Item Tracking

Business Analysis Techniques Series. Item tracking technique captures and assigns responsibility for issues and stakeholder concerns. Items can refer to actions, assumptions, constraints, dependencies, defects, enhancements and issues.

Record items

Record items, manually or by a system, with following attributes:

• Item ID: Unique ID
• Summary: Brief description of item
• Category: Grouping of items with similar properties
• Type: Type of item, Date identified, Identified by
• Impact: Possible consequences. Assess with respect to time, cost, scope, or quality
• Priority, Resolution date, Owner
• Resolver: Stakeholder assigned to resolve item
• Agreed strategy: E.g. Accept, pursue, ignore, mitigate and avoid 
• Status: E.g. Open, assigned, resolved and cancelled
• Resolution updates: Running log of item’s resolution
• Escalation matrix

Business analysts MUST track each item to its closure or resolution. They should report on item tracking performance.Check out Business Analyst Article for information about CBAP Certification, CCBA, ECBA

Strengths

• Stakeholder concerns tracked and resolved.
• Allows ranking importance of outstanding items.

Limitations

• Can be expensive to capture and track items.
• Consumes productive time.
• Stakeholders could become mired in details and statistics.

Worked out Example:

Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) management system is developed for the IT and ITES domain. The primary objective of GRC management system is to help companies implement Governance, Quality, and Information Security Management Systems in an integrated manner. It has various features, one of which is to plan and track projects and programs using standards such as CMMI, ISO 9001, and ISO 27001 etc.

Through this example let us try to understand how the item tracker for Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) management system looks like.