Part 3: The Pink Needs to Go!
By Retta Witter, Senior Consultant, J. Geiger Consulting, Inc.
When you’re working on a project, an important part is understanding the long-term goal. My family’s long term goal is to update the house ourselves, for the most part (we love Mark our Master Electrician very much so he will do the electrical work we need). Along the way, we’ll teach our son basic house maintenance skills. A business, business segment or department may have long term goals that need to be broken down into smaller more easily attainable goals. This is a common strategic approach and also a BA knowledge area: Strategy Analysis (Part 4 – Business Analysis Body of Knowledge Blog Series).
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When addressing a long term need, it’s critical to understand that decisions made today will impact available decisions in the future…lest the dreaded rework enter the picture. The example in the pantry work was the flooring. Our entry way/front hallway had pink ceramic tiles which I DID NOT want to continue with moving forward and the back end of that hallway is where we created the walk-in pantry. Our pantry flooring leads into our kitchen flooring which then leads to the dining room— I think you get the picture. The flooring will need to work with our future cabinets and countertops as well as our entry way. The flooring is what we could call foundational work to any room you are in. Strategy Analysis helps to provide context to the Requirements Analysis and Design Definition (RADD Blog 7) for a given change. It helps with informing the need and the solution scope. For the flooring, the need is to have it match or flow nicely throughout the house and remove the pink. When we redo our kitchen, the plan is to remove the pink flooring and pink countertops in there to better match our style. I am not a pink kind of girl at ALL.
Strategy Analysis Tasks:
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Analyze Current State: Too much pink and the flooring is tired and warn out. It’s at least 30 years old. We need to update our living spaces.
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Define Future State: A nice natural wood looking flooring that we can install throughout the hallways, kitchen and dining room. It should meet our style, taste and add value to our home.
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Access Risks: If we don’t buy all the flooring at once we may not be able to get a good match later on— the flooring could be discontinued— but where do we store it until we are ready to use it all? What happens to the house value if we don’t update it as it needs it?
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Define Change Strategy: Fortunately for me and my husband we like the same type of flooring so we are able to agree on what we liked, then it was a matter of looking at all the items we need for our long term plan, cabinets, countertops, baseboards and to determine the order in which to do our projects.
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In a business this is happening all the time in many departments and in many ways. If one thinks about it, this also happens in our everyday lives all the time too. For example, my son has been figuring out what to do after high school. This entails some sort of education beyond high school and some strategic thought about what to do for a career. Thinking about strategy analysis— how have you used it lately?
Next week I’ll be starting another 6-part series covering another chapter in the BABOK: Underlying Competencies. This series will be finished with a round table discussion on the impact of these competencies on the success of a project or team.