Reference no: EM133614561

Knowledge Audits for Business Analysis

Assessment - Portfolio on Business Analysis and Knowledge

Task Description

In this assessment, you will demonstrate your understanding of the core competencies and skills required for a Business Analyst in terms of Business Analysis and Knowledge Auditing. You will also demonstrate your knowledge on the use of tools and techniques for business analysis and knowledge auditing.

The assessment has two parts - Part A: Reflections and Part B: Case Studies.

Part A: Reflections
To construct this part of the assessment, you are required to a write a reflection on each of the four topics mentioned below.
PESTLE analysis versus MOST analysis
Gap Analysis and POPIT model
Knowledge Audit Typology
Participative Goal-Setting Audit versus Value Audit
In each reflection, you will provide a brief introduction of the topic (method/process/model), how the method/process/model works, stakeholders involved, inputs and outputs, how it helps business analysis, and its benefits. You also need to include figures, diagrams and illustrations to improve the quality of presentation.

Each portfolio should contain approximately 300 words (so Part-A should be a total of 1,200 words). You need to include at least three references (including at least two academic references) for each reflection. You also need to make sure that the references are cited in the text and the reflections are free from any grammatical and spelling errors.

Part B: Case Studies
In this part, you will analyse two short case studies related to Business Analysis and Knowledge Auditing and answer the questions given with each case study. The case studies will be made available on the Moodle unit website (under Assessment-2 section).
The answer to each case study question should contain approximately 400 words (so Part-B should be a total of 800 words).
You should include at least four references (including at least two academic references) in this part.

Short Case Studies

Case Study-1: Business Analysis Related
A manufacturing company had a system that collected all the safety and other test data and produced reports that were submitted to the government to gain approval to sell their product. The system was over 20 years old and was written in Fortran and Assembly language. The users were perfectly happy with the system as it was. Upper-level management was concerned that the two people who were maintaining the system would be retiring soon, leaving the company with no one to maintain the system. Without the system, the company could conceivably not be able to sell any new products. Clearly the problem did not belong to the users. They had no issues with a system that they had been using successfully for years. The assigned business analyst encountered resistance from the users that was supported by supervisory and union management. The users didn't have the time to spend telling the business analysts what the system did and how it produced the reports for the government. The users did not need a new system or the trauma of change that comes with it. The two technicians maintaining the system were similarly too busy keeping the system running with changes to report formats and modifications to regulations and had long since lost touch with the programming and technology.

In this case, the specific problem owner was in the ranks of upper-level management and was not identified. The business analyst had orders from the top to define what the system did in such a way that the entire regulatory compliance system could be replaced by a new system written in Java or another modern language with more modern technology. The users of the old system could care less about getting a new modern system, preferring the system they were used to, and were totally uncooperative. And there was a hard deadline: the day the last of the maintainers left the company for a well-earned retirement in the Florida Keys. If you were the business analyst in this situation, what would you do?

Read the above Case Study-1 and then analyse it to answer the following three questions:

Where are the current users of the Case study organisation located on the Power/Influence/Interest Diagram? Draw the diagram and show the correct position/s of the current users.

Which tools and techniques would you use to identify the reasons behind the lack of communication/cooperation amongst the system users? Give some examples.

Which strategies would you use to effectively manage the stockholders in an "uncooperative users" situation as per the above Case Study-1? Give some examples.

Case Study - 2: Knowledge Audit Related

Modern Homes is a mid-size building company that designs and constructs residential houses for customers in Sydney since 2000. They build houses with custom designs according to customer requirements. Their cost of building is substantially higher than that of volume builders who build houses based on a fixed range of house models. The company comprise a number of departments such as finance, customer service, engineering & design, construction, logistics, and marketing. Each department is headed by a manager who is responsible for managing performance of the employees in that department. There are one or more teams working in each department, each of the teams being led by a team leader. The departments like to work independently and focus on their departmental goals rather than the company goals giving rise to departmental silos. This situation has resulted in a lack of coordination, collaboration and information sharing among the teams across departments. Recently, they have been facing higher customer demands because of their brand reputation. Due to excessive customer demands, it is taking too long to complete jobs such as designing buildings, signing contracts, and completing construction projects leading to a long backlog of tasks which could potentially undermine the company's reputation.

The top management has recently decided to launch a knowledge management system to improve the process of housing projects. They are hoping that the new system will help them to improve the business processes and operations, and effectively manage the diversification of employee skills in all departments by improving the knowledge flows and knowledge sharing amongst the employees in all departments so that the teams can work more efficiently towards achieving the Modern Homes company goal.

To implement an effective knowledge management system, senior management approached you to provide them consultancy and conduct a proper Knowledge Audit to identify the current knowledge resources, the bottlenecks they face and the potential solutions so that they will decide what kind of knowledge management system will suit the company better.

As Knowledge Analyst for Modern Homes, analyse the above Case Study to answer the following four questions:
What specific challenges might Modern Homes face in identifying and cataloguing its knowledge resources during the knowledge audit process? Discuss with brief explanations (use citations/in- text references).
Explain why a comprehensive and granular typology of knowledge types is crucial for Modern Homes' inventory audit. Provide some examples.

During the knowledge audit, you discovered that some departments within Modern Homes heavily rely on tacit knowledge, while others rely more on explicit knowledge. How would you address this imbalance in your knowledge typology to ensure a more equitable representation of both types of knowledge? Provide some examples.

Modern Homes' organisational structure is undergoing changes, with some departments merging and others being restructured. How might these organisational changes impact the development and application of the knowledge typology? Propose strategies to mitigate any potential challenges.