From the course: Business Analysis Foundations

Needs assessment basics

From the course: Business Analysis Foundations

Needs assessment basics

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- Have you ever thought about things you might like to do? Maybe you couldn't easily find something in the garage or a closet and thought, "You know, maybe I should reorganize that area." Maybe you thought about selling some of those items you found in the garage to generate a little more income. Or maybe you see an upcoming date to get your taxes done, or your driver's license renewed. These are all possible needs that you mentally assess as part of your personal life. Now, if we move these into situations within the organization, we often discover that needs fall into one of three categories, problems or possible improvements, opportunities or new endeavors, or compliance requirements. Business analysis includes the assessment of these three different types of business needs. For those problems or improvement needs, it's important to understand what the problem is, the impact that it has on the organization, and a potential solution to resolve the situation. New opportunities allow an organization to grow and expand. Business analysis helps with focusing those opportunities and providing the content to support decisions in these areas. Obviously, every organization and every individual have compliance requirements of one type or another that must be addressed. It's important, but you need to know what's required and especially what happens if those requirements aren't met. Regardless of whether we're solving a problem or supporting a potential opportunity, we need to go through a few steps. First, we need to identify what is the actual problem that needs to be solved, or the improvement that should be made. In the case of an opportunity, what exactly are we trying to pursue? We then need to do an assessment of the current state. This helps us understand any factors that are causing the problem. Now, we have to be careful though not to fall into a state of analysis paralysis. That's when you keep analyzing and analyzing without stopping to generate a recommendation. It's so tempting to try and study the current situation down to the nth degree, but this can turn into a journey down a rabbit hole and lose touch with the original purpose of the analysis. To stay on track, we need to work with the business area or customer to understand the vision they have of that future state. We then determine what gaps, if any, exist between the current state and the future state. If these gaps are fairly large and can't be made in a single step, we may need to consider an incremental approach to arrive at that future state. This way, we can provide interim solutions as the change is able to be absorbed by the organization. Through this assessment, we will clearly define the situation and the current impact, and then begin to craft a solution.

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