Strategy Analysis
Strategy Analysis connects the organisation’s needs to a defined change. The exam tests whether you can describe the current state honestly, define a measurable future state, surface risks, and design a change strategy - without sliding into solution design.
The four tasks
- Analyze Current State - business need, goals and objectives, structure, capabilities, processes, technology, policies, and internal and external influences (techniques include SWOT, capability mapping, process modelling, benchmarking and document analysis).
- Define Future State - goals and objectives, scope of solution options, constraints, and the business architecture changes required.
- Assess Risks - identify, categorise and evaluate risks that could prevent value realisation, with likelihood, impact and mitigation.
- Define Change Strategy - the gap between current and future state, the solution scope, transition states, and how the organisation moves through them (incremental versus big-bang, build versus buy).
Rules that decide questions
- A business need is a problem or opportunity, not a product. “Reduce claim cycle time from 12 to 5 days” is a need; “buy a workflow tool” is a solution.
- Gap analysis compares current and future states capability by capability; a gap is a missing or inadequate capability, not a missing feature.
- Transition states belong to the strategy: each intermediate state must be viable in its own right.
- Risk assessment spans the enterprise, including the risk of not changing.
Worked example
A utility wants a self-service portal. Current-state analysis shows that 60% of call-centre volume is balance and payment-date queries, and that 40% of customers already use the mobile app weekly. The future-state objective is to cut those calls by 40% within nine months. The gap is not “a portal”; it is a missing capability to expose balance data in real time, plus a policy restriction on showing balances to third-party payers. Risks include data freshness tied to the overnight billing batch and low digital uptake in one customer segment. Change strategy: phase one delivers balance visibility inside the existing app, phase two adds the portal, and an interim transition state holds call-centre staffing until call volumes actually fall.
Traps that cost marks
- Starting from a proposed solution and reverse-engineering a need to justify it.
- Writing future-state objectives that cannot be measured or dated.
- Ignoring enterprise architecture and policy constraints until design begins.
- Listing only delivery risks and missing benefit-realisation risks.
- Forgetting that “do nothing” is also a change strategy to be evaluated.