Chapter 6 - Strategic Analysis

Chapter 6 - Strategic Analysis

Author: Zac Dewit

What is strategy analysis?

• The main concept behind strategy analysis is looking within a company and discovering what is wrong or lacking. After solving for these areas of weakness, you make and implement a strategy to solve these problems, whether fully or partially. 
• Throughout all these phases, there are many helpful tools to understand and organize data such as SWOT analysis or a value chain analysis.

How to analyze the Current State. 

• Before any change can be made or utilized, it is important to understand why exactly change is necessary. It is also important to know what will be affected by any changes. 
• To find what needs changing, first look into a business and find where any wastes are taking place. Lean mentality can be useful in this stage. Look for bottlenecks, time waste, or most often error correction. Once you find problems within your business, it is key to have stakeholder buy-in. Think of what a business will need and what the stakeholders will want. Knowing where a business should be headed will help you stress and motivate people to the necessity of change. 
• When making a change, be aware of the dynamic nature of an organization. It is difficult to imagine a business that does not change automatically on a minor scale. This means that a change you want to implement may already be taking place without your input, but more often the situation surrounding your desired change will shift and force you to take a new approach. 

Defining the Future State.

• To define the future state of a business or an organization, you need to understand where you want to be and what you what to have achieved after a period of time. After you know your final position, you need to work backward and solve what you need to accomplish to reach that final destination. 
• Part of understanding the final destination is creating a success determinant. This means that any change can be graded for success or failure. Be aware that failure can still have some benefits, just not what you were originally intending. An example here is 3M. The staff here used a failed glue product to create a brand new product that was extremely successful. 
• A future state description includes all parts of the business that are affected. This includes any small changes in processes or functions, but also the major changes like company structures or the quality of the staff through training and education. 

Risk Assessment.

• Alongside any change comes the possibility of failure or backfiring. This may come in the form of direct issues, or indirect. Indirect refers to the long line of minor problems or challenges created that total up to a loss for the business. 
• This is why risk assessment is key to increasing success rates. Risk assessment is the process of breaking down a change and finding any places that errors may occur. After they have been determined, the analyst must also find creative solutions to these issues. 
• A major factor to address is the likelihood of a risk. If there is little to no chance of a risk occurring, you can keep an eye out for it, but allow the change to continue without reworking it. This is because in the end there is no way to prove something has a 100% probability of going by unhitched. Something can and likely will go wrong, so it is important to minimize the threat and adjust accordingly. 

What is Define Change Strategy?

• The purpose here is to choose the best possible option for change. This means finding which changes will lead to your future goal, while also taking into account the risk possibilities. 
• As this is the final stage, it is where you begin bringing forth a final product and idea to the stakeholders. While before you had given a pitch, now you must show that all the effort and time so far was worth it. 
• There are many formats to show this change strategy such as a business case, Statement of Work, or an enterprise strategic plan. These methods help show the stakeholders the thought involved and reassure them that change is for bettering the business. 
• Finally, it is important to address which parts of the future plan will be affected by this change. You need to show exactly which goals will be met, and which will not. After all this planning and consideration, it is in the stakeholder's hands to begin implementation or reject your proposal.  

Chapter-4 Elicitation and Collaboration

Elicitation and Collaboration 

Created By: Aishveen Kaur Gill

Ques:1 What is Elicitation and collaboration?

Ans: Elicitation and collaboration describes the tasks that Business Analysts perform to prepare for and conduct elicitation activities and confirms the result obtained. It also describes the communication with stakeholders once the business analysis information is assembled and the ongoing collaboration with them throughout the business analysis activities.

Elicitation and collaboration can be planned, unplanned or both. Planned activities includes the surveys that can be structured and organized in advance, workshops and experiments while the unplanned activities are happened at the moment without any notice and these activities requires deeper exploration through planned activities.

Ques:2 What types of task Elicitation and collaboration composes?

Ans: Prepare for Elicitation: It understand of the scope of elicitation, select elicitation techniques, set up logistics for each elicitation activity, identify supporting material to conduct elicitation activity and prepare stakeholders to elicitation work.

Conduct Elicitation: It guides the elicitation activities and capture elicitation outcomes.

Confirm Elicitation Results: It compares elicitation results against sources information and compare elicitation result against other

Communicate Business Analysis Information: It deterimines the objectives and format of communication and communict business analysis package.

Manage Stakeholder Collaboration: It gain agreement on commitments, monitor stakeholder engagement and collaboration.

Ques:3 What are the techniques to prepare for elicitation?
Ans: Brainstorming: used to collaboratively identify and reach consensus about which sources of business analysis information should be consulted and which elicitation techniques might be effective.
Estimation: time and effort estimation required for the elicitation as well as the cost associated in business.
Data Mining: used to collect the data, information or patterns for an investigation.
Risk Analysis and Management: The plans for the elicitation should be adjusted to identify, assess, and manage conditions or situations.
Interviews: used to identify concerns about the planned and unplanned elicitation to procced with specific options.

Stakeholder List, Map, or Personas: used to consulted while preparing for the elicitation, who should  participate in the event, and the appropriate roles for each stakeholders.

Ques:4 How manage a stakeholder collaboration is important in Business Analysis?

Ans: Managing the collaboration of stakeholders in business activities is key to obtain success as stakeholder engagement encourages the stakeholder to work towards a common goal. Choosing the right stakeholder for engagement at a right time is more important than just managing their engagement. Business analyst is the one who determines the roles of the stakeholder and communicate with them. Business analyst encourages stakeholder involvement in order to reduce the impact of negative reactions and constantly supervise their involvement in the business analysis activities and establish a relationship with them as the poor relationships will be detrimental for business analysis.

Ques:5 What are the common guideline and tools to manage  stakeholders collaboration?

Ans: Business Analysis Approach: Each group member should describes the nature and level of collaboration to perform planned BA activities.
Business objectives: To achieve the future state one should describes the desired directions needed and to achieve the desired business outcomes they have to focus diverse stakeholders on a common vision.
Future state description: defines the desired future state and the expected value it present to give more focus on stakeholders to achieve the goals.
Recommended Actions: to improve the focus oitationn stakeholders to achieve goals communicating should be done and the value of solution can help to support and focus.
Risk Analysis Results: Risks related to stakeholder will be needed to address to ensure stakeholders collaboration for business activities.