The Strategic Business Analyst

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Business Analysis   Organizational Project Management   Portfolio Management   Requirements Management   Strategy  

I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few years working with organizations to improve their ability to execute against strategy, generally under an umbrella description of portfolio management or similar. While there are many different elements to that, it generally starts with ensuring the right projects are approved in the first place, and I believe business analysts have a critical role to play in that element of portfolio management.  Of course they have a part to play in developing individual solutions and proposals as well as contributing to business cases that are reviewed as part of project selection, but I also think they contribute in other ways…and that’s what I want to look at in this article.

Strategic business analysis
In particular, I want to explore the concept of strategic business analysis. For the purposes of this article, I want to consider that to be the work that needs to be done to analyze the business impact of a particular set of initiatives. A large part of this work will fall within the concept of portfolio modeling—reviewing a proposed portfolio of projects to ensure they can be completed by the organization, and that they will achieve the desired results. On the face of it, this sounds fairly straightforward, but it is actually very complex because of the large number of variables:

• Organizational capacity: This…

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.