Why strategy comes first
The most common failure mode in change programmes is jumping to the solution space before the problem space is understood. A team agrees on a technology, a platform, a new process — and only discovers six months later that nobody agreed on what the change was meant to achieve. The BABOK Strategy Analysis knowledge area exists to prevent this.
By the end of this section- Explain why BAs begin with the problem space rather than the solution space.
- Name the four components of BABOK Strategy Analysis.
The question behind every engagement
Whatever the surface request — a new system, a process change, an automation programme — there is always a deeper question: what is the business trying to achieve, and what stands in the way? Every piece of BA work is, at root, an attempt to answer that question with enough precision to act on.
Strategy Analysis in BABOK has four components: understanding the current state, defining the desired future state, assessing risk, and deciding the change strategy. These are not phases — they are perspectives that inform each other. The current state shapes what the future state must accommodate. The change strategy depends on what risks are acceptable. A BA who skips current state analysis because the stakeholders "already know the problem" is skipping the work that prevents the wrong solution being built.
Current state
What exists now: capabilities, processes, systems, information, culture, constraints. The baseline everything else is measured against.
Future state
What needs to exist after the change: what capabilities, what performance levels, what outcomes. The destination the change strategy is trying to reach.
Risk assessment
What could prevent the future state being reached, or make reaching it more costly than the value it delivers. Identified early, risks inform the change strategy; identified late, they derail it.
Change strategy
The approach for moving from current to future state: what changes, in what order, at what pace, through what mechanisms. The artefact that connects strategy to programme design.
Business capability mapping
The Business Architecture Guild's BIZBOK Guide organises business architecture thinking into four domains: Capabilities, Value Streams, Organisation, and Information. Of these, the capability map is the most fundamental — it is the architecture artefact that everything else anchors to.
What a capability map is
A capability is what the business does — not how it does it, not who does it, not what system supports it. Capabilities describe stable, enduring business functions that survive reorganisations, technology changes, and strategic pivots. A retail bank's capability to "manage customer credit risk" exists regardless of whether it is done by a team in Mumbai or an algorithm in the cloud.
L1 — Capability domains
The highest level: 8–15 broad domains that cover everything the organisation does. Examples: Customer Management, Product Development, Financial Management, Risk and Compliance. Every organisation has a slightly different set; the work is agreeing what the right set is for this organisation.
L2 — Sub-domains
Each L1 domain breaks into 5–10 sub-domains. Customer Management might contain: Customer Acquisition, Customer Onboarding, Customer Service, Customer Retention, Customer Insight. L2 is where most change work is scoped and prioritised.
L3 — Specific capabilities
Individual capabilities at enough granularity to be meaningfully assessed, improved or automated. Customer Onboarding at L3 might contain: Identity Verification, Credit Assessment, Account Setup, Welcome Communication. L3 is used for detailed process analysis and AI-suitability scoring.
Why decoupling from org structure matters
The capability map is deliberately decoupled from the organisational structure. A capability may be delivered by multiple departments, outsourced to a third party, or split across geographies. If the map followed the org chart, every reorganisation would invalidate it. Because it maps what the business does rather than who does it, the capability map survives reorgs and serves as a stable backbone for architectural and change work.
When starting an engagement, build the L1 map in a leadership workshop — it usually takes half a day and produces the single most useful shared artefact an organisation can have. Every subsequent analysis activity uses it as a reference point.
Value streams and process
A capability map tells you what the business does. A value stream tells you how value flows to a specific customer or stakeholder through the exercise of those capabilities. The two artefacts are complementary: capabilities are the nouns; value streams are the verbs.
Value streams vs processes
A value stream is end-to-end, crossing organisational and departmental boundaries to trace the complete journey from a trigger (a customer need, a request, an event) to a delivered outcome. This is what distinguishes it from a process, which typically lives within a function or department. A complaint-handling process might sit within the Customer Service team; the value stream for a customer experiencing a problem crosses Sales, Operations, Finance, and Service before resolution.
End-to-end perspective. Crosses organisational boundaries. Starts with a customer need and ends with a delivered outcome. Shows the full flow of value, including handoffs and wait states. Useful for identifying where value is created and where it is destroyed.
Typical number per organisation: 5–15 primary value streams covering the main ways the business creates and delivers value.
Functional perspective. Typically stays within a function or team. Shows activities, decisions, and roles. Good for analysing how specific work gets done and where waste or bottlenecks occur.
The process map is a useful tool for L3 capability analysis once the value stream establishes what is being analysed and why.
Value stream mapping
Value stream mapping (VSM) comes from Lean manufacturing but has been widely adopted in service and knowledge work contexts. A VSM makes visible the steps in a value stream, the time each step takes, the wait time between steps, and the quality at each handoff. In most organisations, value stream mapping reveals that the majority of elapsed time is wait time rather than work time — a finding that fundamentally reframes where improvement effort should go.
Service blueprints
A service blueprint extends the process view into three layers: the frontstage (what the customer sees and experiences), the backstage (the internal activities that support the frontstage), and the support layer (the systems, data, and infrastructure that enable the backstage). Service blueprints are particularly useful for change programmes that involve digital channels, because they make explicit the relationship between customer experience and operational complexity.
Pick a value stream you are familiar with — a customer journey, an employee process, an operational flow. How much of the elapsed time is actual work? Where are the handoffs that introduce delay or quality loss?
Strategy analysis tools
Beyond the BABOK Strategy Analysis knowledge area, several tools from strategic design and product thinking are routinely useful in BA work. Each reframes the problem in a slightly different way — which is their value. Using only one lens produces one set of insights.
Jobs to be Done
JTBD theory, developed by Clayton Christensen and refined by others, re-frames requirements as jobs: things a person is trying to accomplish in a given context. A job has three dimensions: functional (the practical task), emotional (how they want to feel), and social (how they want to be perceived).
For BA work, JTBD is useful because it surfaces the need behind the stated requirement. A stakeholder who says "we need a better reporting dashboard" is typically trying to do a job: "keep senior leadership informed without needing to interrogate the data myself." The dashboard is a solution candidate; the job is the actual requirement.
Wardley Mapping
Wardley Maps place components of a value chain on a two-axis grid: the vertical axis represents the customer value chain (most visible to the customer at the top, most infrastructure at the bottom); the horizontal axis represents evolutionary stage, from Genesis (novel, poorly understood) to Custom Build to Product to Commodity (well-understood, widely available).
The map reveals where components are being treated as more bespoke than they need to be (a common source of waste), and where components that should be commoditised still require custom effort. In 2026, Wardley mapping is widely used for build-vs-buy decisions on AI components: most language model inference is now commodity; domain-specific fine-tuning and orchestration layers are still in the custom-to-product range.
Business Model Canvas
The Business Model Canvas, developed by Alexander Osterwalder, captures the nine elements of a business model on a single page: Key Partners, Key Activities, Key Resources, Value Propositions, Customer Relationships, Channels, Customer Segments, Cost Structure, and Revenue Streams.
For BA work, the Canvas is useful as a rapid current-state artefact — completed in a two-hour workshop, it establishes shared understanding of how the business currently creates, delivers, and captures value. It is less useful for detailed requirements and more useful for strategic framing at the start of an engagement.
PESTLE and SWOT
PESTLE (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, Environmental) and SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) are well-established strategic analysis tools that appear in the context of BA Strategy Analysis as inputs to current state and risk assessment.
They are more useful as structured conversation prompts than as standalone analytical frameworks. Run them in a workshop with a diverse stakeholder group and you will surface assumptions and perspectives that a BA working alone would not find. The output is less important than the conversation they generate.
The right strategy tool is the one that answers the question you are trying to answer. Capability mapping answers "what does the business do?" Value stream mapping answers "where does value flow and where does it get stuck?" Wardley mapping answers "where should we build vs buy?" Jobs to be Done answers "what are stakeholders actually trying to achieve?" Match the tool to the question.
Unit review
Two questions and a reflection to close the unit.
In the BIZBOK framework, which domain covers "what the business does" — independent of who does it or what systems support it?
A stakeholder says "we need a new CRM system." Using a Jobs to be Done lens, what is the BA's first move?
Pick an organisation you know — a current or former employer, a client, or one you have studied. Sketch what its L1 capability map might look like. How many domains? What would you call them? Where would the most important value creation sit?
End of Course 02
You should now be able to describe the BABOK Strategy Analysis knowledge area, explain the structure and purpose of a capability map, distinguish value streams from processes, and apply at least two strategy analysis tools to a real engagement context. Continue with Course 03: Elicitation Methods.