The Business Operating Model (BOM)

What is a Business Operating Model

It gives a view of the business from a team, function and processes perspective

Teams/Functions	Sales	Management	Operations	Reconciliations
Front office	Capture trade
Ops			Clear & settle	Reconcile accounts
Marketing	Special offers
Administration		Expenses

Table 1 Example Business Operating Model

The x axis (left to right) made up of the value chain and business functions

Each business will have core business functions e.g. accounts, sales, and management. The BOM orders functions, from left to right, starting with the most valuable.

The y axis (down up) teams

Lists the teams within the business. E.g. operations, off shore support

Processes (the bit in the middle)

The business processes are then positioned according to what functional category the process falls into and which team executes the process.

How is the BOM valuable to a Business Analyst?

As a business analyst your primary responsibility is to analyse and find solutions to problems in the business domain. The business operating model will give you an excellent view of the business from a functional perspective – the business processes and who carries out those processes e.g. the tax calculating process is carried out by the accounting department.

When it comes to designing an IT system for a business, it makes it easier to see which processes, teams and functions are impacted by the change.

For example, building a new trade booking system. The BOM below makes it easy to see which parts of the operating model are impacted.

Teams/Functions	Sales	Management	Operations	Reconciliations
Front office	Capture trade
Ops			Clear & settle	Reconcile accounts
Marketing	Special offers
Administration		Expenses

In this example we can quickly see that the front office and ops functions are impacted and that there will be changes to the capture trade, clear & settle and reconcile accounts processes.

Another advantage of the BOM is that it makes it very easy to see what is in scope and whats not in scope for the change. Using the example above, the marketing and admin functions are not impacted. The special offers and expenses processes are not impacted either

Defining the Business Operating Model

Next post coming soon

What is the difference between a business requirement and a functional requirement?

A business requirement describes the requirements for the business e.g. better operational performance, higher booking through put, lower headcount.

Functional requirements describe a system will function e.g. click on button A to retrieve client info, click button C to generate a document etc.

I believe a business requirement is often confused with a functional requirement because a new system is often built to meet certain business requirements whereas the system itself will have its own functional requirements for its creation.

Simple Requirements Model

Here is a simple model for gathering requirements. It starts of with a simple business process model (BPM) describing the business domain and goes onto to describing the functional processes that can be elicited from the BPM. The functional processes can grouped into functional requirements.

Business Process Model

The business process model describes the key activities, tasks and processes in the business domain. These will be both system e.g. generate doc, retrieve customer data and non-system activities e.g. post a letter, hire an employee.

Functional Components

The solution design really begins with the functional components. The functional components are logical groupings of system based activities, tasks and processes. These will be extracted from the BPM.

Functional Processes

Each functional component will contain a number of high level functional processes. These will be system based processes e.g. workflow, data wizard processes and will have a number of tasks and activities. Functional processes might also have a set of functional sub processes (FSPs).

Functional Sub-processes

Each sub process will describe the hands on user interaction with the system. For example searching for a client details – step 1 enter search criteria, step 2 click on, step 3 see search results etc.

Hi

My first post.

Welcome to business analyst pro!