Persona Analysis
Persona Analysis is a technique employed to create a vivid, relatable character that embodies a larger group of stakeholders or user classes. This technique is essential in capturing the behavioral characteristics of a stakeholder group and thus understanding their interaction with a solution, which in turn aids in product or IT systems design. A persona encapsulates various characteristics like goals, behaviors, motivations, environment, demographics, and skills, sometimes even more based on what the project team deems necessary. These features help to construct a narrative or a story about the user class.
The objective of Persona Analysis is multi-fold:
Analyze Usage Information: By creating a persona, a business analyst can delve into how a specific class of users interacts with the existing or proposed system.
Stakeholder Requirements: Personas help to draw out the needs of stakeholders or users, which can be crucial for defining requirements.
Business Analysis Approach: The insights derived from persona analysis contribute to structuring an effective business analysis approach, particularly during stakeholder analysis.
User Experience Design: Particularly useful in IT and product development, personas help in the design or mapping out of the user experience.
Communication and Engagement: Once stakeholder types have been characterized by personas, the analysis can point towards effective ways to engage and communicate with these groups.
Personas differ significantly from stakeholders. While a stakeholder is an actual individual with varying degrees of interest and influence in a project, a persona is a fictional character representing a group. The depth of description also varies. A persona goes into granular detail about the behavior and characteristics of the stakeholder group it represents—details like device literacy, preferred methods for performing tasks, and the frequency of specific actions. These are generally not required for stakeholders unless they are highly impacted or critical to the project.
Personas can range in complexity and length, from a brief paragraph to one or two pages, based on what characteristics the team decides to capture. They are often written in a narrative form, telling a story about the user class they represent.
In essence, Persona Analysis is an invaluable tool in business analysis. It provides a mechanism for understanding stakeholder needs and behaviors, which in turn helps in better product design, stakeholder engagement, and project planning.