Public-sector leaders are being asked to make high-consequence decisions at pace, often across complex services, incomplete evidence and competing priorities. Big decisions are always hard, but getting evidence to support them shouldn’t be. Across eighteen years delivering Business Analysis in the public sector, I have found that how evidence is gathered, tested and communicated can be as important as the evidence itself.
Evidence should be getting better. There’s more data than ever to draw upon, and a vast range of human and technology-assisted analysis services that can provide public sector leaders with the diverse information they need. Getting the right evidence for the right decisions at the right time is the continual challenge.
Business Analysts work on this ‘decision tightrope’, providing enough evidence for leaders to act with confidence, without allowing analysis to delay the action it is meant to support.
Reflecting on making my own big decisions, like moving house (something my family and I are exploring now) how do I balance getting at and using evidence? In the midst of the excitement of poring over Rightmove, booking viewings, and chatting through what’s important to us (more space for the teenagers is a must!) my family looked aghast as I spent most of a weekend building a spreadsheet model, mapping out our needs and developing scenarios.
The work paid off because the evidence was available when the decision had to be made. Options that seemed intuitively right were sometimes ruled out, and things that seemed impossible initially, were shown to be realistic. The cost was a lost weekend (still unclear on wider stakeholder approval on that investment 😊)
Our decisions were supported by four things:
That’s how good Business Analysis helps. It is not just about drawing maps or cataloguing things in documents to gather dust; it is a responsive, proportionate service that helps leaders make better decisions and act on them with confidence.
Digital transformation has increased the scale and pace of change for most organisations. This means more complex decisions need to be made more quickly. When budgets and priorities compete, analysis can be perceived as stopping delivery from cracking on.
Business analysis helps find things out early, and that’s always less expensive than discovering them when they go wrong. The depth and pace of analysis should be proportionate to the decision: its consequence, urgency and level of uncertainty – knowing when there’s enough evidence to act is critical.
Case Study: In supporting one UK central government department to reduce its reliance on third-party suppliers, analysis of outsourced support contracts combined fragmented and conflicting commercial, service and stakeholder evidence. It identified services that could potentially return in-house and showed that the existing evidence-gathering approach would be too costly to scale. The resulting recommendation shaped the principles used for the programme’s next phase.
When evidence is not yet available and there are too many unknowns, assumptions are inevitable and can quickly become accepted as the norm. But what if they are flawed from the outset? Business Analysts create deliberate points at which critical assumptions are tested and retested as new evidence emerges. This is not about slowing delivery. It is about preventing delivery from accelerating in the wrong direction.
Case Study: On a separate central government project to design support services for digital permission checks on critical national infrastructure, our rapid analysis challenged assumptions about the likely demand for support. The service needed to support more than 30 million permission checks annually, with significant consequences if the digital checks failed. Support calls were initially predicted to reach 5,000 per month. Through wider exposure analysis, we identified that demand could be as high as 125,000 calls per month. Challenging an assumption that had been widely accepted was difficult, so we worked with international partners to validate our evidence against their experience. By resetting the assumptions, we designed a support model that could scale to meet the challenge and supported its implementation. The service was rolled out smoothly, reducing the national reputational risk associated with operational failure.
When there are lots of decisions and decision makers, individual perspectives and agendas can influence how they get made. When these well-intentioned individual decisions are considered holistically across an organisation, their results can be ineffective or inefficient. Business Analysis helps leaders agree consistent criteria before choices are made, so that investment decisions can be compared transparently across services, teams and competing priorities.
Case Study: For a separate central government automation programme, a benefits framework and prioritised opportunity pipeline gave operational and digital leaders a consistent basis for comparing feasibility, risk, return on investment and delivery capacity. This helped leaders direct scarce resources towards the opportunities with the strongest potential benefits. These evidence-informed decisions helped the programme consistently achieve its year-on-year benefit targets, realising £52 million over four years.
In complex organisations, the people implementing a decision may be far removed from those who made it. Unless the evidence, trade-offs and rationale are made explicit, the ‘why’ can be lost as the decision moves into delivery.
Business Analysis can help mitigate that, through targeted action that surfaces the evidence tailored to its ongoing communication.
Case Study: On a local council Digital Experience Programme, discovery evidence was translated into an outline business case, delivery definition, target architecture and options appraisal.
Tailoring views from consistent discovery evidence supported different stakeholders to establish a shared understanding of the changes, and why they were being made. This ensured the programme could support decision-making across the required governance processes, successfully securing the necessary investment.
Business Analysis is perhaps a misnomer. The goal isn’t the analysis, it's better decisions. We live in a messy and complicated world, with competing priorities and constant pressure to do things faster with less. That demands evidence that is proportionate, accessible and actionable. Whether challenging assumptions, defining decision criteria, testing options or communicating the rationale for change, good Business Analysis helps leaders be confident in the decisions they make.
As the first article in this series argued, sustainable partnerships leave organisations better able to make and act on decisions for themselves. Business Analysis supports that outcome by making evidence usable. Alongside it, User-Centred Design ensures that evidence reflects how people actually experience the service.
I’m resigned to the fact analysis can’t create certainty, nothing can. What motivates me is that Business Analysis can create just enough understanding, at just the right time, so that public services can make confident decisions that improve things for us all.