-
Ask what
is the organization trying to do (right now) and thereby define the
Mission
-
Ask for
whom is the organization doing it and thereby define the
Stakeholders
-
Ask what
the stakeholder's needs and expectations are relative to the mission and thereby define
the required Business Outcomes. (See
Stakeholder Analysis for
typical outcomes).
-
Ask what will the
stakeholders look for to assess if their needs and expectations have been met
and thereby define the
Stakeholder success measures or KPIs
(See Stakeholder Analysis for
typical KPIs).
-
Ask what outputs will
deliver successful outcomes and thereby
define the Business Outputs
-
Ask what
factors affect our ability to deliver these outputs and thereby
define the Critical Success Factors. From these one
may be able to identify business objectives, constraints and key
sub-processes. E.g if innovation is critical there ought be an
innovation objective and an innovation process to achieve this
objective. If a constraint is that we must minimise our carbon
footprint, the innovation process has to enable the innovation
objective to be achieved while reducing our carbon footprint.
-
Ask
in
what area are we going to concentrate our resources, which segment
of the market, with what products, what services and with what
values are we going to be the leader and thereby define more
constraints such as the priorities, policies and values.
-
Ask
“what processes will deliver these business outputs with these
imposed constraints”
and thereby define the critical processes.
This may result in identifying many processes such as sales,
marketing, innovation etc rather than generic business processes
-
To
identify the generic business processes ask “what contribution do
these critical processes make to the business” and thereby define
the Business Processes and their
associated sub- processes
(See table below for typical example)
