Business leaders must continually pursue changes within their organisation: to fulfil their strategic vision, to respond to external factors, and sometimes simply to keep the lights on! Identifying the right changes and making these happen can be incredibly complex and challenging – but help is at hand! Business analysts bring a range of skills and talents to support business leaders in achieving their objectives.
In this article, I examine five scenarios in which deploying a BA can help business leaders achieve their goals and bring about better outcomes for their organisation, people, and customers.
1 – You’ve got a new strategic vision – so what now?
Business leaders put a lot of effort into crafting their strategic vision for the organisation, and articulating a fresh picture of the future can be an inspirational moment. However, that energy and inspiration can quickly dissipate if it’s not clear what practically needs to change to turn the vision into reality. Even within an individual business unit, business leaders typically have a vast range of levers they could potentially pull – product/service design, operating practices, use of technology, organisational structures, culture – choosing the right combination is really tough!
Business analysts can help by analysing gaps between the current and desired future states. These gaps may be found anywhere in your operating model – how processes operate, how teams are structured, what customers experience, or what technology is used. BAs come equipped with skills to model and analyse how the organisation works and how it performs, to analyse the likely effects of changes, and to effectively communicate ideas and proposals among stakeholder groups.
A BA can also help formulate and scope plans or programmes to address these gaps, evaluating options and prioritising changes to maximise fulfilment your strategic goals. Perhaps most importantly, a business analyst can help ensure changes are all pulling together in the right direction, minimising wasted effort from confused or conflicting objectives.
2 – When change is forced upon you
Organisations often have to undertake change in response to external demands. Keeping up with changing regulatory requirements is a prime example of this. While your people may have the subject matter expertise to understand the new rules and regulations, business analysts can help you determine how your people, processes, and technology need to adjust in response.
While compliance with a regulatory change will be mandatory, the specific changes made to reach that compliance will often be drawn from a range of options. A BA can help business leaders evaluate those options in terms of effectiveness, potential costs, risks, or trade-offs. This can be really useful if a “day-one” set of outcomes are required while other changes may be factored in over time.
3 – Business leaders seeking operational improvements
For-profit organisations will naturally seek to improve profitability or value for shareholders. Non-profit organisations or public bodies will still need to reduce their costs or pursue greater efficiency. Any organisation will want to find ways of improving customer experience or outcomes, become more sustainable, or improve staff engagement and satisfaction.
Business analysts can lead initiatives to drive improvements of all these kinds.
A BA can analyse your processes, identifying inefficiencies or waste, where things are going wrong, where practices don’t align with the organisation’s values or goals, and examine the root causes of issues. They can also lead your people in finding creative solutions and weighing-up options for improvements. Business analysts are masters at examining the situation from multiple angles to understand the practical implications of possible changes.
BAs can also help articulate the expected benefits of any changes, and support tracking these benefits after changes have been implemented.
A business analyst can also help design and create an ecosystem to support continuous improvement of business operations.
4 – You’re developing your products or services
Whether your organisation provides products (physical or technology) or services to customers, a BA can help provide clarity around the offering and the underlying business design that supports it.
A business analyst can facilitate product and service design, helping you understand and articulate customers’ real needs and drawing out the features that will form the company’s offering.
BAs can also “join the dots” between customer needs, product/service design, and practical implications (e.g. around process design, technology, or resourcing).
In many organisations, business analysts are involved in the Agile development of technology. Here they help Product Owners establish the right features to include and how the product operates within the wider business context (e.g. where data is used, how business processes interact with the software, how features fit within regulatory frameworks etc.).
5 – Your organisation must make a big leap
Organisational restructures, mergers/acquisitions, replacing core technology, digital transformation, outsourcing business operations – these are all massive changes with wide-reaching implications for the organisation.
Understanding and articulating all of the component parts of a change of this scale requires deep investigation, analysis, and design skills. Thankfully, business analysts come armed with the perfect set of talents for transformational change!
A BA can investigate exactly how things are working today, can facilitate the design work to clarify intent for the future, establish the gaps between the two, and help you choose the best ways of bridging those gaps. A business analyst can move between high-level, abstract ideas and very specific details, and can therefore support organisational design work, facilitate the creation of new processes and procedures, lead investment appraisals, scope projects, and undertake detailed requirements specification for technology development/procurement.
BAs can also help ensure that any changes made are fit-for-purpose (leading business acceptance testing of new technology, for example), and help assess benefits achieved against expectations or projections.
What can business leaders do?
A common thread runs through all of these scenarios – a BA helps your organisation understand the situation, visualise a better future, establish what needs to change to get there, and ensure those changes deliver the expected value. In addition to practical investigation and analysis skills, business analysts also come with listening, communication, leadership, and facilitation skills to help engage your people and bring them with you on the change journey.
Business leaders can deploy BAs to help them find the best changes to pursue, to enact them effectively, and to maximise the value created in doing so. You may already have business analysts in your organisation – in which case consider whether they’re currently being used to best effect – or you could consider developing a new BA function to support fulfilment of your strategic goals. Talk to a business analyst about your strategic goals and plans for the organisation; they can guide you in the most effective ways to utilise their capabilities.
If you’d like to find out more about engaging or deploying business analysis in your organisation, why not get in touch for a chat?