What are the needs of your business and where are areas for improvement? There is a commonly used quote possibly paraphrased by William Edwards Deming or Peter Drucker, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”
Although business owners and managers have great intuition founded by their years of experience and exposure to the industry and trade, there will always be a need for a Business Analyst to gather data and analyze the information to ascertain work efficiency and total quality output to your customers. Even if the business is seemingly doing well, a diagnostics gathering data will help determine risks when deciding to make changes in workflow or operations or risks when deciding not to make any changes. Should business operations be lagging, it is critical the correct problem is identified saving valuable time and money. All too often when a problem manifests the immediate response is to fix what is overtly visible while ignoring underline causes. Simply put, it is like “treating the symptom and not the disease.”
There are many external factors outside the control of a business and management team. Proper responses to those external factors can better prepare your business to either mitigate or avoid risks, or exploit opportunities giving your business that competitive edge.