Executing and Managing Your CBA Project

1.      Assign the project manager (more like ‘project tzar’ which is rather self-explanatory). Obviously, he or she must have full authority in the project as well as full support and cooperation from company owners, Board of Directors and top managers. If CBA is conducted by an external consultant (which is usually the case), this function goes to one of the most senior and experienced consultants. If the company does the CBA all by itself (which is usually not a very good idea because of almost unavoidable conflict of interest) this function goes to one of the corporate top managers.

2.      Assign the project coordinator (if CBA project is performed by an outside consultant). A project coordinator is one of the top managers of the company who has the full authority from the owner, Board of Directors and the CEO to ensure (and enforce, if necessary) full cooperation of your managers and specialists with the CBA project team

3.      Assemble the project team which is typically comprised of external consultants and internal business analysts (who will be subsequently involved in performing the SCR as well as in developing and operating your corporate kaizen system)

4.      Assign the project knowledge manager. CBA project is very knowledge intensive (it is a comprehensive business analysis, after all). Therefore, it is critically dependent on the quality (content, structure and interface) of the CBA project knowledge base. Which, in turn, require services of a competent knowledge [base] manager. Who will be responsible for storing and structuring knowledge gathered by business analysts and making it available on a ‘need-to-know’ basis.

5.      Develop the structure and interface for the project knowledge base which will require selection and utilization of an appropriate software package. I have developed two such products – CBA Toolkit and Comprehensive Business Analysis Workbench (CBAW). I will cover both in Part VII.
 

6.      Assign knowledge access rights to project team members and other corporate employees. On a ‘need-to-know’ basis, of course.

7.      Develop optimal procedures for (a) obtaining corporate ‘documented’ knowledge contained in documents and generated via queries; (b) conducting interviews with insiders – managers and specialists; (c) conducting interviews with outsiders – external corporate stakeholders; and (d) conducting brainstorms. The latter is the primary instrument in describing the ‘TO BE’ situation and in conducting a strategic corporate reengineering (SCR) but are also useful in some aspects of a CBA project

8.      Develop and execute detailed operational plan for your CBA project. Obviously, you will need to use some project management software for this – such as Microsoft Project.