Strategies
The best way to use a team/organization’s resources to accomplish a particular set of goals and objectives is defined by strategy.
Business Analysis - Strategy
There may be strategies for the entire company, a division, department, or region, as well as for a particular product, project, or iteration.
The goal of strategy analysis is to identify the future and transitional stages required to satisfy the business need, and the amount of work necessary is determined by both the scope of the problem area and the business requirement.
It includes the finding or conceiving of potential solutions that will allow the firm to produce more value for stakeholders and/or capture more value for itself. It also encompasses strategic thinking in business analysis.
It will give context to the design specification and requirements analysis for a particular change. As soon as a business requirement is recognized, a strategy analysis should be conducted. This enables interested parties to decide whether or not to address that need.
A strategy analysis is a continuous process that evaluates any alterations to the need, the context, or any new information that would suggest that the change strategy has to be adjusted.
Business analysts must take into account their working environment and how predictable the range of potential outcomes is when conducting strategy analysis. The future state and potential transition states may typically be precisely specified, and a clear approach can be carried out, when a change will have a predictable outcome.
Important - A strategy may be captured in a strategic plan, product vision, business case, product roadmap, or other artifacts.
Strategy Analysis Tasks
Follow this steps to setup a proper strategy:
- Analyze Current State: understands the business need and how it relates to the way the enterprise functions today. Sets a baseline and context for change.
- Define Future State: defines goals and objectives that will demonstrate that the business need has been satisfied and defines what parts of the enterprise need to change in order to meet those goals and objectives.
- Assess Risks: understands the uncertainties around the change, considers the effect those uncertainties may have on the ability to deliver value through a change, and recommends actions to address risks where appropriate.
- Define Change Strategy: performs a gap analysis between current and future state, assesses options for achieving the future state, and recommends the highest value approach for reaching the future state including any transition states that may be required along the way
Assess Risks
This step is crucial and it is good to remind the insights from some books, as by default we might fall into several biases when assesing risk.
Understanding the unfavorable effects of internal and external pressures on the firm during a transition to, or once in, the future state is the goal of Assess Risks. Making recommendations regarding a course of action can be done using knowledge about the potential effects of those forces.
Analyzing and managing risks are both a part of risk assessment. The existing state, a desired future state, a change itself, a change strategy, or any work being carried out by the organization could all provide risks.
The risks are analyzed for the:
- possible consequences if the risk occurs
- impact of those consequences
- likelihood of the risk
- potential time frame when the risk might occur
A change strategy is chosen or coordinated using the risk collection as an input. If the effort needed to mitigate the risk or the amount of danger outweighs the likely loss, a risk assessment may include deciding to accept the risk.
Risks can be handled to reduce their overall influence on value if they are recognized and the change is carried out.
Tools for Strategies
For better risk assesments, you should build awareness on how our mind thinks about risks, these books provide great insights about it: