Hi there,

I’d like to dwell upon on such an area of Business Analysis as strategic analysis because it’s often both misinterpreted and misunderstood. This may help dot the i's and cross the t's on the subject.

Strategic analysis requires the examination of a business from different perspectives. We should strategize things like:

• The marketplace itself and customers with their specific needs;
• Partners and suppliers and other external factors;
• Value proposition;
• Internal infrastructure, including capabilities, resources and activities (these could sometimes be referred to as a broader enterprise architecture discipline);
• Channels of sales, delivery and support;
• Mid- and Long-term business goals.

After proper analysis has been done, business analysts should present stakeholders with their change strategy, explaining how to get from the current state (as-is) to the desired future (to-be). The emphasis is on the how.

We often use cost-benefit analysis to justify investments needed to reach that desired state.

When conducting cost-benefit analysis, business analysts develop a business case and try to come up with a recommendation to the key decision-makers to take a particular course of action based on the findings. Such a recommendation is supported by an analysis of benefits, costs, and risks of realistic alternatives, as well as an explanation of how they can best be implemented.

The practitioners may use a combination of standard elements to construct a business case. These elements include, but not limited to:

• An underlying financial model with its assumptions and measures;
• Benefits that can be achieved by implementing the initiative;
• Capital expenditure, or CAPEX, which in general represents assets and spending that are above the capitalization limit and a subject for deprecation;
• Operational expense, or OPEX, that is maintenance and ongoing costs and spending below the capitalization limit.

In the end, a well-defined change strategy should be formulated by taking the following three things into account:

• Organizational readiness to make the change;
• Time frames to make the change and for value realization;
• Alignment with business goals.

To present the overall plan in a nice and tidy way, the practitioners often make up a roadmap as a visual executive summary of the change strategy which includes of all the initiative to take.