Workflow Detail:  Assess Business Status

Purpose

The purpose of this workflow detail is to:

• Assess the status of the organization in which the eventual system is to be deployed (the target organization). 
• Understand how to categorize the project and what business-modeling scenario is the best fit, see Concepts: Scope of Business Modeling. 
• Make decisions on how to continue working in the current iteration and outline how to work in subsequent iterations with the business modeling artifacts.
• Develop a first understanding of the goals and objectives, a Business Vision, of the target organization that can be agreed upon by the stakeholders and the business-modeling team. 

The primary artifacts produced to achieve this purpose are the Target-Organization Assessment and the Business Vision. 

How to Staff

Your business-modeling team, all of whom act as Business-Process Analysts, invites the stakeholder’s representatives to understand the problem to be solved and the character of the business domain of the target organization. This extended business modeling team needs to cover good business domain knowledge and also know how current systems are used to automate the business. The core team needs to have good facilitation skills.

If business modeling is done with the intention of reengineering an existing organization, it’s very important to involve those people who will work at this task  in the new organization. First, these people know how things work; they are the best sources of ideas for improvement. Second, they must feel that they are part of the work because they are going to "own" the new organization.

There are at least three ways to involve those people who are going to work in the new organization in the envisioning work:

• Make them members of the business-modeling team.
• Interview them for their ideas and opinions based on their experience.
• Ask them to review the results.

Work Guidelines

Developing the Business Vision is the task of a business-modeling team It can be done through a series of workshops, with the follow-up work done by individuals. Facilitate a workshop where the goal is to determine the scope of the business-modeling effort. The following sample techniques can be applied to help you collect correct and relevant information:

• Brain storming and idea reduction
• Storyboarding

The decisions you make about how to use the business modeling discipline's workflow and the vision of the future target organization are closely related. Depending on what you want to achieve, the approach you take to business modeling may be more or less comprehensive. Typically, the first iteration of a project—in the inception phase—focuses on producing the Target-Organization Assessment, and only briefly outlines the Business Vision. During the elaboration phase, you will revisit the Business Vision and the Activity: Set and Adjust Goals to make them more complete. 

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