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.
Microsoft has different strategies such as "cloud-first,mobile-first",growing through mergers, focusing on virtual reality and promoting tech-intensity. The Strategy provides the customers with direction strategically and delvers powerful set of outputs. Microsoft Service Security Risk Assessment help the security risk in application and there is support of infrastructure. There is a change management strategy that helps to adopt the new technology which is critical to get success rise in company. Apart from it, there is need of comfort level of communication with stakeholders, IT administrator and champions.
ReplyDeleteBusiness strategy analysis involves understanding the values, management abilities, and administrative structures that are able to connect tactical, operational and strategic decision making across all lines and at all levels of authority. BAs are key in supporting organizations in strategic planning, setting goals and executing business strategy. Measure achievements and make adjustments in areas where the strategies are not generating the anticipated results. Strategic Analysis emphasis on the requirement to align BA deliverables with the objectives and strategy of the business. In Microsoft, in 2017, it invested $ 13 billion in research and development which was 1 Billion higher than its investment in R & D during the past 2 years.
ReplyDeleteThe scope of the current state describes the important existing characteristics of the environment. The boundaries of the current state scope are determined by the components of the enterprise and its environment as they relate to the needs. The current state can be described on different levels, ranging from the entire enterprise to small components of a solution. Creating a model of the current state might require collaboration throughout or outside the enterprise. For small efforts, the scope might be only a small component of an enterprise. Internal and external influencers, as well as other
ReplyDeleteorganizational changes, can affect the current state in ways that force alterations in the desired future state, change strategy, or requirements and designs.