Recall that in my previous blog “Analysis of Business Problems”, I promised to shed more light on the steps to employ in the analysis of business problems. While these steps can readily be deployed to many other areas, this blog will focus on the analysis of business problems, for the benefit of our subscribers and the Lagos Business School community. As we had learnt from the previous blog, these steps are not an out-of-this-world formula, rather they serve as a guide to construct your thought process when trying to analyse business problems. They are described below.
1. Understand the situation: This is the first and perhaps most important step. I mean, how do you engage a situation without first understanding it? This step helps you have a broader view of if you prefer, a bird’s eye view of the situation. At this stage, one cannot overemphasize the value in the questions who, what, why, how, when, and where. The answers to these questions will typically present the relevant details of the situation, its actors, its detractors, and its opportunities.
2. Identify and define the problem: The previous step helps one to dissect the situation and thereafter, identify the crux of the matter. One must however be careful to identify the problem itself, separate from the causes of the problem as well as the implications of the problem. Once these have been sorted, very good progress would have been made.
3. Define your objective: In simple terms, ask yourself, “what will fulfilment look like?”, “What do I really want to achieve?”. The responses to these questions help you shape your objective, given the situation.
4. Generate alternatives: To do this effectively, you must have reasonably exhausted the first 3 steps above. These alternatives represent your options given the situation. In other words, alternatives are the options that are derived by whatever decision/cause of actions you may adopt.
5. Identify criteria: The criteria serve as indicators. For instance, in trying to decide which school to enroll your child in, you may have several good schools recommended to you, these are alternatives; however, your criteria will be proximity to your home, academic curriculum, and fees, upon which you compare the alternatives.
6. Analyse the alternatives: This is an offshoot of the previous step and simply requires you to juxtapose the alternatives against the criteria.
7. Make a decision: Having employed all the steps above, one can adopt one of the alternatives as the business decision that will most suitably satisfy the objective.
8. Develop an action plan: The last step is self-explanatory and simply fleshes out the decision above, into actionable steps.
Now you know what steps to adopt in analysing business problems to get the best possible outcomes. In my subsequent blogs, we will be discussing other key subjects that feed into as well as feed off the Analysis of Business Problems.
Remote work.. benefits and drawbacks