4. Strategy Horizon

4.3 Elements

Agile Extension to the BABOK® Guide

IIBA.org KnowledgeHub Agile Extension 4. Strategy Horizon 4.3 Elements

4.3.1 Observe Change Across a Broad Horizon

The value of agile business analysis at the Strategic Horizon is founded in the broad scope of the analysis and the ability to communicate information across the organization – both to senior decision makers and to those operating within different initiatives within the organization.

Agile business analysis is aware of the need for timeliness of observations. It ensures that observations of change are acted upon sufficiently quickly to make them relevant to the decision process.

.1 Scope of Analysis

Agile business analysis has a broad scope at the Strategic Horizon. Its scope of analysis is beyond the individual initiative and involves analyzing and communicating information learned from the organizational context. At the Strategic Horizon, agile business analysis involves making sense of changes across the following areas:

Changes to customer expectations: teams working on initiatives notice changes in customer expectations resulting from new product introductions and the resulting social and economic changes. There are also changes to customer expectations that are not visible to these teams. At the Strategy Horizon, the scope of analysis extends beyond individual initiatives and involves analyzing and communicating information received through customer research and analytics, as well as research into emerging customer trends.
Changes to the outside environment: organizations exist within an organizational context where competitors are constantly innovating, economic and social conditions are changing, and new technologies are emerging at a rapid rate. Business analysis practitioners constantly monitor and evaluate these changes, forming new hypotheses and changing old assumptions.
Changes within the organization: organizations constantly change. As a result, organizations must constantly redirect resources and potentially set new goals. Agile business analysis provides timely, useful information to those making decisions based on internal changes.
Learning from the front line: teams operating at the Initiative and Delivery Horizons are constantly making changes and discoveries. Some of this information has an impact on the goals and resource allocation beyond the initiative. A major economic driver for agile adoption is the ability to quickly learn which initiatives to stop funding because they either have delivered their promised value or have not realized their potential value, or on which initiatives to increase resources because they have opened new strategic opportunities. At the Strategy Horizon, business analysis practitioners synthesize and analyze information from multiple initiatives in order to inform decisions that impact the organization's business goals and priorities.
Threats and opportunities: with constant change occurring within and beyond the organization, new threats and opportunities appear (and fade) constantly.

Agile business analysis practitioners continually analyze threats and opportunities that enable the organization to
- start a new initiative to counter a threat or exploit an opportunity,
- change the resourcing, scope, or success criteria for existing initiatives in response to changing circumstances, and
- cancel an existing initiative that has become less relevant or less likely to succeed.

At the Strategy Horizon, the focus of business analysis is on the discovery and analysis of evolving threats and opportunities. Successful outcomes depend on decisions being made quickly and correctly on changes as they occur.

At the Strategy Horizon, business analysis practitioners are required to understand the organizational goals and how they map to the goals of individual initiatives. Analysis at the Strategy Horizon generally stops before getting into the details of specific initiatives. Business analysis practitioners working within each initiative are generally better placed to analyze information, collaborate with stakeholders, and inform good decision making for the initiative.

At the Strategy Horizon, business analysis practitioners identify a potential need and then provide enough detail to the team working at the Initiative Horizon for them to understand the need and develop potential solutions and features.

The detailed analysis of the solution is done at the Initiative and Delivery Horizons. At the Strategy Horizon, business analysis practitioners focus on risks, changing circumstances, and new needs that might change the prioritization of decisions made by the organization as multiple initiatives progress.

Due to the great need for collaboration, feedback, and learning between the Strategy, Initiative, and Delivery Horizons, there is no clean line where the responsibility for analysis is handed over from one business analysis practitioner to another.

At the Strategy Horizon, agile business analysis involves breaking down systems and ideas into small parts to understand each component sufficiently to either create a new solution, solve a specific problem, or modify an existing solution.

The systems being analyzed (for example, the performance of individual initiatives, the actions of competitors, and the changing inputs to strategy) are unstable and understanding is always incomplete. Business analysis practitioners use tools such as models to reduce the complexity of large volumes of confusing data, and enable decision makers to have sufficient information to make a defensible and testable decision.

Mapped Tasks From the BABOK Guide

Learn how Tasks from the BABOK Guide Knowledge Areas apply at the Strategy Horizon.

3.1 Plan Business Analysis Approach

This first step in planning the business analysis approach is making the determination that agile will be used as the approach. The level of plis lightweight and just wanning hat is needed to meet the needs of the horizon.

The agile approach is continually redefined and business analysis methods change and evolve as feedback
is received.

3.2 Plan Stakeholder Engagement

The plans for stakeholder engagement are relative to the specific needs of the Strategy Horizon.

The approach for establishing and maintaining effective working relationships with the stakeholders is an ongoing adaptive process and includes stakeholders from across all initiatives in the organization who havea longer view of theorganizational goals and strategy.

3.3 Plan Business Analysis Governance

Define how decisions are made about requirements and designs, including reviews, change control, approvals, and prioritization. Involves establishing a portfolio management approach and a decision framework for the entire organization. Governance and decisionframeworks are adaptive based on the evolving understanding of relative risk across the organization.

3.4 Plan Business Analysis Information Management

The approach for how business analysis information will be stored and accessed is defined through ongoing collaboration with all initiatives across the organization to ensure consistent processes. To facilitate continuous improvements, feedback and learning is shared with the other horizons.

3.5 Identify Business Analysis Performance Improvements

Assessing business analysis work and planning to improve processes is continuous and based on ongoing feedback. Measures focus on the ability to learn and adapt based on ongoing feedback.

4.1 Prepare for Elicitation

Preparing for elicitation involves creating and supporting a framework for collaboration and learning or across all initiatives and using feedback to ensure continuous improvement in elicitation outcomes.

4.2 Conduct Elicitation

The focus of conducting elicitation is continuous and spans across all initiatives, throughout the organization, and spans beyond the boundaries of the organization. The focus is on ensuring that ongoing feedback is heard, and that ongoing organizational learning extends across allinitiatives.

4.3 Confirm Elicitation Results

Confirming elicitation results involves ensuring that feedback is both consistent and still relevant. At the Strategy Horizon, decisions can be based on both what is likely to be true and what is actualltrue. It is important to communicate a clear understanding on which elicitation results are assumptions and which are facts.

4.4 Communicate Business Analysis Information

Ensuring stakeholders have a shared understanding of business analysis information involves establishing and actively supporting an environment for constructive communication, collaboration, and continuous improvement throughout the organization. This can be done through visioning, the product roadmap, and story maps.

4.5 Manage Stakeholder Collaboration

Assessing business analysis work and planning to improve processes is continuous and based on ongoing feedback. Measures focus on the ability to learn and adapt based on ongoing feedback.

5.1 Trace Requirements

Tracing requirements at the Strategy Horizon involves determining if the changes in one initiative impact any other initiatives in the organization.

Efforts focus on ensuring initiatives contribute to business goals and measuring impact. Effective implementation at this level limits work in progress to shorten the delivery cycle.

Requirements maybe ambiguous and focus on organizational goals. Ensure feedback frameworks are in place to support the ongoing alignment to evolving organizational goals.

5.2 Maintain Requirements

Maintaining requirements is focused less on maintaining accurate requirements and more on understanding the accuracy of customer needs and lessons from customer experience, and determining if existing information remains relevant. This may involvea trade-off between accurate maintenance of requirements in favour of experimentation, continual change, and learning.

5.3 Prioritize Requirements

Prioritize Requirements focuses on the prioritization of organizational goals and initiatives rather than detailed requirements. Feedback and learning from inside and outside the organization is central to understanding what and how to prioritize goals and initiatives.

5.4 Assess Requirements Changes

Evaluating the implications of proposed changes to requirements and designs, the Strategy Horizon focuses on understanding how changes impact organizational goals and impact changes that extend beyond initiatives. Assessments are based on continuous feedback and learning.

5.5 Approve Requirements

At the Strategy Horizon, approving requirements involves empowering initiatives to understand what is doable through ongoing communication of evolving assumptions, constraints, and goals.

6.1 Analyze Current State

Analyzing the current state is done through collaboration, continuous feedback, and learning. As the current state evolves, it is continuously re- analyzed to understand the impact of the change.

6.2 Define Future State

Defining the future state is done through collaboration, continuous feedback, and learning. As the future state evolves, it is continuously re- analyzed to understand the impact of the change.

Multiple potential future states and different time horizons are continually being defined and re-defined while change is happening

6.3 Assess Risks

Assessing both positive and negative risk is ongoing for multiple potential future states and different time frames.

Assumptions and hypotheses around risks associated with the evolving multiple future states are continually explored and understood as a means of ongoing risk mitigation.

6.4 Define Change Strategy

At the Strategy Horizon, the change strategy is defined with the focus of aligning initiatives to organizational goals.

This includes impact goals or metrics to measure whether an initiative positively influences the strategy.

7.1 Specify and Model Requirements

The Strategy Horizon specifies and models the goals of the organization.

7.2 Verify Requirements

The Strategy Horizon ensures that the initiatives are meeting the goals of the organization.

7.3 Validate Requirements

The Strategy Horizon ensures that the initiatives are aligned to the goals of the organization.

7.4 Define Requirements Architecture

The Strategy Horizon ensures that the initiatives are aligned to the goals of the organization.

7.5 Define Design Options

While the detailed design options are defined elsewhere, the vision for the customer journey and high-level user experience can be defined at the Strategy Horizon.

7.6 Analyze Potential Value and Recommend Solution

The scope of analysis is do just enough analysis to decide to start an initiative or not. Ensuring continuous collaboration and feedback between initiatives aids this analysis. The strategy for the vision of creating value is defined at the Strategy Horizon.