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Tuesday, 07 December 2010 10:09

Is Your Business Analysis Process Like Buying a Car?

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Kupe_Blog_Dec_7This past weekend my wife and I bought a new car.  I was replacing my 14 year old Ford Explorer and had 3 cars in my sights. I went to 3 dealerships to test drive those cars.  What a nightmare!  I thought the car buying experience was going to be better than 14 years ago.  I actually think the process is worse.

With all the online tools available and my network of friends I did all the research.  I knew which cars I liked, what the dealers pay for the cars and what people in my area have been paying for them.  The first step I took was to submit my information on the dealership's website, get a price quote and set up an appointment to test drive the car.  For each dealership I received an automated email stating I was a preferred customer and when I arrived at the dealership I would speak directly to a manager. The manager would work with me to test drive the car and settle on a price.  I was lead to believe I could expect to be in the dealership for 30 minutes to an hour.  With my preferred customer number the dealership had all my information.  What a great way to buy a car, right! Absolutely...if it actually went down like that. 

When I arrived at the dealership, I was quickly moved to work with a salesperson who started to ask me what car I was interested in. He broke out a form and began asking me for my name, phone, address, email etc.  I am a calm and patient person, but this set me off. This person knew nothing about me and it would take 30 minutes to explain what I already shared with the dealership online.  I left the dealership letting them know I was not planning on buying a car from them.  Could you believe 3 days later I received an email from the internet dept. of that dealership asking me if I was still interested in a car. Aah!!!! I was reminded why I don't buy cars often.

Is your business analysis process like buying a car? I hope it is not close.  Your process needs to be customer focused.  I spoke with someone a few weeks ago and her organization was still in a "throw it over the fence" mode.  That fence was so high and thick that she never received a question from the developer and was not even sure what the implemented solution looked like until it was in production.  When she told me, the look on my face had to be saying, "Are you kidding me?"  I assume her business stakeholders felt like me when buying a car.  They shared information with the BA and then when the developer had questions they were probably asked the same types of questions..

At another company they did not throw it over the fence, but they still used a poor version of waterfall. The developers and QA team were not brought in at the beginning of the project.  The BA would review requirements with the tech lead and QA lead that would then estimate the build and test portion of the project.  If the high level estimate was approved developers and QA analysts were assigned.  You think they had questions? Even if the questions were not asked directly to the business stakeholder, their time and money was being spent on a lot of knowledge transfer.  

This extra time and some unnecessary back and forth with your business stakeholders does not help promote the value of Business Analysis.  As the BA you need to raise your hand and demand some change if your project lifecycle is not customer focused.  Your role is to help implement solutions to improve the business area you support.  Always make sure your process is geared towards that goal. 

 Always be easy to deal with,

Kupe

Read 2334 times Last modified on Tuesday, 27 March 2012 13:46
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Kupe Kupersmith

Kupe Kupersmith, President, B2T Training, possesses over 14 years of experience in the business analysis profession. He has served as the lead Business Analyst and Project Manager on projects in the utility, television and sports management and marketing industries. Kupe is a Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP) through the IIBA. Kupe is a trained improvisational actor and performed for years in clubs around Atlanta.  He is a big believer that we can work and learn while having fun. Kupe is a connector and has a goal in life to meet everyone!

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0 # Cecilie Hoffman 2010-12-07 06:43
Kupe, will you be sending a copy of this column to the owner of the dealership? Considering that they made a business decision to invest in the information gathering capability, it might be an eye opener to find out that their business process isn't supporting the prospect channel and is actually driving away business.
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0 # Cathy Brunsting 2010-12-07 09:36
Kupe - I had to laugh at your "buying a car" analogy. To this day I will never, ever buy a Honda/Accura product due to the extremely poor way that several dealerships (I was perssistant!) handled my attempt to buy a new car almost 20 years ago. Doesn't matter how good the quality of their products are - if they cann't treat a customer with respect in the buy process why should I bother. I hope that my customers never feel that way about their experience at dealing with me (and my colleagues) while trying to obtain new products from me. I think that it is important that buisness analysts always keep in mind that they are the "sales person" who is dealing with the customer (internal or external) and that they need to adapt their process and tools to best serve the customer needs. I recognize that not all team members can be staffed at the same time, but totally agree with you that getting developers and QA involved early is important to the success of the project. The more involvement of the entire team in understanding the why and what of what solution the team is building, the better the final product. In my experience with Acura years ago, I attempted to test drive an Integra - THREE separate times, over 2 vendors. I won't buy a car that I can't try out. So, I also like to see "test drives" for our customers. Things like mockups, prototypes, and iterative delivery of systems pieces. It gives our customers a chance to experience what they are asking for as early as possible in the process, rather than waiting to see the product in UAT months after they requested it. Keep up the analogies - I love them :-)
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0 # Kupe Kupersmith 2010-12-07 09:49
@badass BA - That's a good idea. I spoke with the manager, but not the owner. I should probably give her/him a call. @Cathy - And I like your test drive analogy! I think I know you well enough to say that I am sure your process is the complete opposite of your Honda/Acura experience.
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0 # Paul Mulvey 2010-12-07 21:55
You bring up one of the frustrations that drove me into CRM - that a company has no idea who it's talking to! Call Center: "Please input your 45-digit customer account number followed by the pound sign" then, when you are connected to the agent: "May I have your 45-digit account number, please?" Or my other favorite, the store that sells tires for a car. How many consumers know the type of tire that they need, yet it's the first question that the store asks. The second question (after admitting that I don't know the exact type), is "what kind of car do you have?" Then, they can look up the tire based on the car. To me, I would think that it's simpler to ask the second question first. And I realize that there are exceptions, because someone may have "tricked-out" their ride and has funky tires, but that person is savvy enough to know that they have different tires, and can state their exception. I guess that as BAs, we see the business inefficiencies every day when we deal with businesses. You were caught up between two silos within that dealership that were not talking to one another. That's clearly evident by the internet marketing department's follow-up. Mea nwhile, enjoy your Little-Duece-"K upe" (you don't know what you've got!)
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0 # Doug Goldberg 2010-12-07 23:02
Great analogy to bring this problem to light. Knowing one's audience is critically important and not being able to understand those needs and adapt to them is a real problem. I'm currently in the throes of a similar situation in which I am struggling to connect with one of my developers due to language and process/domain knowledge barriers. We're simply not in the same place at the same time and things are suffering. I think this is the point where analysts are frequently in far better shape to be able to adjust methods and adapt to conditions where other might not be so much. An analyst is very often in the middle of trying to teach people or explain to them about how to change and adjust to make things better. So it makes sense that the teacher (us) has an understanding of how to make these changes when they are required of us. In my situation, I set additional one-on-one touchpoints and will, after the first of the year, begin pairing up with the developer 4 hours per day to work through issues concurrently. Working back to your car sales situation, I can only imagine how happy customers would be if there were more personalized service that was geared less toward the immediate dollar reward and more toward addressing the customer's needs. I really have to wonder if the longer-term dollar reward would actually be greater than achieving the immediate sale. Thanks for the eye opener again Kupe. Remind me to start riding my bike more.
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0 # Peter Rankin 2010-12-08 01:20
Kupe...This made me laugh...not out of schadenfreude, but of complete understanding. I think the world of car sales is the same where ever one goes. As @pmulvey shows, the customer has been forgotton in the process. This is similar to what most people in the UK experience (i would assume it happens in the States - but not sure). In the US, do you have the self-serving counters in grocery stores, the "fun" (said through gritted teeth) ones whereby the customer is meant to scan their products themselves, bag and pay? In many UK stores they have this, what a great way to reduce ques at tills and allow people who only buy small number of items to move through the checkouts quickly. Also helps to reduce the costs of staff at the checkouts. Except, they seemed to have forgotton the customer in the whole process. It doesnt take into the account that customers are not trained in the use of scanning (which you may think is easy - scan the barcode!), but what happens if that doesnt work, or the price is incorrect, or you have a discounted product...and what really gets me, is you pick an item from your basket, scan it, and place to one side (which is basically a weighing machine that matches the weight of an item to what you scanned - perfect! Nope, majority of the time it will fail) So what happens when all this goes wrong, you look around aimlessly for an assitant to help you...spend so much time in anger at these machines, it would have been quicker and easier to que and get human interaction.
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0 # Adam Kahn 2010-12-08 01:24
Kupe- love this blog and your analogy! Classic example of old world meets new world buying patterns! Its amazing how some industries refuse to adjust (even though it appears they do). Great work as always!
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0 # Kupe Kupersmith 2010-12-08 01:41
Pete -Thanks for feeling my pain. We do have the self checkouts at our grocery stores. At mine they have one person monitoring and helping for 6 stations. It actually works very well for me! @Akahn - You nailed it...totally old world/new world. Thanks for the kudos!
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0 # Glyn Bartlett 2010-12-08 06:24
It is highly likely that a BA was involved in the car dealership's system. So it would seam that we have some one in our profession that concentrated on the back office and failed to take into account the full business process. A lesson for us all not to have the blinkers on and just do the work we were hired to do. We have a professional responsibility to take a step back, look at the big picture and give the right advice. I recently recommended that a large project be delayed because the Needs Analysis had not been done. Once it was completed the client agreed that it had added value and clarity to the project.
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0 # Adriana B. 2010-12-08 11:30
Great reminders here about the importance of BAs going beyond analysis of functionality to ensure that the customer experience is positive, both for project stakeholders and the end users of the solution being built. Unfortunately, given the number of bad customer experiences we constantly publish at IT'S BROKEN (http://2wtx.com/itsbroken/), it doesn't look like many companies are involving customer-focuse d BAs in their initiatives these days.
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0 # Mother Kupe 2010-12-08 12:28
You forget that the process of selling a car involves the pricing of the car. With the ability to gather as much info as possible on the net, the customer, you would think, has the upper had. The salespersons job now is to confuse the buyer so much that the low end price they came in with is not what they end up paying. In addition the buyer leaves thinking they got a great deal, until they get home and look over the paperwork and see they got robbed! And that is why it takes so much time! Saturn was the only dealership to not use this process, they are out of business.
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0 # Kupe Kupersmith 2010-12-08 20:25
First of all...does any other BA blogger out there have their mom commenting? I don't think so!! Thanks mom for chiming in! @ Glyn Bartlett - You may be right here. A BA may have been involved. This is the reason I write about mostly the non-technical side of our job. We need to do a better job as a profession. Great job on delaying the project to make sure it was on the right track!! @Adria na B - To your point about many companies lacking customer focused processes, I worked on a team that disregarded usability of the system being delivered. All in the name of time and money. They felt the functionality was there, so the customers have nothing to complain about. Wrong. They didn't use the system until the usability was addressed. Sometimes internal IT teams forget that our end users are using usable software everyday now. The apps we build have to match that...unless the users don't view that as high priority of course. But you get my drift. Thanks for all the comments!
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0 # Soumya , Mu Sigma Inc. 2010-12-09 10:53
Fortunately managing business is never like buying a car in analytics industry. Here the BA playa partial role of developer too in soiling the hand with the technology proposed to have the solution made of, although this article is something I wil keep in mind as a paradigm. Thanks nice article
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0 # Ernesto 2011-02-23 22:45
Kupe - nice article. Very relevant in this day and age where the customer is a key player in web-enabled business processes. More and more the customer has been empowered with e-commerce applications and the BA must be cognizant of the best way the application will support the business process as well as how intuitive the functionality must be to the end user.
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0 # Kupe Kupersmith 2011-02-23 23:45
Thanks for the comment Ernesto. Your point is right on. So, many BAs I know do not get involved in Focus Groups. Do you think this is an area BAs need to develop or at least know how to find the right people to lead a focus group? Then the BA can help analyze the results.
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