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Business Analysis Center of Excellence
Kathleen B.Hass, PMP, with Richard Avery, Terry Longo and Alice Zavala
(May 18, 2007)
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The Cornerstone of Business Transformation.
The fiercely competitive twenty-first century business environment poses challenges at every turn. Both public and for-profit organizations must be flexible and adaptable to remain competitive. It is through successful projects that organizations manage change, deliver new business solutions, and ultimately, achieve their strategies. However, we continue to struggle to manage complex business change initiatives. Organizations around the globe are striving to improve their business analysis capabilities to: (1) drive changes from strategic goals; (2) invest in the most valuable projects – those that deliver the highest value at the lowest cost and risk; and (3) execute projects optimally to achieve business benefits from the new solutions as quickly as possible. This paper explores our disappointing project performance track record, the nature of twenty-first century projects, the need for a central focus on business analysis as a critical component of organizational transformation, and the role of a business analysis center of excellence in organizations.
Introduction
In the twenty-first century, business processes have become more complex; i.e., more interconnected, interdependent, and interrelated than ever before. In addition, businesses today are rejecting traditional organizational structures to create complex communities comprised of alliances with strategic suppliers, outsourcing vendors, networks of customers, and partnerships with key political groups, regulatory entities, and even competitors. Through these alliances, organizations are addressing the pressures of unprecedented change, global competition, time-to-market compression, rapidly changing technologies, and increasing complexity at every turn. Since business systems are significantly more complex than ever, projects that implement new business systems are also more complex. To reap the rewards of significant, large-scale business transformation initiatives designed to not only keep organizations in the game but make them a major player, we must be able to manage complex business transformation projects. However, huge cost and schedule overruns have been commonplace in the past.1 Looking at the numbers, our past project performance record is troubling:
$80-145 billion per year is spent on failed and cancelled projects (The Standish Group International, Inc.)
25%-40% of all spending on projects is wasted as a result of re-work (Carnegie Mellon)
50% are rolled back out of production (Gartner)
40% of problems are found by end users (Gartner)
Poorly defined applications have led to a persistent miscommunication between business and IT that largely contributes to a 66% project failure rate for these applications, costing U.S.
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