Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring
Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring (BAPM) governs how the rest of the business analysis work will be carried out. The exam tests judgement rather than templates: can you choose a planning approach that fits a given context, define how stakeholders will be engaged, control how requirements decisions get made, organise the information produced, and measure whether the BA effort itself is working.
The five tasks and what each actually decides
- Plan Business Analysis Approach - selects the planning method (predictive, adaptive or hybrid), formality and level of detail, which activities will be performed, their timing and sequencing, and how the approach itself will be reviewed.
- Plan Stakeholder Engagement - stakeholder analysis (influence, attitude, interest), roles and responsibilities, collaboration expectations, and communication needs.
- Plan Business Analysis Governance - how requirements are prioritised, how change is requested and approved, who decides, and when reviews or sign-offs occur.
- Plan Business Analysis Information Management - how information is structured, stored, accessed, reused, and at what level of detail.
- Identify Business Analysis Performance Improvements - measures, baselines, and corrective actions when the work underperforms.
Worked example
A payments team must deliver a regulatory reporting change by a fixed date; the regulator publishes the final rule only six weeks before the deadline. Reasoning: the fixed external date and audit exposure push toward a predictive approach with high formality and traceability, so the plan specifies sign-off gates and a change control board. But the unknown final rule means requirements will arrive late, so the plan also reserves a short adaptive iteration for the last six weeks and sets a performance measure - percentage of requirements baselined within five days of receipt - that will reveal whether the team can keep pace. That combination is defensible; choosing a purely adaptive approach would ignore the audit trail the regulator expects.
Traps that cost marks
- Treating the BA plan as a Gantt chart. It documents approach, governance, engagement and information rules; the schedule is a technique output.
- Doing stakeholder analysis once. It is revisited whenever influence or attitude shifts.
- Assuming adaptive suits everything, or that predictive means waterfall deliverables - predictive concerns the degree of upfront definition, not the delivery framework.
- Omitting how the plan itself will be approved and changed.
- Confusing item tracking with governance: item tracking logs issues and defects; governance decides who resolves them.