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The New Role of the Business Analyst and The Strategic Implications

Written by Cynthia Low on . Posted in Articles.

The new role of the BA is far more strategic in both the organizational sense as well as at the project level. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the BA, when appropriately leveraged, represents a liaison between business, project and customer teams. This shift in responsibilities identifies two areas that need to be addressed by any organization seeking to expand this role:

  • The organizational structure must support the actions of a “strategic” BA position. 
  • The BA candidate must have wide skill sets, encompassing many general management competencies.

As organizations shift to become “projectized,” the roles and responsibilities that have supported projects within a traditional matrix structure must shift as well. Over the years we have seen organizations struggle with the following challenges related to shifts in both structure and culture: 

  • Broken or disjointed cross-functional communication channels. 
  • Uncertainty around roles and responsibilities within the project structure and beyond. 
  • Quality concerns at the point of project delivery. 
  • Skewed scope statements and, thus, implementation plans due to early-stage breakdown. 
  • Overall loss of productivity on project teams due to lack of continuity and methods.

The items noted above are tell-tale signs that several strategic components of a best practice project management environment are missing. In the past, we addressed the discussion around project office and methodology; the topic of BA is an integral component to bring both of those items to life in the real world.

Forward looking or best in class organizations have aggressively embraced the concept of the BA role. What sets them apart from the old school thinking associated with this job title is the escalation and expansion of the roles, definition and responsibilities. Not too many years ago, a BA may have been confined to a very technical role within an IT environment working on specifications, functionality and even some quality and testing related to one or more project life cycles. Today we are seeing BA positions filled from across the organization and expect that this trend will continue, as it should.

Let’s address these points in the context of how they can be leveraged to meet the challenges:

Broken or disjointed cross-functional communication channels

A BA should be in front of any project communication produced, from the point of team inception to the close-out phase. This interaction does not mean that the BA takes on the role of project manager (although we have seen organizations combine the two roles), as it is not effective on larger and longer term initiatives. Our experience shows that an independent BA position can help to promote better communication, align protocol and help the project manager to extend his/her reach into the project teams.

Uncertainty around roles and responsibilities within the project structure and beyond

The BA functions as a tour guide through the project plan ensuring that all of the moving pieces are touching at the right points. We call these critical communication points and they can be built around time, budget or deliverable expectations. The BA will be assigned a protocol map within the project structure to enable better access to expectations, and provide for a proactive way to reach team members.

Quality concerns at the point of project delivery

In reality, the BA is monitoring quality points through the project life cycle, thus producing a quality product at the close of the project. Very much like the thinking around proactive quality control, the BA is in front of each deliverable and monitors the progress against the project plan. This allows for immediate communication between the project manager, customer and associated teams.

Skewed scope statements and thus implementation plans due to early stage breakdown

The planning stages of a project are obviously critical to the implementation plan and ultimate quality. A BA should be assigned early in the process and work hand in hand with the project manager to ensure the highest level of intimacy with the plan. Just as important, they need to have a direct connection to the internal and external customers in order to ensure collaboration and proactive attention to emerging issues.

Overall loss of productivity on project teams due to lack of continuity and methods

A strategic BA assists the project manager and PMO with the execution of best practice within an organization’s project management structure. The BA has a unique opportunity to guide the process through an existing methodology and essentially help the project to operate in better alignment. This is accomplished by having a dedicated individual who is consistently working against the deliverables and is not distracted by the operations management associated with the project manager’s job.

By taking the above steps you have begun the shift toward the organizational structure needed to take advantage of the BA position. With that said, we still have one more change to make in order to secure success.

It is obvious that the BA role, as defined here, will require wider skill sets than the more traditional BA position, still driven from the IT departments of yester-year. To that point we have begun to see a trend where the BA position can spawn from either business or IT. This is an interesting point as it speaks volumes to an organization’s maturity around project management. Imagine, for just a moment, an organization that has no boundaries within in its functions and everyone on the team collaborates toward a common goal. I like to call this organizational desegregation and cultural morphing. As we begin the next phase of benchmarking the project management industry and clients, we are beginning to see this shift as a representative of the next wave of advancing thought in the project management space. It was not too many years ago that I published an article on the emerging role of the project manager as the CEO of his/her project. I am confident that the BA role will take a firmly positioned spot in the upper hierarchy of any world class project organization within the next few years.

In order to succeed the BA will need to have a competency profile that meets the following criteria: 

  • Excellent understanding of both business and technology within the project environment. 
  • Be a leader, communicator and professional. 
  • Understand the skills associated with internal consulting techniques. 
  • Be proficient in project management skills as well as a complete understanding of the internal process. 
  • Epitomize the essence of a collaborator and team player. 
  • Understand and be able to navigate through the organization’s politics and structure. 
  • Be able to manage without having authority via negotiation. 
  • Understand true stewardship-based service.

So, the BA role probably looks a little different than a traditional structure may have dictated. Yet, this is the trend and, I believe, will become the norm. As organizations look to enhance productivity and quality while reducing cost, they are finding this role to be extremely important. Additionally, project managers we spoke to during the research for this article all stated that having a BA on the team made their job easier, and allowing them to focus on deliverable based activity.

It is important to note that this type of structure is recommended for mid- to large-size projects, but on the smaller initiatives we found that these attributes were part of the project manager’s role.

Phil Ventresca is Founder, CEO and President of Advanced Management Services, Inc. (AMS), a full service management consultancy servicing an international client base. Phil has utilized his extensive background in management and consulting to lead AMS to its current status as a multi-million dollar enterprise with an international customer base. Phil has led the organization to recognize several strategic breakthroughs such as developing partnerships with distance education providers, software developers and publishers. Through these efforts, AMS has emerged as a leader in consulting, training and assessment services. He has also founded three other businesses which remain under his direction, PTV Equity Management, WIT Group and AMS Aviation. For more information regarding this topic Phil can be contacted at [email protected].

Real Reuse for Requirements

Written by Cynthia Low on . Posted in Articles. 2 Comments on Real Reuse for Requirements

A telecommunications company in a hotly competitive market needs to deliver the next generation of cell phone to its customers quickly, and at the lowest possible cost. The company wants to adopt a baseline set of requirements for the next generation project, but must make necessary modifications to leap ahead of the competition.

An automotive supplier must produce embedded software components consistently and reliably for its OEM clients. To do so, the supplier’s development process must account for the slight variations required by each manufacturer.

Requirements reuse provides organizations, like those illustrated in the scenarios above, with the unique ability to share a requirement across projects without absorbing unnecessary duplication of artifacts within a repository. This is a critical capability that accelerates time to market and cuts development costs. Shared requirements can either track to the ongoing change made by the author or they can remain static if the needs of the project dictate. Further, change to a shared requirement can be made by anyone and the system handles the branching and evolution of that requirement appropriately.

The concept of reuse is a familiar notion within the software development realm, but less common when considered in the field of requirements management. There are various definitions and use cases which must be taken into consideration when implementing a solution to address requirements reuse.

This whitepaper discusses the elements that make up a requirement and establishes common understanding of how requirements evolve, how that evolution is retained, and how organizations can reuse requirements to speed business innovation, reduce complexity and control costs.

Dissecting a Requirement

To understand the concept of requirements reuse, we must first look at the various parts of a requirement: data, metadata and relationships.

Data
Describes an object, and is relevant to the object itself. An example of data may be a summary or description of a requirement.

Metadata
This is data about the data, which aids in organizing or using the object within a process. It typically describes the current state of the object, and has the same scope as the data itself. For instance, metadata may describe the State/Stage within a requirement workflow (i.e., Approved, Rejected, Satisfied, and Tested).

Relationships
This characteristic of a requirement allows you to model: 

  • structure (i.e., Consists Of, Includes); 
  • history (i.e., Revision Of, Derived From); 
  • conceptual links or traces (i.e., Satisfies); 
  • references (i.e., Defined By, Decomposes To); 
  • security (i.e., Authorized By, Enables).

Any given requirement can have information in each of the data, metadata and relationships categories. When requirements are reused, any or all of the information can also be reused.

An organization’s chosen requirements management tool needs to have an underlying architecture and the user capabilities that support the strategic level of reuse dictated by the demands of the organization. Since reuse can occur at a number of different levels by leveraging the data, metadata and relationship elements of a requirement, flexibility is also critical to solving the reuse challenge.

History, Versions and Baselines

When implementing a complex reuse scenario, or even a system where requirements persist release after release, one must be able to identify significant points in that requirement’s evolution. In the development world, these significant points are called “versions.” This term may mean different things to different people, so we will begin with a definition of the term “version” as it applies to requirements reuse and show how it relates to similar terms like history, baselines and milestones.

Consider a system where requirements are captured within requirements documents but are stored as individual items within the repository.

History is the term used to describe the audit trail for an individual item or requirement. All changes made to the item, whether it is to data, metadata or its relationships are captured in its history. History answers to the who, when and what questions with respect to changes to that item.

Version represents a meaningful point in an individual item’s history. Not all changes to an item are significant and warrant a new version of the item. For example, the reassignment of a requirement from Nigel to Julia would not require a specific version identifier. The change is recorded to the item’s history, but a new version is not created.

Baseline is a very similar concept to version but has a much different scope. Individual items are often organized into groups or sets. In the requirements management domain these sets are called documents and a baseline is a meaningful point in a document’s history. Some organizations use a slightly different definition for baseline. Rather than being a snapshot in time for a given document, a baseline, as defined here in the context of requirements reuse, is a goal to work towards. For the purposes of this discussion we will call the goal-oriented baseline a milestone in order to distinguish between the two.

Requirements management claims to allow for the versioning of individual requirements. Many tools support versioning by way of cloning or copying the entire requirement. Even fewer solutions relate the copy to the original requirement.

Although related, versioning and reuse are not the same. The concepts of versioning are often confused with that of reuse. In the next section, we will explore various reuse scenarios to illustrate the differences (and the benefits) of versioning and reuse.

Reuse or Not Reuse? – The Many Flavors of Requirements Reuse

Requirements Reuse without Reuse – Share

The ability to share an item between projects, documents or other work efforts could be considered a form of reuse. Under this definition all of the projects that are sharing the item see, and can possibly even contribute to, the evolution of the item. The metadata on the item is shared as are all the relationships and the data.

This is not real reuse. I question whether to call this reuse at all, but it is included here for completeness.

Requirements Reuse without Heritage – Copy

As mentioned previously, copying an object from one place to another can also be considered a form of reuse. In fact, this is the form of reuse that Microsoft Word (or any other non-Requirements Management tool) supports. When an analyst opens a document, selects some content and performs a copy/paste gesture into another document, they are reusing that content for a new purpose. This form of reuse has no knowledge of heritage or “where did I come from” and of course changes in one document have no impact on changes in the other. In fact, changes are completely independent and one document has no knowledge that change occurred in the other, let alone what the change might have been.

This is also not real reuse. Any flavor of reuse must minimally include a pointer to where the original content came from.

Requirements Reuse with Heritage

Given the above scenarios, let us assume you can answer the “where did I come from” question. Augmenting the copy with the pointer back to its origin provides several options for reuse. It is the manner in which this link is leveraged that will differentiate each of the following reuse models. Most RM tools available today have some notion of links or relationships – if not at the individual requirement level, at the document level. Document level links are better than nothing, but they are not very powerful. In the long run, they don’t really answer the traceability question in sufficient detail to be meaningful.

Having a link to an item’s origin is the start of real reuse though it is certainly not the end.

Requirements Reuse with Change Notification

In this situation, a requirement and all related information (data, metadata and relationships), is reused in its entirety. Project state determines the state of the requirements at the time of reuse, and any change to requirements in a reuse scenario causes a ripple effect, flagging all artifacts related to those requirements as suspect.

Requirements Reuse with Change Control

Reuse with Change Control is similar to Reuse with Change Notification in that data, metadata and relationships are reused in their entirety. This seems, and in fact is, the same as the Share topic discussed above, however, there is one significant difference; the two projects sharing the same requirement only share it until the point in time where one project needs to change it. When the information changes a new version/branch is created and only items referencing that new version are declared suspect. All other projects or documents are unaffected.

Requirements Reuse with Annotations

In the two reuse paradigms above, the requirements and related information (data, metadata, and relationships) are reused in their entirety. In Reuse with Annotations, only some of the information belonging to a requirement is identified as a candidate for sharing and reuse. The rest of the information is specific to the project or document. The shared information is held in the repository while the other information belongs to the project or document reference. Each instance of the requirement being reused has its own metadata and relationships. The project or document state is, or can be, independent of the state of the requirements that are contained within it. New versions of the requirement are automatically created when the shared information in the repository is changed. These changes that trigger new revisions can suspect other references, as well as other items in the system, by the ripple effect of that change. For example, changes to requirements may affect test cases or functional specifications downstream.

Once you have project or document independence in terms of the metadata, you have the ability to model both a dynamic (share) and static (reuse) form of reuse at the same time. The project manager or analyst decides if they want to remain consistent with the evolving requirement in a dynamic way or if they want to lock the requirement down such that the impact of change does not affect their project.

Requirements Reuse with Annotations and Change Management

Applying change and configuration management paradigms onto the requirements management discipline in a single integrated and traceable solution can bring the power of reuse to a new level. By incorporating a process on top of reuse and controlling how and when requirements can be modified and reused enables you to reap these benefits without unnecessarily branching and versioning objects unless it is authorized and appropriate to do so. Requests for Change (RFCs) come in, get filtered and are directed by various review boards. Some of these RFCs get approved and assigned to users to affect the requested changes. Ideally, this change management process can define what types of changes can be made; whether it is modification, branching, applying a baseline or other gestures. Only when an approved RFC is associated with a requirement can an analyst modify the requirement, causing the system to version and branch accordingly, and notifying the related constituents appropriately.

There are clearly, additional reuse models that are not described herein – Component level reuse, documents reuse and various combinations of these with annotations and change management for example. This paper provides only a sampling. The business needs and strategic goals within the group, business unit or business as a whole will help determine which model is most effective for the project or organization.

Is Requirements Reuse Right For Your Organization?

Requirements reuse is not for everyone. There is a broad spectrum of need in terms of requirements management tooling in the market today, and organizations first need to know where they lie on the requirements maturity curve.

realreuse1.png

1 The requirements maturity curve is not really a curve at all but a measurement of the current process and tools used and/or needed within an organization when it comes to requirements management. As organizations evolve along the curve, the need for more capabilities – such as change management, process and workflow, traceability, reuse, etc. – within their requirements management framework exists. 

Many companies are still in the infancy of requirements management. They have not yet adopted a requirements management tool, and are currently using business productivity applications such as Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel to capture and track requirements. They may look for capabilities such as ease of document import, rich text support, and downstream traceability to ease business adoption. These organizations are not yet at a point of requirements sophistication where reuse support is necessary – or maybe they are but have not found a tool to support their needs.

However, if an organization has progressed on the maturity curve with respect to requirements management, and is managing multiple projects and thousands of requirements in parallel and seeking to reduce complexity, lower cost of development, and shorten innovation cycles, then requirements reuse is a concept that should be investigated.

Let’s face it, regardless of where an organization falls on the curve, reuse in its most basic form will provide a boost to productivity. Rather than re-writing requirements, copy them and modify them for the needs of each project – you will save keystrokes as well as leverage the structure and organization these requirements were managed under in the past. After all, how many different ways can the requirements for logging in to an application be specified really? Ok, likely quite a number, but within any one organization the need to standardize and streamline application access exists and leveraging requirements from one application to another to provide this similar type of functionality can only be a good thing™ (Martha Stewart).

In any case, concentrate on the problem domain before jumping into the question “is requirements reuse right for me?” What challenges is the organization facing in terms of requirements management? Here is a list of sample questions an organization can ask to determine if reuse is a concept that could be leveraged and if it is, which flavor of reuse is best suited to the need. 

Doug Akers is a Product Manager at MKS Inc., (www.mks.com) the global application lifecycle management (ALM) technology leader, that enables software engineering and IT organizations to seamlessly manage their worldwide software development activities. through a single enterprise application, resulting in better global collaboration and higher roductivity. MKS supports customers worldwide with offices across North America, Europe and Asia. Doug Akers can be reached at [email protected]

Managing Large Groups of Stakeholders

Written by Jonathan Malkin on . Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on Managing Large Groups of Stakeholders

You’ve just been assigned a new project.  You’re excited to get started but then find out the customer wants to have 18 stakeholders instead of the usual six to eight.  Reaching consensus with 18 people is a little more difficult than with six people.  Try getting 18 people to agree on lunch and see what I’m talking about!

How do you handle a large group of vested stakeholders? 

  1. Push back on constraints
    Part of your job as a business analyst is to ask the tough and uncomfortable questions. Why does each of the 18 people need to be at this meeting?  Is each person a decision-maker or a provider of information?  Six providers of information were asked to provide their data in advance.  By providing information ahead of time they were no longer required at the meeting. Why are they there?
  2. Double the estimates for all work
    Reaching consensus in a meeting is one thing.  Reaching consensus on document reviews once everyone has gone back to their regular work schedule is another.  Make sure to double the expected turn-around time for all document reviews or other work requiring participation of all stakeholders.
  3. Organize the team
    Make sure each person on your team knows his/her roles and responsibilities.
    In our meetings typically I present, facilitate, and generally do the “song and dance”.  The project manager documents decisions, action items, why decisions were made, and anything else that may help.  The subsequent work of managing the project schedule, conducting analysis, and other key tasks is also clearly divided. 
  4. Expect additional work
    Additional tasks will “spring up”.  The project sponsor may request reviews, demonstrations, or other key meetings to keep abreast of all decisions and changes.  Make sure to do whatever it takes to make this person happy.  After all it’s the project sponsor who ultimately calls the shots and signs your check.

In my recent experience, a project sponsor wanted to see the “user experience”.  I created a document including a flow chart and screen shots walking through a simple purchase scenario.  We reviewed the document, demonstrated a live system and answered all of her questions.  The project sponsor was given a clear picture of the system she purchased and was able to assign additional tasks to her staff.

In summary, with a little planning and preparation, working with a large group of stakeholders can be a rewarding experience that asks you to work in new ways, to be patient and flexible,  and to improve your skills.  

Jonathan Malkin is a Business Analyst at Plateau Systems.  Jonathan provides configuration, integration, documentation, and deployment support services for a leader in Talent Management Systems.  Jonathan’s areas of support include 21 CFR Part 11 Validation, SF-182’s, EHRI compliance and customizations to COTS software for which he has won multiple awards.  His experience includes work in the federal government, telecommunications, mortgage and banking, and custom software development industries.  Plateau Systems is a leading global provider of adaptable, unified web-based talent management software, content and services to onboard, develop, manage and reward talent.

Jonathan may be reached by email at [email protected] or by visiting his LinkedIn page at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jmalkin

Business Process; A Thing of Beauty

Written by Suzanne Jane Maxted on . Posted in Articles.

The English romantic poet John Keats wrote in the poem Ode on a Grecian Urn ‘”Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ This article proposes that, by recognising and reflecting on how a business behaves, we can find, cultivate and hone its beauty by clearly seeing the culture and behaviour that will make that business uniquely successful in its chosen field.

The previous articles in this series looked at seeking out good by setting the scene using a business context model, and at finding the truth within a business by understanding what real things exist and are true at any time of the day, however the business behaves, using a business domain model.  This article looks at why we model the dynamics of a business and its people.

Unless we can see how the business behaves, it is very hard to understand it. It is therefore important that we can encapsulate what the business does so that we can refine and streamline its behaviour, reduce unnecessary complexity and focus on purifying its business offering. As an analogy, an athlete will develop a process to maximise performance, eliminating all unnecessary activity. There may be a small measure of uniqueness in the process depending on the physical and mental nature and build of the particular athlete, but most athletes will follow a similar process for their sport.

There are two main camps nowadays when choosing a notation for modelling business process. I like to use the Unified Modelling Language (UML) because my business customers tell me that it is easy to pick up and read and because it covers all the types of business modelling that I require (dynamic and static). The Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) covers only business behaviour (both notations are owned and managed by the Object Management Group). In addition, many government bodies and industry groups such as the United Nations, the World Customs Organisation and the Telemanagement Forum set standards and industry patterns using the UML.

There is another faction – those who describe the business without a notation – the textual modellers who have the genuine concern that their business people will not like or understand the standard notation.

I have only ever experienced positive feedback on the notation, willingness and enthusiasm from the business and an immediate understanding of a few simple symbols, but, it is our job to create and communicate understanding, not the notation’s job. The notation is simply a language with a ‘dictionary’ and some ‘grammar’ rules. It is our job to ask all the right questions in the workshop (remembering we should always model with the business), to apply logic to a number of jumbled verbal descriptions of what is going on and to label each model element in a meaningful way in order to communicate the understanding reached. Otherwise the business will not understand the result! It is the combination of analytical skill and of the UML notation which won the following accolade. Recently during a domain modelling session (please see the article “The Importance of Business Domain Modelling“), a fellow business analyst, new to the UML, told me that he had looked down to think about something, then had looked back up at the whiteboard and exclaimed to himself how well the entire discussion had been recorded in a matter of seconds.

Most business analysts are familiar with modelling the business process at some level. If we can answer the question “what happens next?” then we are dealing with a dynamic view of the world, i.e. depicting the behaviour and activity of the business area of interest. For example, the following (simplified) UML activity model of an outdated UK government business process to do with the international trade of food, specifies the business activity requiring automated support.

businessprocess_1.png

Note that a business process always has a starting point, a finishing point and directions on where to go when there are several paths to choose from. These are three of the most frequent review comments I make. Apply rigour and logic! For instance, I can only trade goods if a certificate was issued. Also note that the activity swimlanes (Goods Trader and Certification above) can be derived from the business context model (please see the article “The Business Context Model: As Good as it Gets“) by reusing the actors and business services or areas of interest already identified. The most frequent review comment I make is about the words used to name an activity. Each element in any model must be labelled in a meaningful way. I often see activities labelled like this – “Do Administration” or worse “Enter Data”. These have no meaningful business goal and therefore we cannot hope for good understanding.

Incidentally, it is useful to model at a higher level as we learn about the business; the business use case model is an ideal way to model disjointed business processes that do not logically flow one to another. For example, in international trade, we might identify the processes that are important to our piece of work in the following way, perhaps including a description (in a good modelling tool of course) before we model each process. They should be named to express an important result of value to the business or a major goal. We could even use the strategic business objective as the business use case name.

businessprocess_2.png 

A business use case is also a useful container for business policies, business rules and constraints which can later be inherited by any software specified.

While some people think that specifying software requirements is the only aim of a business analyst, my view is that this activity should be regarded as a possible end goal depending on the findings of analysing the business. While the focus of this series is on business analysis, I will diverge a little to help refocus our attention on the business when we do step further into software specification i.e. to specify structured functional software requirements as system use cases (because a use case describes a single interaction between a user and a system that meets a goal of the user). There is misunderstanding about why we have use cases. Briefly, a system use case exists to partially or wholly automate and support a business activity in a business process. Therefore, we should not invent use cases from thin air. They should be derived. I have just read an article giving guidance on how to choose whether to model use cases or business process. I claim that we cannot know which use cases we need without studying the business process they are there to support. Otherwise, it’s like administering medicine without knowing what’s wrong with the patient.

businessprocess_3.png

How do we derive use cases? By studying the current behaviour of the business and improving it to a more desired state and then by looking at which activities we can enhance and support further. Please reference the Capability Maturity Model Integration [CMMI] which is an open framework for business process improvement describing five levels of business maturity: Level One is otherwise known as the ‘Beast’, and we might nickname Level Five as ‘Beauty‘.  This begs the question – how do we know when we have found a system use case? The answer is when the goals of the business process are understood. What I mean is that we must model goal focused activities and those goals, once recognised, will guide us in informatively naming those activities in Verb + Noun format. When we understand the goal we have a system use case – possibly with the same name. If we don’t understand the goal of an activity, then we must look closer, like we do when showing a bee on a flower to a child – what is the bee doing and why? It may be that the activity identified is too ‘big’ or too ‘small’ and we need to ask many more questions.

Only by deriving use cases from a good logically thought out business activity model can we be sure that our software requirements analysis will be fit for purpose. How else would we know? By writing down the wish list of our business people, hoping that everyone can remember exactly what they said in the requirements meetings so that the 300 pages of free text that resulted are not subject to an endless round of revision? In addition, praying that the statements made can act, in a timely manner, as an accurate specification that really does meet the subset of business goals and objectives assigned to the piece of work from the overall business strategy?

Many business process modellers like to model in ‘layers’ and I am often asked how many layers one should model and what level of detail is required at each level. Some industry standards also model in layers, such as the Telemanagement Forum’s eTOM business process model. My preference is not to layer the business process, because I want the model to be public and exposed, say on my business owner’s wall, and I want the model to be useful as a focus for meetings and discussions. This means that it must fit on one page if printed! I have often seen four walls completely covered by a single layer process, or layers upon layers of business process never used again after the model is “completed” – incidentally the model can never be completed in my book. It is really a judgement for each modeller to make depending on their piece of work, but I prefer a single layer with exceptions modelled on further pages so that I can keep the main process on one page (“main” = what happens most of the time with exception activities shown to indicate when something goes wrong). This may mean that I must keep the goal of each activity quite ‘big’.

Of course, the best businesses are never complacent, always proactively striving for enduring beauty: measuring and optimising business objectives and activities; and visualising the business economics (cost, revenue, benefits). Therefore a model of the business process can never be complete – it is a snapshot of an ever evolving set of activities.

With a smoother running process, we can focus our attention on what really counts – the value chain; designing and pricing products and services. It can be a painful realisation when we know we must actively go looking for inefficiencies in our daily business life. After all, beauty is pain, so the saying goes.

The Art (or not) of Blamestorming

Written by Cynthia Low on . Posted in Articles.

When times get tough, when people get stressed, and when they are faced with a crisis, it is interesting to observe how many people seem to suddenly become skilled in the Art of Blamestorming. Loosely defined Blamestorming is a meeting of like-minded people who enjoy sitting around in meetings, deciding who or what they are going to blame for their current plight.

How many good Blamestorming sessions have you had in your own organization recently? You probably know some people who are highly skilled at Blamestorming. Some people are so proficient that they do not even need an organized meeting in order to practice their art. They do it at the water cooler, in the elevator, on the phone and some are even skilled enough to record it on paper or send out by email.

In our current economic climate it is not difficult to become a skilled Blamestormer as there are so many easy targets to pick from; Wall Street; The Government; Over Spending Home Owners; Greedy CEOs; Oil Prices and the like.

Unfortunately though, Blamestormers tend to lead their organizations on a vicious downward spiral of panic, falling morale, resignations, lack of focus on solutions and a lack of vision for the future because they are too focused on finding someone or something to blame for the past.

What organizations need now more than ever are not people who are looking to place blame, but for leaders who are prepared to step forward and take some responsibility. To take responsibility for how we got here, what needs to be done about it, what does the future look like, and how are we going to execute a plan to get there. 

Good leadership is always about responsibility and never about blame. Of course there are always things that occur that are beyond your control and yes they can affect your current situation. Strong leaders though will instinctively know that sitting around discussing who is at fault will achieve very little.

Instead they will ask themselves some of the following questions: 

  • Did we really have a contingency plan in place for recessionary times?
  • Have we created a culture of innovation so that we can look at new ways to grow?
  • Have we created an agile organization that can adapt quickly to changing needs?
  • Have we built a loyal engaged workforce who have faith in their leadership and will stay with us?

In the days ahead, organizations that have developed strong leadership will be thinking about how to learn from the past, be innovative today, and provide inspiration for tomorrow so that they emerge stronger, leaner and well prepared when the upsurge occurs. They will not be wasting time with the Art of Blamestorming.

Bryn Meredith is a principle of Bluepoint Leadership Development.  He has extensive experience as a business leader, entrepreneur and leadership development specialist. Bryn can be reached at [email protected]