

2. Our application does not work between 12 PM to 2 PM 13

3. MAISAI – The Japanese scientist 14

4. Emergency meeting for the entire business unit. 15

5. 600 bugs and counting! 16

6. We sold 500 tickets just for 7500 USD. 17

7. I can’t use your dashboard. 18

8. Numbers on system and excel are different. 19

9. Holy XXXX, Dan loses a prospect. 20

10. I dread our code base like a Dinosaur. 21

11. Papa, let me plan my birthday. 22

12. 4 months, still waiting for approval. 23

13. I can't open my requirements document! 24

14. Mom, I need to extend my stay by 3 months! 25

15. We are already late by 300%! 26

16. Let us get out of this project! 27

17. We are cancelling the project. 28

18. No buy button on our ecommerce web-site. 29

19. Go live postponed by 3 months. 30

20. There are 100 customers our customer care 31

21. How do you expect us to really work? 32

©Adaptive US Inc. AdaptiveUS.com | 7

22. We are scrapping this product. 33

©Adaptive US Inc. AdaptiveUS.com | 8

23. I need statistical analysis. 34

24. Our proposal acceptance ratio is just 10%. 35

25. All our user interfaces are rejected. 36

26. Now you can generate PLC automatically! 37

27. Our application usage is less than 10%. 38

28. Your BA said those are good ideas! 39

29. Time to change our product architecture. 40

30. Oops…the program is misbehaving in production. 41

31. Mid-night blues. 42