Fabris Schweighofer

The Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) is a crown corporation that supports entrepreneurs with small-mid-sized enterprises in all industries and all stages by providing financing, advisory services and capital. Recently, BDC has implemented a solution to digitalize its procurement department. The ServiceNow® application was selected. One of the reasons for choosing this solution is the fact that it was already in place covering the IT Service Management processes, which means the solution was customized to include the procurement requirements.

A well-known consulting firm was selected for the project, which ends up focusing on delivering the features required to enter data into the system, but due to time constraints, missed the creation of reports to get data out of the system. I was hired by the Finance Application team, which is responsible for providing system applications to teams under the Finance department.

The goal of my mandate was to create new reports and dashboards to bring visibility of the procurement processes so that the procurement team could be able to view where it is going well and where there is room for improvement. When the original mandate ended, it was extended to create another set of reports specifically about metrics for the Procurement and Accounts Payable departments. Ten dashboards and more than three hundred reports were created to cover the needs of the procurement manager, the sub-groups within the department, and the metrics. Since it was a one-person type of project, I leveraged all my skills and experience to act as a business analyst, project manager, developer, and tester.

 

Tasks Performed:

• Identify and document stakeholders involved and impacted by the initiative, their roles and responsibilities to plan business analysis activities as well as plan the communication strategy.

• Prepare and conduct requirement elicitation meetings with diverse stakeholders, including from the Procurement, Finance Applications, and Accounts Payables departments.

• Based on the requirements identified, develop detailed user stories and establish acceptance criteria to build reports and dashboards.

• Manage high-level business requirements, detailed user stories, requirements lifecycle, development lifecycle, and testing results in a Microsoft Excel® spreadsheet designed for this purpose.

• Conduct one-on-one interviews with stakeholders to clarify and assess information or assumptions gathered through requirement elicitation sessions or document analysis to achieve the expected outcomes.

• Analyze existing system documentation as well as run test scenarios to reverse engineer to understand the current system behaviours and business rules especially for the procurement part of the system, which is a custom module.

• Facilitate meetings with key stakeholders to prioritize requirements taking into consideration several factors like business need, internal deadlines, regulatory deadlines, technical dependencies, the level of clarity of requirements, and more.

• Develop AS-IS and TO-BE business process maps, which are based on the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), using the online tool Heflo.com for each type of service that the procurement department provides to its internal and external clients. In total, create nine business process model diagrams.

• Create a logical data model of the procurement module on the ServiceNow® application based on the output of the reverse engineer effort in order to understand how data is stored in a variety of business scenarios to create reports that filter and display data in a proper way.

• Develop reports and dashboards using the ServiceNow® reporting tool based on the requirements gathered and by selecting the best type of chart to display the data to fulfill the business need. Create ten dashboards and more than three hundred reports to the Procurement and Accounts Payable departments.

• Propose alternative solutions to stakeholders when facing technical limitations from the reporting tool that prevents from expectedly creating the report.

• Create an innovative way to dynamically apply filters on reports and dashboards so that it is not necessary to purchase a specific type of license to be able to use the dynamic filtering feature.

• Formulate a test strategy, create test scenarios and perform test activities. Besides, execute User Acceptance Testing (UAT) with team members to validate the reports and dashboards built as a solution. Manage the status of all UAT efforts from different stakeholders. Produce a Requirement Traceability Matrix to trace from test scenarios and results to high-level requirements.

• Deployed solution components to the production environment after approval.

• Create a project document containing all the pertinent information related to the project and its progress, such as project objectives, scope, deliverables, stakeholders, activities, dependencies, schedule, assumptions, constraints, risks, and glossary.

• Track project progress by updating the development of activities, maintaining an issue log, risk register, UAT progress, and liaising with project stakeholders on an ongoing basis.

• Provide project status reports and presentations to the Finance Application team weekly. Provide an approach to move forward with the project when facing impediments.

• Develop recommendations for changes to the ServiceNow® platform, including proposals to modify existing behaviours as well as add new functionalities that could enable capabilities to be used in reports to fulfill business needs. Work alongside with the IT department in the development of the proposed changes to make sure they meet the requirements and pass the acceptance criteria.

• Keep track of decision points, approvals, and development life cycle for each requirement as a proof for auditing purposes.

• Create documentation for all reports and dashboards built with business and technical details so that the Finance Application team has a source of information in case changes in the reports are needed in the future.

• Identify business or technical changes that might happen in the future and flag reports that might be negatively impacted by these changes so that the Finance Application team would know what reports/dashboards have to be updated. Create a Microsoft Excel® spreadsheet containing a list of all reports built in the initiative as well as details about them such as the type of chart, the source table, filters applied, groupings, fields shown in the report, and many more by using the pivot table, pivot chart, and slicer features so that the Finance Application team can dynamically apply filters to find the reports that require update based on the circumstances.