Moving to the Organizational Level

The organizational level is the level just below enterprise; it refers to the
company’s general areas or large regions. Organizational analysis focuses on
optimizing the activities and processes within these individual organizational
silos as opposed to the interactions between them (which is the domain of
enterprise-level analysis).
Depending on the organization’s size, a separate strategic group may work to
define goals and prioritize projects within the organization. As a BA, you
need to spend some time with this group to understand the goals and
priorities
within the organization and properly plan your projects. The people you
interact with at this level of analysis are one layer below executive leaders —
most likely directors or VPs of the different business areas. Their main focus
is on their specific domains. Think about the division of Microsoft
responsible for the Xbox. The leaders of that business area (or organization)
probably don’t put much thought into how the sales of Microsoft Office are
going; their concerns relate only to Xbox.
When you’re doing analysis at the organizational level, understanding
the enterprise-level goals helps you prioritize and plan efforts at the
organizational level. Say one organization within a company brings you
on to develop and roll out a new piece of hardware, but you discover that
the enterprise has placed a higher priority on rolling out a different
product for a different market segment. In this case, the organization
may not want to fund the project or support its development after all,
given the priorities on the enterprise level. Even if the enterprise
approves the project to begin with, the project may be stalled during the
development.
Fulfilling duties at the organizational level
The activities you perform on this level are generally the same as at the
enterprise level, but the scope and specific problems you solve are different.
You can imagine the organization areas as enterprises of their own that roll
up
to the parent enterprise. For example, say a company has a strategic plan at
the enterprise level to broaden its market reach by increasing the number of
computers it sells. The company has three organizations: one that sells
computers, another that sells computer accessories (such as keyboards and
monitors), and a third that sells software products. On the organizational
analysis level, you work with each separate organization to develop a
strategic plan specific to each area. Those plans then fit together into the
broader picture to meet the ultimate goal of selling more computers.
For each organization, the business analysis tasks you do include the
following:
Conducting strategic plan development for the organization (flip to
Chapter 9)
Facilitating strategic goal setting sessions and performing competitive
product analysis specific to an organization, using competitive analysis as
an elicitation technique (Chapter 7)
Defining success metrics for the organization and aligning them with the
strategic direction of the enterprise (Chapter 9)
Understanding how workflow is used to implement changes in process
reengineering (Chapter 15)
Replicating enterprise analysis activities, including
• Defining business need (Chapter 9)
• Assessing capability gaps (Chapter 9)
• Process mapping the current and future states, using workflow as a tool
to identify and define your processes (Chapter 13)
In the end, these efforts need to tie back into the goals and strategy of
the larger enterprise.
Dealing with organizational-level obstacles
The big challenge you encounter when performing organizational analysis is
that the leaders of each organizational unit may not care about integration
points among other organizational units throughout the company. These
leaders own and control their domains and are responsible for the success or
failure of their specific areas. You may identify gaps and overlaps among the
organizations, but each individual organization may decide those gaps aren’t
its problem, especially if it’s currently working efficiently and successfully as
a stand-alone entity.