User Stories Without Users: The Pitfalls of Assumption-Driven Design

Written by Adrian Reed on September 12, 2024. Posted in Articles.

Where I live, every year residents receive two water bills. One is for the fresh (tap) water supply, the other is for wastewater and maintenance of sewers. The wastewater bill is a standard tariff, and I guess most people have automatic monthly payment set up. It’s the kind of thing you “set and forget about”. I mean, it’s hard to get too excited about wastewater, right?

Recently, I’ve been receiving letters from the water company trying to get me to sign up for their online portal (or app) so that I can get my bills electronically. I can almost imagine the initial user story that was written:

“As a user, I want to access my annual statement online, so that I know how much I’ll be charged”

Yet, for me at least, this is an illusion. I really don’t need another app, I really don’t need another portal account and password. For something I receive once a year there is a good chance I will have forgotten my password by the time I need to use it, and if I’m completely honest I look at about 10% of the statement anyway (I glance at the monthly payment amount then file the statement).

These days I’m a digital native, but having to access this information via an online portal would be less convenient for me. I suspect I’m not the only consumer that thinks this…

Digitalization with Purpose

I’m not saying that portals and apps aren’t useful, they absolutely are in the right context. I use online banking apps and portals all the time, and these save me time. However, I wonder how many customers the wastewater company spoke to before building their app/portal. I wonder whether they determined whether customers actually wanted it or not?

Another possibility is that this wasn’t a customer-driven initiative at all. Perhaps the director of customer service was given a target of reducing cost. One way of doing this is to reduce the amount of letters and statements that are printed. Every statement costs money: the paper, printing, envelope, postage cost plus the cost of handling it too.

But when the change is purely driven from an internal cost-saving perspective, with little or zero customer interaction, isn’t it a little disingenuous to write a “user” story from the perspective of the customer? A customer who hasn’t been consulted? There’s the danger we jump straight to a solution, and with no customer interaction this might be a solution that has very low adoption.

Understand the Real Drivers

So, if the driver is cost reduction say so. Rather than jumping straight to a user story or set of requirements, a more useful starting point will be to understand the specific outcomes that are being sought. In this case, it might be:

“A reduction in cost of sending and handling outgoing correspondence of X%”

Then, it’s useful to understand any constraints. There is likely to be a regulatory requirement to issue an annual ‘statement’ (although what a ‘statement’ is may or may not be prescribed in the regulations). With these things in mind, existing practices can be challenged.

Then, having understood why a change is necessary in the first place, we can start to work with the stakeholder team (including customers or customer representatives) to figure out ways that this can be achieved that will ideally benefit them too. Or, at least ways that they can live with.

This might create a very different set of solutions. Perhaps a solution is proposed where a customer receives a small discount for the first year when they opt in to having electronic statements. They’ll receive an SMS text message with the key details (payment amounts, dates) and an email reminding them that the statement information is there if they want it. This is just one option: it’s one that would work well for me, but I am a sample of one. It would be important to get a range of views from different stakeholder groups.

Understand Variety

When thinking about changes like this, it’s also important to consider those who can’t engage with organizations digitally. There can be many reasons for this, so thinking about accessibility not just in terms of “how can we make the digital solution accessible” but also “what are our options for non-digital engagement” is important. Understanding the variety of people, their needs and preferences is important.

In conclusion, whatever final solution is agreed upon, starting by understanding the desired outcomes (and being transparent when the primary goal is cost saving) will lead to a broader conversation. It’s important to avoid rushing towards an early solution in absence of this!

The Mirage of AI as a Cure-All: How to Ground Executive Enthusiasm in Realistic Outcomes

Written by Joel Frenette on September 11, 2024. Posted in Articles.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, artificial intelligence (AI) is often heralded as a panacea for a wide range of organizational challenges. Whether it’s optimizing supply chains, improving customer service, or enhancing decision-making processes, AI promises to revolutionize how businesses operate. However, as any seasoned project manager or business analyst knows, the reality is far more nuanced.

Many executives, driven by the latest headlines or industry trends—often referred to as “managing-by-magazine”—may come to you with the next “big idea” for an AI project. While their enthusiasm is commendable, it can also lead to unrealistic expectations and poorly defined projects that fail to deliver the promised results.

The Problem with AI Hype

The marketing surrounding AI often paints it as a silver bullet capable of solving any business problem. This can create a disconnect between what executives expect and what AI can realistically achieve. Without a clear understanding of AI’s limitations and the specific problems it can solve, organizations risk investing in projects that deliver little to no return on investment (ROI).

As a project manager or business analyst, your role is to bridge the gap between executive enthusiasm and practical outcomes. This involves not only understanding AI technology but also being able to communicate its potential and limitations in a way that resonates with decision-makers.

Start with the Use Case

The first step in any AI project should be to thoroughly discuss the potential use cases. What specific problem is the AI solution intended to solve? How will success be measured? By framing the conversation around use cases, you can help executives focus on the practical applications of AI rather than getting swept up in the hype.

For example, if an executive is excited about using AI to improve customer service, you might start by discussing how AI could be used to automate routine inquiries, allowing human agents to focus on more complex issues. From there, you can explore the potential ROI, such as reduced call times or improved customer satisfaction scores.

Identify Specific Deliverables

Once the use case is clear, the next step is to identify specific deliverables. What tangible outcomes will the project produce? These could be anything from a working prototype of an AI-powered chatbot to a detailed report on how AI can be integrated into existing workflows.

By focusing on specific deliverables, you can help manage executive expectations and ensure that the project remains grounded in reality. This also makes it easier to track progress and measure success, as you will have clear milestones to work towards.

ROI: The Bottom Line

One of the most critical aspects of any AI project is identifying the potential ROI. This involves not only estimating the financial return but also considering the broader impact on the organization. Will the AI solution improve efficiency? Reduce costs? Enhance the customer experience?

ROI calculations should be revisited regularly throughout the project lifecycle. As new information becomes available, it’s important to reassess the potential benefits and adjust the project scope as needed. This iterative approach ensures that the project remains aligned with organizational goals and delivers real value.

Refine Through Requirements Gathering

Even with a clear use case, specific deliverables, and a well-defined ROI, it’s essential to continually refine the project scope through requirements gathering sessions. These sessions allow you to gather input from various stakeholders, identify potential challenges, and ensure that the project remains on track.

During these sessions, it’s important to ask probing questions to get to the heart of the matter. What are the underlying business needs? How will the AI solution integrate with existing systems? What data will be required, and how will it be managed? By addressing these questions early on, you can prevent scope creep and ensure that the project stays focused on its core objectives.

The Power of Business Process Mapping (BPM)

One highly effective tool for refining project scope and ensuring alignment with business objectives is Business Process Mapping (BPM). BPM is a visual representation of an organization’s workflows and processes, and it can be instrumental in highlighting inefficiencies, redundancies, and gaps within current operations.

Before diving into an AI implementation, BPM can help you and your stakeholders gain a clear understanding of how work is currently being done. By mapping out existing processes, you can identify where AI might be most beneficial, as well as areas that may need improvement before AI can be effectively integrated.

For instance, if a process map reveals that a significant amount of time is spent on manual data entry, this could be a prime area for AI automation. Conversely, if a process is already highly optimized, it might not be the best candidate for AI enhancement, helping you avoid misallocation of resources.

BPM also serves as a communication tool, providing a common language for discussing process improvements. It enables all stakeholders to visualize where changes will occur, what the expected outcomes are, and how the AI solution will fit into the broader organizational landscape. This transparency can help prevent misunderstandings and ensure that everyone is on the same page regarding the project’s goals and expectations.

Conclusion: Turning AI Hype into Real Results

AI has the potential to transform businesses, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. By taking a thoughtful, measured approach to AI projects, you can help your organization avoid the pitfalls of “managing-by-magazine” and achieve real, tangible results.

The key to success lies in grounding executive enthusiasm in practical outcomes. This involves thoroughly discussing use cases, identifying specific deliverables, calculating potential ROI, and continually refining the project scope through requirements gathering sessions. Additionally, leveraging tools like Business Process Mapping can provide valuable insights into existing workflows, highlighting areas where AI can be most effective and ensuring that the project delivers real value.

By following this process, you can ensure that your AI projects are not only aligned with organizational goals but also contribute to the long-term success of your organization.

The Myth of Multi-Tasking

Written by Christina Lovelock on September 4, 2024. Posted in Articles.

So, you think you are good at multi-tasking. Perhaps you even list it on your CV. Multi-tasking seems like a “must have” skill in this busy world we live in, but instead of helping you get-ahead, is it actually holding you back?

Multiple projects/ multiple priorities

Everything is high priority, and everything is urgent. The Eisenhower Matrix is great in theory, but most of us have no-one to actually delegate anything to! The urgent drowns out the important, but everything on our list ‘must be done’.

Many BAs work across multiple teams or projects, which can be great, as it gives us variety in our work, different challenges, different stakeholders and plenty of opportunity to learn.

HOWEVER! The reality of working in this way is that your stakeholders don’t know or care that you are spinning many plates and expect outputs and answers at the same speed.

Notifications

Email. Teams. Slack. Chat. We have messages and notifications flowing in from multiple channels, and they often cause us to stop what we were doing/ thinking/ saying to instantly investigate. Most of these do not really need instantaneous action. Remote working has normalized being in meetings, whilst ‘simultaneously’ checking emails and responding to messages via many channels.

The instant message fallacy: just because a message arrives instantly, does not mean it needs an instant response.

Notifications are impacting the quality of our attention, our creativity and productivity.

Context Switching

Allowing ourselves to be distracted (or ‘notified’) seriously disrupts our ability to think, plan and decide. Moving between different apps, topics, tasks and projects requires time for our mind to adjust to the change and ‘tune in’ to the new activity. We typically underestimate how long this mental adjustment takes.

The cost of context switching is significant. We can lose a massive chunk of our day by trying to multi-task. “Each task switch might waste only 1/10th of a second, but if you do a lot of switching in a day it can add up to a loss of 40% of your productivity” (Psychology Today, 2012).

Moving between different levels of detail is particularly taxing for our brains. This is something BAs are doing regularly. We might move from a kick-off meeting for a new piece of work, which requires strategic thinking and creativity, to a clarification session looking in detail at requirements and issues, which involves recall, lateral thinking and problem solving. Wondering why you are feeling so exhausted when you have just sat still all day? We are firing up many parts of our brain, using different cognitive functions and not allowing ourselves any time to recover and recharge.

Flow

There is a brilliant video by Henrik Kniberg, which contains everything you need to know about:

work in progress
productivity
saying no (or not yet)
context switching
multi-tasking.

It emphasizes the need to get things done, before you start doing something else. It’s better for you, and it’s better for all the stakeholders you are trying to keep happy (yes – even the ones who have to ‘wait’).

Accomplishment

Constant interruption and inching forward affects how we see ourselves, our levels of motivation and our sense of accomplishment. Counter-intuitively, getting stuff done gives us the energy to get more stuff done. Failing to make real progress saps our energy and makes it harder to be motivated and effective. We all get a sense of satisfaction from completing tasks on our to-do list. The more attention we give each task, the more tasks we can achieve. We can still have multiple tasks on the list, or multiple projects on the books at the same time, but we need to manage our time across these activities and avoid unnecessary switching (of both projects and levels of detail).

Conclusion

Given the complexity of most projects, in terms of interdependencies, stakeholder relationships and technical challenges, we really need to be paying attention to the task in hand.

Research from Stanford University shows that trying to talk, read, process and respond using multiple channels (i.e. meetings, emails and messages) actually lowers our IQ!

Simple steps can make a big difference. Protect chunks of time. Turn off notifications. Manage your diary to avoid unnecessary context switches. Take a lunch break.

We all need to comprehend that the once prized skill of “multi-tasking” is actually a sophisticated and covert form of procrastination, and it’s making us less intelligent and effective.

Further reading

Notification fatigue is tanking productivity: HR Dive, 2022

Multiple WIP vs One Piece Flow Example: Henrik Kniberg, 2020

Context switching is killing your productivity: Asana, 2024

Media multitaskers pay mental price, Stanford study shows: Stanford Report, 2009

Three Keys to Building a Strong Process Management Foundation

Written by Madison Lundquist on August 29, 2024. Posted in Articles.

Effective process management is not something that can be built overnight but is critical to the success of process management programs. Recent research by APQC indicates that only 52% of organizations feel their process management programs are somewhat effective, and only 11% feel they are very effective. However, the survey findings also point out three opportunities for growth:

Align process programs with organizational strategy
Measure process performance
Ensure a strong focus on process governance

Organizations looking to leverage opportunities for growth and to build their process program on a strong foundation should consider the points outlined in this article.

First, the structure.

Organizations can structure their process team in a variety of ways; and most often, the same way won’t work best for every organization. According to APQC’s research, most organizations (44%) have centralized process teams, 29% have federated teams, 14% have decentralized teams, and 13% follow an ad hoc approach.

While organizations will favor the structure that works best with their organization’s overall structure; there are pros and cons to consider with each structure.

Next, align to strategy.

Process work has traditionally involved teams driving efficiencies in cost, cycle time, and throughput. However, over the last few years, process teams are shifting these tactical objectives under broader organizational drivers.

While some organizations are not aligning to strategy as well as they should, 49% of organizations do align their process efforts to organizational strategy.

Strategy and process management activities should intertwine and inform each other. The following best practices lead to greater alignment of strategy with the work of the rest of the organization:

Planning – Do not limit strategic planning processes to the corporate level, and make sure that the planning process is constantly evolving with business needs and forecasts. Continuous improvement is a best-practice mantra.
Measurement – Use qualitative data in addition to carefully selected quantitative data points to set strategic plans but remember that financial numbers only tell part of the story. Qualitative information can provide the context needed to make valid decisions.
Organizational structure, communication, and culture – Strategic plans should include processes for communicating strategy. The organization will never be aligned if strategy is not clearly and consistently communicated and discussed. Embed strategic planning into people’s roles, driving employees to feel motivated to contribute and feel that their time is valued.
Process design – Integrate the strategic planning process with quality processes. Be sure that quality and strategy inform each other and enable enterprise success.

Lastly, measure process performance.

Once organizations have selected their team structure and defined their strategy, it’s time to consider how they will measure the performance of their process efforts. When organizations were asked how they use measures in managing process performance, 30% of organizations only use ad hoc measures, and 16% have no process measures at all.

Measurement enables decision making at all levels in the organization. Without measuring, leaders manage and make changes in the dark, without a clear view of which changes need to be made and where.

Determining which measures align with strategic goals is the first step. Once the organization selects the initial sets of measures for the different audiences (e.g., executives, business units, departments, managers, frontline workers), those measures can be tracked over time and tweaked as necessary. When an organization can look at its performance on a granular level and see how those pieces roll up into high-level metrics, it can begin to adjust in the places where they will make the biggest difference.

Don’t forget about process governance.

Organizations can have the best process program strategies, linked to organizational objectives and with smart measures in place; however, if the right governance is not in place, those plans can fail.

Governance encompasses all the structural elements that help process management function and often dictates the efficiency and speed at which an organization implements and embeds process management into its practices. Appropriate governance ensures that the right changes are made to processes and that policies surrounding process design and management are clear and relevant to the entire enterprise.

According to APQC’s survey, 75% of organizations have process owners present in their organization and 57% have process improvement specialists. Only 38% of organizations have champions or steering committees, which vitally provide oversight and governance for process work, help to prioritize opportunities, and align processes and process work with organizational strategy and objectives. Thankfully, the number of process sponsors and champions at organizations has improved since the last time this survey was conducted in 2020, showing the increased importance organizations have placed on these more strategic process roles.

Process management programs are not built overnight, and they all follow a different path. Starting with the key topics outlined in this article can help organizations get off on the right foot.

Navigating Multiple ‘Right’ Answers in Business Analysis

Written by Adrian Reed on August 28, 2024. Posted in Articles.

We’ve probably all experienced situations where there are multiple ‘right’ answers to a question. This is particularly true with questions that appear straightforward, but actually hide significant nuance. Let’s take a seemingly simple question;

“Who released the song ‘The Boys of Summer’?”

If you know the answer, you might instinctively reply “Don Henly”. However, if you said The Ataris, or DJ Sammy, you’d also be correct, all of these bands/artists have released the song. Depending on when you were born and the type of music you listen to, you might be familiar with one, many or none of those tracks. You might even know of other versions!

Equally, you might have interpreted the question ‘who released this song’ as relating to the record label or promoter. So you equally might have responded “Geffen” or “Universal Music Group”, and you’d have been correct…

If it’s hard to get a single ‘right’ answer to a seemingly simple question like the one mentioned above, what hope do we have when undertaking requirements elicitation? We might be seeking to understand how a particular process works today, how things could be improved, or perhaps we’re wanting to understand potential requirements for an IT system. People are naturally going to have different opinions and experiences.

Yet if different people have different ways of undertaking the work, or if there are different views on what ‘good’ would look like, what do we do? How do we avoid missing (or misunderstanding) crucial information?

Avoiding Elicitation Woes

There’s no silver bullet, but three key considerations are specificity, multi-sourcing and modeling.

Firstly, it’s worth thinking about the specificity of any elicitation activity. By this I mean what level of granularity are we seeking. If we are at the very beginning of an initiative, we might be seeking answers to very big, macro-level questions. These will help us determine what direction we should take and where we should follow up. By their nature, these questions are big and fluffy, and there can be a tolerance for error in the answers. “Do you think the claims process works well?” is a big, broad, question. If the answer is “no” then it gives us something to follow up on.

Equally, as we get closer to granular requirements, we ought to be seeking very specific information. It’s crucial to actively seek to understand key terminology and probe into specific areas. We might probe into particular areas where improvements are necessary, and this is likely to require uncovering more and more detail. Feeling empowered to ask “what do you mean by that?” is a must.

Specifying contextual information such as the timeframe or situation is key. “In 2003, which band released ‘The boys of summer’ from their album ‘So Long, Astoria’” is a more specific question than the one mentioned at the beginning of this article. Equally “once a potential insurance claim has been reported by a policyholder by phone, what determines what happens next? What rules or decision logic are applied, and how?” is a more specific question than simply asking “what happens with claims?”.

Embrace Multiple Sources

However much specificity we gain, rarely will one person (or team) have a full view of a situation or process. Seeking multiple sources of the ‘truth’ is important. How a procurement process works, and whether it is efficient or not, will depend on who you ask. A procurement team might think its processes are very efficient, but managers from other departments trying to procure services might disagree as they feel procuring a product or service takes too long. External service providers might have a different view, particularly if their invoices aren’t paid on time!

Understanding different stakeholders’ perspectives will help to gain a 360 degree view. This helps avoid situations where an improvement is implemented that works very well for one group, but makes life much harder for others.

Modeling for Validation

Elicitation and modeling are sometimes seen as separate activities, and I have never understood why. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has sat with a stakeholder and sketched out a process, then quickly shown my sketch and said “is that what you mean?”.

Creating informal models is a great way of ensuring that everyone is on the same page, and also a great way to spot gaps. It might identify that there are different teams undertaking a process in different ways—and one way of improving the situation might be to unify this.

Not only this, but having some kind of model to point at ensures that areas of agreement/disagreement can be clearly highlighted. Creating a shared model, whether that’s an ‘as is’ or a ‘to be’ model, ensures that people are on the same page. It helps avoid situations where everyone appears to agree, but different stakeholders have slightly different views on what should be done.

The Power of Perspectives

All of this highlights the power of perspectives. Typically different stakeholder groups each know a bit about a particular situation or process. The art is to get enough coverage, enough variety, sufficient perspectives, to see a feasible and desirable way forward.

Doing so will ensure that the end solution or product is one that the stakeholders actually want to use!