Communicate With Impact: The Bottom-Line to the Top

by Kitty Hass and Lori Lindbergh, PhD

We cannot stress enough the importance of effectively communicating assessment findings to participants, managers, and your leadership team. Not communicating the findings to all of these groups will undermine the value of your findings. However, presenting basic findings alone, such as BA practice maturity level, strengths and opportunities, and project status is not enough. You must communicate the impact of these findings on your organization’s bottom line.

Not all BA competency and BA practice maturity assessments provide the information and analyses for you to do this, however. This will not be possible with an assessment that provides a single BA competency score, a single practice maturity score, or lacks a reliable and valid data collection instrument. A research-based assessment is the only way to evaluate the impact of your current BA capability level and practice maturity level on your organization’s bottom line.

Let’s take a look at a comparison between typical one-dimensional assessments versus a mature assessment similar our BA workforce capability and BA practice maturity assessments. For this comparison, we are assuming the organization conducted an assessment of its BA workforce competency.

You can see the difference in the findings you will be able to communicate and how you can measure impact in your own organization before and after your improvements and training are implemented and sustained. Linking your BA assessment findings to the bottom line is the only way to get you the attention of the top line.