How a Discovery Factory can enable fast-flowing Business Analysis on an enterprise-wide scale

Industry leaders see a future of hyper-automation, AI-driven insights and a digitally-enabled workforce. This relentless pace of transformation presents a significant challenge, with organisations juggling multiple initiatives whilst striving to find solutions to problems that are simply too big to solve all at once. Here we propose a practical approach to problem-solving in this environment, The Discovery Factory, and explain how it helped one small team of Business Analysts to complete 100 discoveries in 18 months.

What is a Discovery Factory?

A Discovery Factory is a team of Business Analysts (BAs) who understand business problems and design solutions for organisations driven by competing priorities, urgent deadlines, and complex requirements. As BAs, they combine strong technical skills with a love of problem-solving. The Discovery Factory fosters an environment that functions like a fine-tuned production line. It takes high-level requirements from policy, operations or programme teams and refines them into precise detailed designs which are then delivered to engineers and developers to create new products, services and features. This Factory-style approach enables the team to make an enterprise-wide impact and support fast flow into delivery.

The 7 Key Characteristics of a Discovery Factory:

We have identified seven key characteristics necessary for Discovery Factories to succeed. These are: the right people; an infectious culture; brutal prioritisation; repeatable processes; effective tooling; emotional intelligence; and visionary leadership.

1. Finding the right people, with the right qualities, is essential for Discovery Factories to work effectively. This starts with mindset; the right people must be adaptable, as the ever-changing project environment requires quick thinking and manoeuvrability. They should love problem-solving, as Business Analysis requires uncovering root causes of problems before solutions can be found. And they must possess domain expertise in the sector they work in, or be able to quickly understand the organisation’s business and operating environment by working alongside the Factory’s subject-matter experts. Some of these individuals may be experienced or qualified BAs, but this isn’t essential for everyone. BA teams can also be energised by new joiners from school or university who inject fresh thinking and are more open to new ways-of-working. Managers should look for candidates at all experience levels, use interviews to uncover their individual passions and select those that align with the Factory’s purpose and goals.
2. It’s critical to foster an infectious culture where the whole team can thrive. Each member of the team has a role to play in encouraging collaboration and sharing technical knowledge, to create conditions for continuous improvement. Regular Problem Solving sessions, where team members talk through their requirements and collectively brainstorm ideas with colleagues, are a great way to foster this environment and grow the knowledge base and expertise of the whole team. Occasional Innovation Forums to devote time to new ideas help identify improvements to products, services, ways-of-working or tooling. Initiatives like these help create the kind of psychological safety where people feel trusted to make mistakes and learn from them and empowered to put forward suggestions, with the support of their colleagues.
3. The Discovery Factory must be structured to facilitate brutal prioritisation of work requests and requirements. Project environments inherently involve juggling multiple deadlines and milestones. However, effective progress requires navigating these complexities across many projects in parallel, demanding swift decision-making that’s clearly communicated in daily stand-ups and on a Kanban board. This isn't simply about choosing the most urgent tasks; it's about ruthlessly focusing on activities that deliver the greatest value and preventing distractions from clogging up the discovery pipeline. The Factory should use programme goals (e.g. to deliver a minimum viable product, or decommission an old system) to apply simple ‘bright line’ tests for what work is accepted into the pipeline, wherever possible. Alongside this, BAs must empathise and provide sound reasons when explaining to stakeholders why other requests are deprioritised.
4. The Discovery Factory needs to design and apply repeatable processes to each outcome, which are tailored to the operating environment. They should utilise templates for common activities like root-cause analysis, requirements identification and user needs mapping, to ensure consistency and productivity gains. They should enforce consistent product and service standards, to prioritise re-use over reinvention. And the Factory should treat consumers of its work (typically developers and testers) like customers, by welcoming early feedback on technical designs and shaping discovery outputs based on what they need to enable fast flow into delivery.
5. Effective tooling must support the production line. An ever-expanding suite of AI products is transforming the role of BAs and the nature of Discovery. Some of the most exciting AI developments are in fields like synthetic user research, real-time prototype creation, and automation of BA artefacts like user stories and acceptance criteria. The Factory should select AI solutions carefully based on clear user needs and the ability to deploy at scale. As well as increasing productivity, tooling can also enable a culture of transparency; wherever possible the team’s work should be accessible to everyone in the organisation on a shared collaboration platform, and the team should welcome stakeholders to comment on their work in show-and-tells and online.
6. Emotional intelligence (EQ) is more important than ever for Business Analysis. The premium placed on IQ is diminishing, but the value of EQ is growing. Many traditional BA tasks requiring high IQ are now automated by AI. The Factory should embrace this and recognise the gap BAs must fill to bring people together using EQ. This includes facilitating discussions between individuals from different backgrounds, raising and resolving ethical questions, making strategic choices based on the organisation’s values, and forging consensus. Deep Dive and Hackathon sessions are some of the most effective ways to achieve this, and they succeed best when run by BAs with strong interpersonal skills.
7. A successful team must have visionary leadership – the leader(s) must have a clear vision of the team’s purpose and explain why this matters, in a way team members buy into. To achieve this, leaders must embrace the six points above and use their role to create these conditions on the ground. Leaders do this through the tone they set, how they describe the team’s purpose, how they celebrate success and manage failure, and how they support the career goals and progression of individuals. They also need to be able to effectively manage the production line, giving individuals the autonomy they need to get things done, while recognising when they are required to step-in to unblock stoppages.

The Benefits of a Discovery Factory

Our experience shows that the Discovery Factory approach significantly increases the speed and efficiency of a project, from startup to completion. For example, we deployed a Factory of seven BAs at a large, central government department in the UK. Our team worked in an ever-changing environment, navigating a combination of complex policy, operational, and programme led transformation to complete 100 discoveries in 18 months by following the Factory principles. Using our Kanban metrics, we measured work in progress, cycle time and throughput for each BA and the Factory overall, to enable us to accurately forecast when discoveries would be ready to move into delivery. This enabled the programmes we supported to achieve major milestones, including launching new services with millions of interactions each month, and realising savings valued at £12m/year.

By combining the right people, culture, processes, and tools under visionary leadership, the Discovery Factory enables organisations to tackle complex challenges at pace and drive meaningful enterprise-wide change in a world of relentless transformation.