Business Planning and Enterprise Analysis

Want a way to help senior leadership have confidence they are investing in a valuable project?  Are technology efforts planned, but with little knowledge of the impact on current processes?  Do business processes need significant improvement?

Before investing in expensive initiatives, make sure you have a firm understanding of the business problems you are trying to address.  By performing domain analysis, that is, by documenting the business processes and information needs in an organizational area, you get a holistic view of your operations, your bottlenecks and, most importantly, your opportunities for improvement.  These efforts, sometimes called “discovery projects,” can lead to a business case for one or more solution efforts.

Seasoned business analysts can play a critical role in helping to discover and define the right projects to undertake.  BAs have many skills that make them uniquely suited to this task – not the least is their ability to elicit information and to analyze and organize that information so that critical decisions can be made with confidence.  BAs are key players in business planning and enterprise analysis efforts, especially when they have deep practical experience in the techniques and a wide-ranging perspective across the organization.

But many organizations do not have BAs with these high skill levels within their walls and need to call on outside expertise.  DEA’s experience and singular focus on business analysis makes us an excellent option, because:

• Our senior BAs are skilled at documenting business processes and identifying problem areas that could benefit from solutions, technical or otherwise.
• Because we’re not situated in a siloed business unit, our BAs can drive a broader perspective across the enterprise
• We use a repository for models, business goals, and opportunity areas.  That means the models can continue to live – they’re not just sitting in a file somewhere, but are up-to-date assets that can be made available to all for education or for helping to evaluate future improvements. 
• We know how to take the business process information and turn it into solution requirements that can be used for RFPs or as the foundation for in-house technical projects.
• We can work toward building an enterprise architecture that catalogs your organization’s intellectual property and allows for sharing of knowledge and assets.  We can help you  determine what knowledge to include in your enterprise architecture, how the knowledge can be developed and maintained, and how the knowledge can be structured and stored.
• We can help you gather the pertinent information to build a business case for moving forward.

Documented business processes provide an ongoing vision, foster continued process improvement, provide the backbone for business agility, and clarify what the organization really does.

What work products can you expect?

• Industry-standard business process models in BPMN notation with annotations to illustrate areas of opportunity for improvement
• Metrics and information needs of the processes
• An analysis of product impact
• An inventory of improvement opportunities and their support of business goals
• Prioritization and impact analysis of changes
• An executive summary report for the top initiative recommendations
• Supporting information for a business case for moving forward

Some of the things we hear:

“I never realized that what we did in our department had such an effect on others”

“No one ever asked my opinion before.  It was eye-opening to sit in the same room and realize how differently the ‘same’ job is done in different branches.”

Contact DEA at info@doreenevans.com and let us know how we can help your project.