Tag: Best Practices

The Unique Competing Space: A Framework for Evaluating the Competitive Landscape and Strategic Options

Written by Oluwakorede Asuni on October 25, 2023. Posted in Articles.

The Unique Competing Space (UCS) is a macro-level strategy visualisation framework, which enables teams to understand the broader scope of customer needs, evaluate how well their offerings are meeting customer needs, and evaluate how well their competition is also meeting the needs.

The UCS can easily be one of the tools in a firm or team’s arsenal for probing and situating “…the firm’s strategic position in its greater competitive context”^[1].

First introduced by George Tovstiga in their book Strategy in Practice: A Practitioner’s Guide to Strategic Thinking. The framework is often presented as a venn diagram consisting of three overlapping individual circles that overlap to provide a view of the firm or team’s competitive space unique to them, the opportunities open to them and the challenges on offer by the competition(s).

First each circle.

Figure: Components of the UCS framework

Customer needs:

Customers are the reasons any business is in business. They are the stakeholders whom businesses seek to serve and create value for. It is in meeting their stated, or, observed, or perceived needs that businesses indeed create value for these stakeholders, who in turn pay for the goods and or services the business has provided them. When or if satisfied, these stakeholders return to make repeat purchases as their needs may dictate and the business’ bouquet of unique offerings, prices, and customer experience may afford.

The firm’s offerings:

These are individual or collective products or services or both, that a business offers to its customers as a way of meeting the customers’ needs.

These offerings are often dictated by the alignment of the firm’s capabilities, enabling regulatory, social and cultural environments, and noted customer needs.

The competition’s offering:

Rarely is it the case that there isn’t an alternative or substitute product or service that can meet a customer’s needs other than the one offered by any one firm. This collection of offerings from one or more competing entities servicing the same market or market vertical or segment combines to make up the competitors’ offerings.

And now to the Unique Competing Space:

Figure2: The UCS framework

The UCS emerges when the customer needs overlap with the firm’s offering and, the competition’s offerings where those exist, are accounted for.

The portion of the Venn diagram where the customers’ needs uniquely overlap with the firm’s offerings is the firm’s UCS.

A firm’s strategic objective could be:

to defend that space from shrinking – if it is large enough or
to grow that space if isn’t large enough and there are potential benefits to the firm for growing the UCS or
To exit the UCS completely if it is shrinking and there isn’t any value to the business for defending or growing the space.

Using the UCS:

Figure 3: The UCS framework with conceptual labels

To use the UCS, it may be best for teams to gather around a large whiteboard with sticky notes (or an electronic equivalent – think Miro, Mural etc.) and then create the Venn diagram representation of the customers’ needs, the firm’s offerings or capabilities and the competition’s offerings.

On the sticky notes write down:

All known customer needs that both the firm and their competitors are not currently meeting: place these on the part of the Customer needs component of the UCS that isn’t overlapping with the firm’s offering or the competitor’s offerings. This portion of Figure 3 is labelled C1.
All known customer needs that the firm is currently meeting: place these on the overlapping section of Customer needs and Firm offering components of the UCS labelled C3 in Figure 3.
All known customer needs that the firm is currently addressing and that also have alternative or substitute offerings from competitors: place these on the overlapping section of Customer needs, the Firm’s offerings and Competitor offerings components of the UCS labelled C5 in Figure 3.
All known customer needs that are not being met by the firm, but are being met by the competition: place these on the overlapping section of Customer needs and Competitor offerings components of the UCS – labelled C2 in Figure 3.
All firm’s offerings (and available capabilities) that may or may not overlap with those of the competitor but which are not currently being utilised to meet customer needs: and place these on the non-overlapping section of the Firm’s offerings component of the UCS – labelled A2 in figure 3.
All of the known offerings from competitors which isn’t currently offered by the firm or meeting any known customer needs: place this in the non-overlapping portion of the Competitor’s offering component of the UCS, labelled A2 in Figure 3.
All known competitor offerings which are also offered by the firm, but meet no known need of the customers: place this in the portion of the UCS framework labelled A1, where the Competitor’s offering overlaps the firm’s offering but both are not known to be meeting any known customer needs.

What to do with the information:

In general, the UCS helps the firm see the size of their UCS relative to that of the competition(s), and can provide clear inputs into the strategic choices the firm makes.

In some cases, these options include but are not limited to:

Defend the UCS
Customers often end up churning for one reason or the other, and the goal of every business should be to retain customers for as long as they can manage and also attract new customers. When customers churn, it could only mean that the UCS shrinks one churned customer after the other, with the implication, if unarrested, of a negative impact on a business’ bottom line.So how does a firm keep customers? Listen to customers.
Observe what they love most about your products and your competition’s offerings. Ask what can come along and replace your firm’s offerings in your customer’s mind (clue – look at those things already replacing your firm’s offerings).Lock customers in (though customers protest malicious lock-ins, however, you are better off locking customers in by ensuring your offering is the most delightful to the customer). Apple had no business making watches, right? But it risks losing some iPhone users to Android OEMs who have leapfrogged the smartwatch economy and were building ecosystems between their watches and mobile devices. By introducing the Apple Watch, Apple figured out a way to lock customers into their ecosystem, whilst selling more to the same customers (people buy a phone once every two years on the average, and Apple figured out to sell to the same customers a second device which relies on the first one within the same or adjacent sales circle – both defending and growing their UCS in one fell swoop.
Grow the firm’s UCS
Growing the UCS could require selling more to the same customers, selling to more customers or both. Additionally, it could also imply meeting customers needs that were not previously a focus for the firm but that has a great potential for cementing the existing relationship between your firm and customers. You may recall that during COVID, UberEats which was a predominantly food delivery business expanded to also deliver medicines and small packages – both of which have now become additional sources of income for UBER and in a way, has expanded the UCS for Uber.

Closing notes

Whilst most strategy teams and firms understand that having a current bird’s eye view of the competitive landscape in which they compete, the UCS may be one easy-to-use framework for doing so and carrying all stakeholders within the business along for the ride.

^[1] Chapter 5 Strategic Analysis II: High-Level Sense Making: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/strategy-in-practice/9781118519271/chapter05.html (accessed: 18/09/2023)

Always Ask Why: A Practical Example

Written by Adrian Reed on October 18, 2023. Posted in Articles.

I don’t know about you, but I find that I can’t turn my business analysis brain off. I find myself wanting to improve just about every process that I experience, and I often find myself conducting business analysis on the processes that I experience as a customer.

This happened to me recently when a company asked me for a physical ‘wet signature’ on a form. This wouldn’t be unusual if I was in the same physical location as the person requesting the signature, but I wasn’t—they were literally going to email me a PDF form for me to print out, sign, scan in and email back. Even though Adobe PDF has a signature function (and I have a graphics tablet, so I can literally do the same signature electronically), this wasn’t good enough. It had to be old-school pen on paper. I eventually complied, deciding that I’d rationalize it by calling the process “retro” and “vintage”…

Badly “Improved” Processes Might Be MORE Risky:

In situations like this, I always want to ask ‘why’ to understand the underlying reasons that things work in a particular way. In this case, if we were to ask why I suspect the underlying answer would be that an old paper process had been replaced, with each step being recreated electronically. In this context, ultimately, a signature acts as a way of authorizing something to happen.

You can almost imagine the conversation with a group of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). One of them is adamant that we couldn’t possibly accept electronic signatures. The legal & compliance SME says that electronic signatures are completely valid, but there is reluctance from other stakeholders for other reasons. Perhaps there’s a perception that by getting a physical signature there is less risk… or perhaps there are other reservations. Some might be genuine, others might be founded on unsubstantiated fears or assumptions.

Left unchecked, there is a risk that ‘we’ll do things the way we’ve always done them, just in an electronic format’. This can lead to the worst of both worlds where risk is increased and customers are inconvenienced:

Alternation: I could have altered the PDF before I printed it and signed it (it’s relatively easy to edit a PDF). Unless they check it word-for-word they’ll never know, and since it’s scanned, auto-comparing will be difficult.
Verification: They didn’t actually have my signature on file. If they weren’t comparing it against anything, then really what is the point? I could have scrawled any old signature and it probably would have been accepted.
Security: Unencrypted email isn’t a secure transmission format. Even though it was relatively low-risk mundane information, it’s liable to interception en route. Plus emails can be spoofed so there’s a risk of a customer being impersonated.
Scanners: How many customers have scanners? What about people who just take photos on their phone, will that be sufficient?

These are just four examples, but they illustrate a key point: The process probably isn’t achieving what it actually set out to do. Yes, you are getting a physical signature. But if the aim is to get a secure, authenticated nonreputable authorisation for something… then the process is failing!

Always Ask Why: “Good” Questions Make A Difference

The key to avoiding situations like this is to ask why, in varied ways, lots of times. Do this and you’ll get to the core purpose of a process, or process step. In their book “Mastering the Requirements Process: Getting The Requirements Right”, James & Suzanne Robertson call this “The Essence”. In this example ‘getting physical signature’ might be the current step, but the essence is ‘authorize transaction’ (or whatever).A key point here is that if you understand the essence, you can question any underlying assumptions or business rules. It’s possible to ask “how else might we be able to do this”. If the aim is to ‘authorize transaction’ then there are countless other ways of doing this that are more secure and verifiable than a scanned PDF in an email. You could even use the Brown Cow model to question any underlying assumptions that have been made.

Asking these questions will help encourage stakeholders to think about the true essence of the process, and about how it might change in the future. A half hour discussion now might save tens of thousands of processing time later, once the process is implemented.

This is yet another area where BAs add significant value by helping to ensure things improve in a way that maximizes the benefits that will be delivered both to the organization, and to its customers.

Building a Business Analysis Center of Excellence: A Blueprint for Success

Written by Abhi Puri on September 21, 2023. Posted in Articles.

A Business Analysis Center of Excellence (BACoE) is a dynamic and strategic organizational asset that can significantly enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of business analysis processes. Often referred to as a Competency Development Center, a BACoE serves as a hub for collaboration, best practice management, and competency development in a specific functional area. This article explores the key elements of establishing a BACoE and its pivotal role in increasing business success.

Defining a Business Analysis Center of Excellence

A BACoE is more than just a department; it’s an organization that promotes collaboration, manages best practices, and elevates the competency level within a specific domain. Whether established as a virtual entity integrated into the broader organizational structure or a distinct group with a dedicated budget and authority, a BACoE can be staffed with either full-time or part-time members.

Creating a BACoE signifies an organization’s move toward higher organizational maturity, and as maturity increases, the risk of project failures tends to decrease.

Responsibilities of the BACoE

One of the primary responsibilities of a BACoE is to ensure consistent quality in business analysis artifacts throughout the organization. Variations in the quality and format of these artifacts can lead to project risks. The BACoE takes the lead in standardizing the expected quality, format, and presentation of artifacts, initially through training and artifact templates. Additionally, it promotes the use of standardized tools among business analysts and provides support for projects to maintain consistent professionalism.

Functions of a Business Analysis Center of Excellence

A well-established BACoE should provide support and oversight in several critical areas:

Tactical Project Assistance: The BACoE offers assistance to projects through project coaches, mentors, and staff. This includes planning business analysis activities at the project’s initiation phase, ensuring appropriate resources and approaches are in place, and providing resources as needed.

Methodology: The BACoE defines standard approaches for business analysis planning, monitoring, and execution. A methodology aligned with industry best practices, such as the IIBA®’s Business Analysis Body of Knowledge® (BABOK®), serves as a foundation for training and practice within the organization.

Best Practices: The BACoE curates a collection of company and industry-best practices for business analysis and artifact creation. This includes standards for use cases, data models, process models, and other documentation types.

Learning and Professional Development: It manages a competency model, training curricula, certifications, assessments, and practices for knowledge sharing. This includes the maintenance of knowledge repositories, discussion forums, and collaborative tools like “wikis.”

Tool Standards: The BACoE provides guidance on tools essential for preparing high-quality, standardized business analysis artifacts, including requirements management and visual modeling tools. It also maintains a repository of templates and guides for artifact preparation.

Forming a Business Analysis Center of Excellence

The establishment of a BACoE involves a series of steps:

Assessment of Current State: Evaluate the organization’s current business analysis maturity by assessing the skills of business analysts and gathering feedback from project managers.

Determination of Desired Future State: Define the level of maturity needed to support projects effectively.

Analysis of Gaps: Identify gaps between the current and desired states.

Specification of Desired Level of Maturity: Clearly outline the competency model and practices required to bridge the gaps.

Development of Competency Model: Create a competency model that aligns with the organization’s needs and industry best practices.

Dissemination of Improvements: Implement strategies to disseminate competency improvements through training, mentoring, and internal resources.

Maintenance and Continuous Enhancement: Regularly assess and enhance competencies through retrospectives, surveys, and ongoing training.

Best of BATimes: Business Analyst Role in COTS Projects

Written by Maksym Lysikov on September 13, 2023. Posted in Articles.

Many tech companies offer commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products.

Such products allow to meet their clients’ business needs relatively fast, comparing to the development of the new IT solutions from scratch. However, a COTS product for a complex solution such as ERP, CRM, laboratory or hospital information systems requires considerable time and effort to be invested into the configuration. Hence organizations usually involve a separate implementation team of professionals familiar with the COTS product to adapt it for the company’s needs.

COTS vendors normally provide the implementation service to their clients. This can vary from company to company, but oftentimes it includes discovery phase, configuration or customization of the system according to the business needs, user training and making sure the project goes live.

This article describes the BA role in the implementation of the COTS projects and cooperation between a COTS product team and BA from an implementation team.

BA in Implementation Project

One might say that COTS projects do not require business analysis since there seem to be no significant development activities. However, COTS projects could vary from completely out-of-the-box to complex solutions with lots of configuration and additional customization (codding) involved. In the latter case we can and shall involve the standard business analysis activities:

Plan your business analysis work. Ask yourself what is your business analysis approach (adaptive vs predictive)? Who are your stakeholders? Do you have a requirements governance process in place?
Requirements elicitation and analysis. This covers discovering the current and desirable states, conducting workshops and interviews, document analysis, etc. Don’t forget to elicit and document any gaps if a COTS solution is not capable to meet some of the business needs.
Requirements modeling. COTS projects normally do not require the complete functional specification since the solution is predefined already. However, there are many other requirement views which can be useful for the configuration project. We will discuss that in the section that follows.
Solution evaluation. Define your KPI and measure if they improved compared to the legacy solution.
Configuration. System configuration is normally out of business analysis scope, but some companies tend to involve business analysts in such activities. In any case, the BA should know how the system works and understand the solution limitations.

Requirements Modeling

As mentioned before, it might not be required to document all the functional requirements for the already predefined solution like COTS product. However, not documenting requirements at all could result in certain drawbacks:

Apparently, external stakeholders, like end users, and internal stakeholders, like testing or support teams, will need at least some documentation that describes how the system behaves.
Without modeled requirements, there is no way to validate the requirements before they are actually implemented and the system is demoed for users. What if you only validate your assumptions by demoing already configured piece of functionality? That is right, you will most likely need to reconfigure the system again once you receive the feedback, and then again and again. Nevertheless, you still can present out-of-the-box functionality which doesn’t require any configuration efforts and use it as a starting point to collect the initial feedback from your users.
The change management process can suffer. Imagine that you documented the requirements for the billing module in the bunch of meeting notes, and now 4 weeks after the requirements were implemented the clients insists that some of the billing transactions are not calculated correctly. Would it be easier to refer to the SRS part where all business rules are documented, or try to find the relevant emails?

To address the above issues, the BA can use a variety of the business analysis techniques which will be applicable for the project and audience. For example:

Roles and Permission Matrix: most of the COTS solutions allow roles configuration and assigning permissions. Start with defining and documenting user roles and their permissions. The organization chart can come in handy to define the roles.
Process Modeling: you can elicit and model the current processes using either the standard notations such as BPMN, UML or come up with a simple drawing which doesn’t follow any notation standard but clear for the audience. The next step will be to review the models with stakeholders, define if anything should be changed in the process and update the model. Once done, you can supplement the model with the additional requirements view, e.g. use cases.
Gap Analysis: as the BA on the implementation project you need to identify the areas in your client’s business which are not covered by the COTS package and address it to the product team. Bear in mind that it is always a good idea to think about the potential workarounds you can offer to the client, before escalating the gap to the product team. That way the client can access the desired functionality earlier, the product backlog will not be overloaded and there will be no need to overengineer the product with the functionality potentially used by only 1 client. So at first always assess if it is possible to configure the system in an alternative way or if the client can agree to do certain steps manually.
User Stories: this is a simple and popular way of specifying the requirements, especially if you follow the agile approach and need to deploy the COTS solution incrementally. It is also quite convenient to prioritize the requirements using the user story form.
Use Case and Scenarios: you can document each separate business flow in the use case. Use cases can easily be converted into the test scripts and serve for validation purposes.
Business Rules Analysis: it is always a good idea to elicit and document business rules. Make sure you have a process in place to update business rules due to external or internal changes.
Interface Analysis: your COTS product will most likely not be used as a standalone solution and will communicate with other components. Define and document interfaces specific to your client.
Data requirements: usually a COTS solution replaces an outdated legacy solution and you need to take care of the historical data. And it is better to define data requirements upfront before you realize you cannot import 256 characters long text into the address column for one of the top customer’s client. Ask yourself the following questions: do you need to import the historical data into your brand new COTS solution? will the legacy data fit the new system? how will you handle the cases when the data doesn’t fit the new COTS product?

Provide Feedback to your Product Team

A good way to improve the product is to listen to your user’s feedback. And when it comes to COTS project who is the best candidate to elicit, analyze and document all the client’s concerns and frustrations? Yes, you’ve got it right! It is the implementation BA or anyone else who fulfills this role in an organization. And thus the BA is the one who should establish a process to communicate all business concerns and client gaps to COTS product team.

For example, the BA can create a separate Wiki page per a client where they can list all gaps discovered during the project and communicate them to the product team. The product team can then collect the feedback from all clients, prioritize the gaps for the future releases and share the roadmap with the implementation team.

Conclusion

COTS implementation projects can be a challenge for the BA as they differ from the traditional IT development projects. However, with the right attitude and a bit of creative thinking, we can adopt the BA techniques and establish the process which will bring value to the implementation projects and help improve the COTS product.

Published: 2019/08/08

Best of BATimes: 5 Characteristics of Effective Business Analysts

Written by Giorgos Sioutzos on September 6, 2023. Posted in Articles.

“Business Analyst” is not just a title. Is not a job. It is a mindset, a concept and a structured process executed by people in different positions inside an organization. It’s more like, an approach of making the things happen from the realization of business need towards the final implementation.

It’s easy to call yourself business analyst but difficult to be a good and effective business analyst. The field can be great fun, and very rewarding, but you need to be prepared. People who take on business analysis roles typically believe they need three things: skills and experience, a bit of marketing, and an interest in working in a variety of environments. However successful business analysts know they need much more than a technical expertise and specific skills. They need a mindset and a specific attitude in order to serve with the best possible and feasibly way their clients business needs.

What is expected from business analysts can vary widely. And what they actually need you to do can be completely different from what they expect. Business analysis is an exciting, dynamic form of work. You can have a positive impact on your clients and be well paid for your effort. But you have to be appropriately equipped.

To be an effective and successful business analysis you need to continuously develop some specific characteristics.

The first is technical depth. It’s critical that you have the technical background to satisfy your clients’ needs. This means you have experience in a variety of environments. The more breadth of experience you have in your technical area, the easier it will be to apply your skill as a business analyst.

Second, effective business analysts need to understand quickly and accurately what’s happening in their client’s environment. Your power of observation needs to be well tuned. Being able to listen carefully and patiently, observe the behavior of your clients, and make sense of what is happening is very important.

Third, effective business analyst care about the welfare of their client’s business and the clients themselves. You need to be able to put yourself in your client’s shoes and appreciate the difficulties they may be facing or have faced. While what you do may seem routine to you, it probably isn’t routine for your client. You need to appreciate that fact and behave accordingly.

Another important characteristic is emotional intelligence. Often clients will engage you because they’ve had substantial difficulties. They may have a skill shortage, or they may not be sure how to manage what you’ve been asked to deliver. All these conditions create stress. On top of that, you’ll be striving to learn as much as you can as quickly as you can, so you’ll be under stress as well. Dealing with all that requires personal emotional maturity and the ability to assess and deal with the emotional state of your client.

Also, you have to develop the observation and effective listening as a personal characteristic, make recommendations based on sound business judgment, and be patient. As trust builds, the direction your client provides will likely become more reasonable. Work out your contract. Understand your client’s needs and desires, and establish a good relationship with your contract manager, and you could put on your superhero costume to celebrate your success. Observation helps towards a really robust problem definition statement. So as you look at your problem-solving, and you’re getting ready to start pursuing that initial set of ideas, you need to go through that prioritization and pick the highest value one that’s going to have the biggest impact on your overall solution.

Business analysis is performed on a variety of initiatives within an enterprise. Initiatives may be strategic, tactical, or operational. Business analysis may be performed within the boundaries of a project or throughout enterprise evolution and continuous improvement. No matter their job title or organizational role business analysts are responsible for discovering, synthesizing, and analyzing information in order the best solutions to be derived and the clients’ needs to be accommodated in the best possible way.