AE24 RABAGO, JUSTIN

STRATEGIC BUSINESS ANALYSIS DELA CRUZ, JAYPEE

CBET-01-902E (ACCOUNTANCY) MIÑA, JELYN NICOLE
PROFESSOR CARMEL T. MOSURA REPANCOL, ALAYSSA GRACE

Reporting Topics:
 Strategic Business Analysis in the organization.
 When business is not clearly defined.
 The strategic business analysis and the business analyst.
 Describe strategic analysis; identify roles/responses and identify the business
need.
Learning Outcomes:
1. Discuss the purpose of having a Business Analysis standard.
2. Describe and explain strategic business analysis and its importance, purpose
and having a business Analysis standard.
Assigned Discussants/Reporters:
 Justin Rabago - Strategic Business Analysis in the organization.
 Jaypee Dela Cruz - When business is not clearly defined.
 Jelyn Nicole Miña - The strategic business analysis and the business analyst.
 Alayssa Grace Repancol - Describe strategic analysis; identify
roles/responses and identify the business need.

I. STRATEGIC BUSINESS ANALYSIS IN THE ORGANIZATION

A. BUSINESS ANALYSIS STANDARDS

DEFINITION

Business Analysis Standard is the standard for the practice of business analysis and for
those who perform business analysis tasks.

Recognized globally as the standard of business analysis, it guides business

professionals within the six core knowledge areas, describing the skills, deliverables,
and techniques that business analysis professionals require to achieve better business
outcomes.
SIX KNOWLEDGE AREAS

Business Analysis is all about tasks and techniques followed to qualify the business
needs and finding the business solution. The solution may include the system
development, process development or improvement and change in the organizational
structure. It is about the process to complete the tasks with quality and those who follow
these processes are known as business analysts. In some organizations, these
business analysts are referred as system analysts, business process analysts, business
system analysts and much more.
The six knowledge areas outlined to be dealt with in business analysis are the following:

1. Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring - covers the activities which a

business analyst should follow to determine the efforts involved in the future
steps. It mainly covers stakeholder analysis, managing risk, issues, and
requirements. It also covers the techniques to manage the requirements and the
track of the project progress.
2. Elicitation and Collaboration - Requirements are the most important aspect of the
project and understanding them correctly is of utmost importance. It’s not only
important to gather the requirements from the available sources (sources may
refer to stakeholders also) but also to elicit from them.
3. Requirements Analysis and Design Definition - covers the tasks that business
analysts perform in order to manage and maintain requirements and design
information from inception to retirement. These tasks describe establishing
meaningful relationships between related requirements and designs and
assessing, analyzing and gaining consensus on proposed changes to
requirements and designs.
 4. Requirements Life Cycle Management - defines how the business analyst
approaches managing and maintaining requirements. Tasks and techniques for
managing changes, conflicts, and issues related to requirements are also
described. Business analysts perform requirement management tasks as part of
requirements development work.
5. Solution Evaluation - This covers the assessment of the available solutions which
can help the stakeholders select the most appropriate solution to implement the
requirements. Once the best solution is selected the BA makes it sure that it
meets those requirements throughout the life cycle of the project.
6. Strategy Analysis - describes the business analysis work that must be performed
to collaborate with stakeholders in order to identify a need of strategic or tactical
importance (the business need), enable the enterprise to address that need, and
align the resulting strategy for the change with higher- and lower-level strategies.

B. STRATEGIC BUSINESS ANALYSIS

Strategic business analysis is the process of conducting research on a company
and its operating environment to formulate a strategy. It helps a company’s leaders
decide on priorities and goals, and form a long-term strategy for the business.
WHAT MAKES A GOOD STRATEGY?
A solid strategy reflects the core values of the organization. Your strategic team
should gather input from across the organization to ensure there’s alignment between
the strategy and each department’s priorities. All strategies should be actionable.
When creating a good strategy, focus on the desired end result (the goal). Your
strategy is the foundation for all activities within the organization, and how it’s crafted
will guide decision-making as your teams work to achieve those goals. For example, if a
furniture company has a goal to expand market share, its strategy could include offering
the most competitive prices and always being in stock of common offerings. Leadership
teams will make decisions that prioritize lower costs.
STRATEGIC BUSINESS ANALYSIS IN THE ORGANIZATION
Strategic business analysis requires a focus on all aspects of the organization.
The strategic business analysis includes both Internal and external analysis.
Internal Analysis External analysis
- aimed to assess the business's - aimed at examining all the factors
tangible and intangible resources in the external environment that
and assets, to see the overall may have an impact on business
business health. operations.

It gives a company the ability to understand its environment and formulate a

strategic plan accordingly.
Strategy
- defines the long-term goals and
how you’re planning to achieve
them. In other words, your strategy
gives you the path you need
toward achieving your
organization’s mission.
Tactics
- Tactics are much more concrete
and are often oriented toward
smaller steps and a shorter time
frame along the way. They involve
best practices, specific plans,
resources, etc. They’re also called
“initiatives.”

Strategic business analysis are those actions and decisions made by

management while trying to understand the impact of strategic events like: introduction
or development of new product line, setting up a factory in a new location, employing
key staff, selecting organizational structure, investing in new technology, managing
risks, complying with relevant laws and regulations, implementing changes, etc.

The purpose of evaluating business investment decisions on a strategic basis is

to meet the four most important goal of a business. The four goals of a business are: (1)
satisfying customer’s needs, (2) keeping employees happy at their job, (3) complying
with regulations, and (4) operating profitably.

II. WHEN BUSINESS NEEDS ARE NOT CLEARLY DEFINED

IDENTIFYING THE BUSINESS NEEDS
Business needs are gaps between the current state of a business and its goals.
Identifying business need is one of the critical roles of the Business Analyst. In order for
any project or initiative to be successful, an agreed upon business need must be
determined. This need may present itself as a problem or an opportunity.
 Business Analysts must be able to guide the business in articulating which of
these is the catalyst for the initiative prior to starting any business analysis work.
Projects without a clearly defined business need get drawn out due to issues such as
increased stakeholder conflict, poorly defined requirements, and excessive rework.
To determine the needs, business analysts must articulate:
 What objectives or goals are being served or attempted in specific business
area(s)
 What results or outcomes are desired
 What issues or problems are getting in the way
 What solutions are being suggested or considered for implementation or
adoption in order to get the business needs met
IMPORTANCE OF DEFINING THE BUSINESS NEED
1. Gives Purpose
Understanding the business need early in the process gives a clear understanding of
why the change is being initiated. The process of defining a desired future state uses
the identified business needs to evaluate potential solutions to ensure that each
potential solution satisfies the need and choose the solution that BEST satisfies those
needs. Any solution option that does not satisfy the business needs should be
eliminated from consideration because it serves no purpose.
Identifying the business need is also necessary in order to understand the current state.
Business needs related to the current state help to reveal existing constraints that need
to be taken into consideration when evaluating potential solutions. Having this additional
context upfront will lead to fewer problems and revisions as the project matures.
Addressing business needs from a current state perspective helps present why the
existing process is no longer viable.
2. Increases Motivation
Goals and objects are the core of any project or initiative. The ability to effectively
communicate these can aid in getting buy-in from stakeholders and the project team.
Understanding how the project's goals and objectives satisfy a business need can
motivate participants to put their best foot forward as they will be able to see how their
efforts have a positive impact on the organization.

3. Reduces Conflict
Initiatives with undefined business needs can be plagued with conflicts of interest due to
unaligned motives and competing priorities. Obtaining agreed upon business needs
provide a source of truth for project decisions to be based upon. Prioritizing
requirements and assessing change requests can be a source of contention when the
business needs are not clear. Once identified, business needs help facilitate
prioritization as the basis of which the activity is derived. Key stakeholders determine
weighting for the prioritization criteria based on their relevance to the business needs.
When stakeholders value different things, having criteria-based prioritization allows for
more objective evaluation of requirement ranking.
When changes to requirements are proposed an assessment must be made of the
change’s relevance and value. Clearly communicated business needs allow the
business analyst to quickly weed out change requests that are not in scope and more
effectively determine requirement changes that sufficiently address a need. Denied
change requests are better received by stakeholders when the business analyst can
explain that the requested change does not address the agreed upon business needs.
4. Guarantee Satisfaction
There is nothing worse than spending time and effort on a project only to end up with
stakeholders that are not satisfied with the end-result. Projects that lose sight of the
business need that initiated the change are destined to result in wasted time as
changes are made that do not adequately solve a problem or seize an opportunity the
way the stakeholders had envisioned. Business Analysts can increase the likelihood of
stakeholder satisfaction by validating requirements, designs and change requests
against the business need throughout the life of the project to ensure that needs are
being met.
STRATEGIC CHALLENGES THAT RESULT TO BUSINESS FAILURE
Nearly every organization is grappling with huge strategic challenges, often with
a need to reimagine its very purpose, identity, strategy, business model, and structure.
Most of these efforts to transform will fail. In most cases, they will miss the mark not
because the new strategy is flawed, but because the organization can’t carry it out.
Corporate transformations points to the six common interrelated reasons for
failures called hidden barriers. Leaders often don’t know — and sometimes do not want
to know — about hidden barriers that stand in the way of their institution’s
transformation.
Hidden barrier #1: Unclear values and conflicting priorities

Often, the underlying problem is not this or that strategy, but rather the process by
which the strategy was formed — or the lack of any such process. In these cases,
strategy is often developed by the leader along with the chief strategy or marketing
executive and only then communicated to the rest of the senior team for discussion. If
the whole team is not involved clarity and commitment are not possible.

Your organization is suffering from this barrier if you notice any of these signs:
  Lack of clearly defined and articulated direction — strategy and values — to
guide organizational behavior.
 Conflicting priorities, conflicts over resources, and poor execution of strategy,
due to functions and businesses each championing their own priorities.
 People feeling overloaded, due to everything being labeled a priority.
Hidden barrier #2: An ineffective senior team 

Top-team ineffectiveness was reported by lower levels in almost all the organizations
we studied. Most of the time, this ineffectiveness comes from the top team not speaking
with a common voice about strategy and value. The organization-wide consequences of
this were low trust, low commitment to strategic decisions, and different and sometimes
conflicting understandings of what the strategy even was. In all these cases, the leaders
and their senior teams had not solved the fundamental problem of getting everyone on
the senior team in the room to talk about the right things in the right way — honestly and
constructively.

Your organization is suffering from this barrier if you notice any of these signs among
the senior team:

 Most of the time spent in meetings is spent on information sharing and updates
on short-term operational details — sometimes known as “death by PowerPoint”
— rather than on confronting and resolving tough strategic and organizational
issues.
 There is little constructive conflict in meetings. The real decisions get made
outside the room.
 Members of the senior team don’t speak with a common voice about strategy
and priorities.
Hidden barrier #3: Ineffective leadership styles

When it comes to individual leadership, there are two ineffective styles: a top-down
approach that does not involve team members sufficiently and a laissez-faire,
nonconfrontational style. We’ve found you can attribute either style to the leader’s
personal aversion to conflict or to the lack of a clearly defined process for opening a
constructive debate and carrying it through to a decision (in other words, a decision-
making process). As a result, the leader doesn’t learn about what members of the
senior team or lower levels really think about what’s not working and why.

Your organization is suffering from this barrier if you notice any of these signs:

 The leader tends to get lost in the operational details and works “one level below
their pay grade.”
 The leader is not visible. They spend relatively little time on communicating
overall strategy or direction or on forcing constructive debate in order to resolve
contesting views.
  The leader does not confront issues or people directly to resolve festering
conflicts.
Hidden barrier #4: Poor coordination

Coordination across silos — functions and business units or geographic regions at the
corporate level critical to effective execution of strategy — is always a challenge.
Ineffective senior teams whose members defend their fiefdoms are unable to agree on
how to reorganize and reshape the culture to overcome naturally occurring obstacles to
coordination and collaboration. If there’s friction, then the cross-boundary team structure
for integrating value-creating activities either does not exist or is flawed and the lack of
honest, collective, and public conversation prevents the organization from recognizing
and correcting those flaws.

Your organization is suffering from this barrier if you notice any of these signs:

 It is painfully hard to execute on cross-functional, business, or geographic

initiatives, often even despite good personal relationships.
 Work on horizontal cross-boundary teams is seen as secondary to meeting the
goals for one’s own unit (e.g., function, business, or region).
 The roles, responsibilities, and decision rights of functions, business units, or
regions are unclear.
Hidden barrier #5: Inadequate leadership development

Research has shown that leaders usually develop not through training, but by carrying
out challenging new assignments. This requires managers to sacrifice for the larger
good by giving up their high potential leaders to other parts of the organization for their
development. When this doesn’t occur naturally and regularly it is tied to three hidden
barriers already discussed: An ineffective senior team (#2) in a siloed organization with
“fiefdoms” (#4) that does not have the perspective or capability to define collaborative
organizational values and behaviors it expects of leaders (#1), nor to design a talent-
management system that enables the cross-boundary developmental assignments
required to develop general management ability.

Your organization is suffering from this barrier if you notice any of these signs:

 It keeps coming down to the same usual suspects when something important
needs to get done.
 Too few opportunities are provided for leadership and management
development.
 The senior team does not review leadership talent regularly or offer career paths
that enable the development of general management capabilities.
Hidden barrier #6: Inadequate vertical communication

Inadequate honest vertical communication is like a bad game of Telephone. The

necessary information about an organization’s strategic direction and values does not
circulate from the senior team to the lower levels and the necessary information about
the barriers to that direction and those values is not recirculated from the lower levels to
the senior team. Rather than productive conversation, there is increased confusion.

Your organization is suffering from this barrier if you notice any of these signs:

 There are few forums for upward communication in which managers and
associates can openly and publicly communicate with senior management in a
low-risk environment.
 Open, public discussion of difficult issues goes against the cultural grain.
 Senior leaders rarely if ever ask lower levels to tell them about problems that
stand in the way of the company’s effectiveness or how those problems can be
improved.
Start with an assessment. If you recognized your organization in each or most of the six
hidden barriers described above, your organization is probably having a hard time
transforming itself in some important way. If most of the items in any given hidden
barrier category are true, that particular barrier is playing a strong role in undermining
the effectiveness and agility of your organization.

III. THE STRATEGIC BUSINESS ANALYSIS AND THE

BUSINESS ANALYST
STRATEGIC BUSINESS ANALYSIS
Strategic business analysis involves outcome focused thinking, simultaneously
understanding business context, business challenges, and the complexities of the
internal and external environment to frame the scope of the transformation, articulate
the business need/outcome, and shape the agenda for transformation.
Strategic business analysis requires a focus on all aspects of the organization. It
leverages business analysis, change leadership, and program and project
management. Strategic business analysis focuses on ‘what and why’, not the ‘how’ of
solution implementation.
While traditional business analysis deal with individual items, strategic business
analysis looks at things from both corporate perspective and longer-term view.
Strategic business analysis in modern day business is hard to separate from strategic
management and planning where management have to battle with the ever-changing
business environment. Strategic business analysis depicts the role of strategy in
business.

CHARACTERISTICS OF STRATEGIC BUSINESS ANALYSIS

Long term in nature: for any business analysis to be strategic in nature, it must have a
long-term view. When designing a balanced scorecard for example, management
should think of the impact that each target and objectives that is contained in the
strategic map will do to the long run survival of the company.
Every company wants to have a larger market share in any chosen industry, but care
should be taken to ensure that activities of managers now while trying to meet their
target would not jeopardize the organizational long-term goals.
Focus on external events and activities: senior managers spend about 60% of their
time gathering and interpreting information from outside source which will significantly
improve decision making process. They interact with people and organizations outside
the entity in order to achieve this goal.
Place more emphasis on qualitative matters: in as much as financial indicators play
vital role in shaping the fortune a business entity, attention should also be given to those
qualitative factors that an establishment cannot afford to ignore, else, business failure
will imminent. A qualitative emphasis means that detailed calculations and manipulation
of figures are unnecessary. All that is needed is the big picture.
ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF STRATEGIC BUSINESS ANALYSIS
1. Advantages
• Monitor and control progress through management accounting controls
• Makes management think in advance
• Optimizes the use of scarce resources
• Ensures consistency in the pursuit of goals and objectives
• Seamlessly make organization fit into its environment
• Guides the path of the business

2. Disadvantages
• Could be expensive in terms of time and money
• Could lead to bottleneck and bureaucracy
• Not so useful in managing crisis
• Blindfold management from identifying and taking opportunities as they arise.
THE BUSINESS ANALYST
Business Analysts performs collaborative work with stakeholders to identify a need for
strategic or tactical importance called the business needs and enable the enterprise to
address that need and align the resulting strategy for the change higher and lower-level
strategies.
Business analysts collaborate with stakeholders to define the scope of the solution and
gain an understanding of the organizational needs in a way that will provide a
successful future outcome. Besides, they examine the value of the solution if a certain
change is implemented and consider the overall context in the organization while
devising a change strategy.
Strategic business analysts identify business needs and solutions within the context of
the overall direction of a company. They develop and implement critical business
solutions through information gathering, synthesis, review, and testing. They secure and
allocate resources, manage implementation schedules, and facilitate meetings.
Strategic business analysts are commonly part of the IT field and usually work in the
financial, banking, computer, or IT industries. A strategic business analyst's projects can
involve software development and acquisition, systems development, and process
management.
ROLES OF BUSINESS ANALYSTS
The key role a business analyst plays when conducting an analysis of a business is
requirements management. The modern business environment is complex and the
business analyst’s role is to maintain requirements through constant change by using
innovation to do so. 
 
This means their role is to develop technical solutions to problems in a business or to
further a company’s sales revenue by defining, documenting and analyzing
requirements. When they use their role to manage requirements during a project, they
begin to help fulfill business needs. 

Business analysts perform an important role in the development of a strategy analysis in

different ways. Business analysts have the following roles within a strategy analysis:
a) A business analyst helps to carry out the investigation, especially on problems that
face the organization. The business analyst has a solid understanding of the business
as a whole, which is vital in moving the company forward.
b) A business analyst helps a business in ensuring that any change that is made is in
line with the business strategy.
c) Business analysts have the organizational and investigative skills to drive thorough
research that results in a beneficial analysis. This results in the ability for management
to make important strategic decisions.

IV. THE STRATEGIC ANALYSIS PROCESS

STRATEGY FORMULATION
Strategy formulation is the process of using available knowledge to document the
intended direction of a business and the actionable steps to reach its goals. This
process is used for resource allocation, prioritization, organization-wide alignment, and
validation of business goals.
Strategy formulation includes developing a vision and mission, identifying an
organization’s external opportunities and threats, determining internal strengths and
weaknesses, establishing long-term objectives, generating alternative strategies, and
choosing particular strategies to pursue.
A strategy is a plan of actions taken by managers to achieve the company’s overall
goal and other subsidiary goals. It often determines the success of a company. In
strategy, a company is essentially asking itself, “Where do you want to play and how are
you going to win?”
VISION, MISSION, AND VALUES
To develop a business strategy, a company needs a very well-defined understanding of
what it is and what it represents. Strategists need to look at the following:
Vision – What it wants to achieve in the future (5-10 years)
Mission Statement – What business a company is in and how it rallies people
Values – The fundamental beliefs of an organization reflecting its commitments and
ethics
After gaining a deep understanding of the company’s vision, mission, and values,
strategists can help the business undergo a strategic analysis. The purpose of a
strategic analysis is to analyze an organization’s external and internal environment,
assess current strategies, and generate and evaluate the most successful strategic
alternatives.
STRATEGY ANALYSIS PROCESS

1. Perform an environmental analysis of current strategies

Starting from the beginning, a company needs to complete an environmental analysis of
its current strategies. Internal environment considerations include issues such as
operational inefficiencies, employee morale, and constraints from financial issues.
External environment considerations include political trends, economic shifts, and
changes in consumer tastes.
2. Determine the effectiveness of existing strategies
A key purpose of a strategic analysis is to determine the effectiveness of the current
strategy amid the prevailing business environment. Strategists must ask themselves
questions such as: Is our strategy failing or succeeding? Will we meet our stated goals?
Does our strategy align with our vision, mission, and values?
3. Formulate plans
If the answer to the questions posed in the assessment stage is “No” or “Unsure,” we
undergo a planning stage where the company proposes strategic alternatives.
Strategists may propose ways to keep costs low and operations leaner. Potential
strategic alternatives include changes in capital structure, changes in supply chain
management, or any other alternative to a business process.
4. Recommend and implement the most viable strategy
Lastly, after assessing strategies and proposing alternatives, we reach a
recommendation. After assessing all possible strategic alternatives, we choose to
implement the most viable and quantitatively profitable strategy. After producing a
recommendation, we iteratively repeat the entire process. Strategies must be
implemented, assessed, and re-assessed. They must change because business
environments are not static.
CHALLENGES FACED BY MANAGEMENT IN THE PROCESS OF STRATEGICALLY
ANALYZING A BUSINESS
 Identifying organizational objectives and matching it with its environment
 Identifying the need for change and initiate both the incremental and
transformational change
 Blending the conflicting needs of stakeholders in such a way that the knockoff
effect on the business will not be felt so much
 Striking a balance between short term and long-term concerns