Tag: Planning

Shift Your Business into Drive – Focus with a Balanced Scorecard

Written by Richard Lannon on August 4, 2014. Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on Shift Your Business into Drive – Focus with a Balanced Scorecard

To achieve a balanced business perspective consider using a Balanced Scorecard as part of your strategic planning initiative. A Balanced Scorecard is an approach that is used to align your business to the vision, mission, core values and strategy of the organization. The emphasis is to turn strategy into forward thinking actions that the senior team can implement against key performance indicators. To embark on a Balanced Scorecard, the company must have a mission and vision and know their financials, the present business structure and levels of employee expertise. They must also have extensive knowledge regarding customer satisfaction levels.

There are four key elements in a Balanced Scorecard: Customer, learning and growth, financials and business processes.

Customer: Research has shown that having a customer-centric view focused on satisfaction is one key to success. If the customers aren’t happy they’ll move on. Good or poor customer performance is a leading indicator for the future success or failure of a business. The ultimate question is this: What is the value proposition that you deliver on in your customer markets? Knowing your value as defined by the customer and having a clear understanding of what your customer is willing to pay is essential. This part of the Balanced Scorecard helps you focus on your markets and customers.
Learning and Growth: This part of the Balanced Scorecard includes your business culture, employee and business attitudes, self improvement initiatives and your investment in employee development. It is known that successful long-term businesses invest in the success of their people. High performance is driven by dedicated happy people. Most organizations today are operating on a knowledge platform. It is the unique knowledge of the people that keeps things going. Unfortunately, when people leave their knowledge leaves too and getting it back is painful. Things to consider include: employee satisfaction, retention, skills, experience and aptitude and the business’s beliefs, values and attitude. Ask yourself this: What kind of infrastructure is needed to foster long-term business success enabling us to grow and change to meet ongoing demands?
Financials: Data on company financials is important. The key is having the right kinds of data along with timely and accurate information. For management, just having return on investment information might not be enough. As data becomes more centralized, other financial data and key performance indicators become important. For example, consider cost-ease-benefit analysis or risk analysis to consider long-term impact. This is a slight shift that changes thinking.
Processes: This refers to the internal processes of the organization. Most businesses have a maturity line when it comes to processes. They are usually chaotic, reactive, proactive, service or value providers. These can all be measured. The management team needs to know what is working and what is not working in relation to the customers’ needs and the business mission. Understanding the present state of business processes allows for a focus on a desired future working state that will provide positive, measurable results for the business. The best people to do that work are the people who do the work. The key is to know what existing and future business processes must be focused on to excel as a business.

Having a Balanced Scorecard that is aligned to the mission, vision, core values and guiding principles of the business is an important part of your success. If constructed well it becomes part of a strategy map and a communication tool that allows you to easily share your work and progress with stakeholders. With a Balanced Scorecard you can forward think and create the success you deserve.

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7 Habits of Highly Effective Business Analysts

Written by Angela Wick on June 9, 2014. Posted in Articles.

Highly effective BAs, regardless of their skill level or years of experience, consistently hone their craft. Guided by curiosity and passion, great BAs are always on the lookout for growth opportunities—ways to strengthen and sharpen their skills.

This focus on continuous professional improvement goes far beyond attending an annual conference or workshop. Instead, effective BAs develop daily habits that demonstrate leadership and expertise.

So, I’ll borrow Stephen Covey’s popular “seven habits” framework to discuss the recurrent behaviors that support excellence in the business analysis profession.

Although I refer to these as BA habits, they can be applied to most professions. So, whether you are a project manager, a tester, a techie or a trainer, think about how these habits can help you become a leader in your organization.

Habit #1: Effective BAs engage stakeholders.

BAs need information, cooperation and trust from their stakeholders. Skilled BAs get what they need by building strong relationships. They engage stakeholders in a way that inspires engagement, creativity, collaboration and innovation.

How do you know if your stakeholders are engaged? Well, these are common issues on teams with weak stakeholder engagement:

Strongly conflicting requirements between stakeholders.
Stakeholders are silent; roll their eyes, sigh or multi-task during meetings.
Stakeholders do not contribute to the project. They don’t return phone calls, do not reply to emails, do not review project documents, provide resources, etc.
Stakeholders show up late for meetings, leave meetings early or skip meetings.
Disparate groups do not understand other stakeholder’s needs and benefits from the project.
Progress is slow.
Discussions loop in circles.
Decisions are difficult to obtain.

Do you see any of those things happening consistently in your organization? Effective BAs use their influence to create an environment that looks more like this:

Stakeholders have a shared vision and can communicate the vision to their team/s.
Stakeholders understand their connection to each other.
Stakeholders trust each other and the BA.
Stakeholders enthusiastically participate in meetings.
Stakeholders make themselves and their resources available to the BA as needed.
Questions, discussion and meaningful debates.
Proactive, 2-way communication

Habit #2: Effective BAs research new techniques.

Great BAs love discovering new tools that make work efficient, valuable and maybe even fun. Experts estimate there are more than 500+ BA techniques in use today—literally lurking around every corner. Here are a few ways to find them:

Read the BABoK! The IIBA’s comprehensive handbook describes 40 of the most common and useful BA techniques. Current IIBA members can get a sneak peak at BABoK 3.0 by participating in the public review process.
Attend industry conferences and workshops. Full-day or multi-day training sessions give BAs exposure to a variety of new techniques, trends, and methodologies. Many training companies and universities offer BA training. IIBA and PMI sponsor events across the world.
Network. Connect regularly with other BAs. Ask them about new techniques. Find out what works on their projects. Solicit advice when you hit road blocks.
Observe others. Find a mentor. Watch your peers. Which techniques do they use regularly? Are they working? Why or why not? How could you make them better?
Borrow from other industries and professions. The most obvious example may be the lean processes project teams have borrowed from manufacturing. Are there techniques you could borrow from an elementary school teacher, a farmer, a scientist or an actor? Definitely!

Habit #3: Effective BAs experiment with new techniques.

Now, it’s time to put those new techniques to work! Stagnation and boredom are the enemy of an effective BA. Applying new techniques keeps BAs motivated, engaged and inspired.

Experimentation often invites risk, but there are many ways to contain possible fallout:

Start small. Try a new techniques on small, low risk projects. Apply the new technique to a small part of a big project.
Break it down. Find a way to break the new technique in pieces. Try one piece on an analysis or elicitation effort to see if it is works. Then get feedback and adjust course if needed.
Find your friendlies. Use a new technique with a small, friendly group of co-workers. Encourage them to give you honest feedback.
Set expectations. Let stakeholders know why you are trying the new technique.
Ponder plan b. Courage to try new things includes the possibility of failure. Think about the worst case scenario. What’s your plan b if the new technique fails?

Habit #4: Effective BAs plan to re-plan.

I run into so many BAs that get stressed out by estimating requirement deliverables. They often ask, “How can I estimate when I don’t have any requirements yet?” My answer: “We plan to re-plan!”

As the project needs and scope evolve, effective BAs revisit their estimates—they reevaluate and adjust as the project moves forward.

Every BA leader and PM I have talked to about this agrees. It’s totally fine to change the estimate and re-plan, just not at the last hour!

So, set expectations and share them.

Make sure the PM and other leaders understand that this is your best estimate based on the current state of the project.
Help them understand which factors will increase or decrease estimates.
Plan resources: What can you do in the early stages of the project to anticipate estimate changes? Who can you pull in if you get behind? What tools can you use to be more efficient? How can you manage busy SMEs to get good requirements?
Look at the value and risk of scope items and adjust the plan accordingly to spend more time on high value and high risk items.
If your incentives are based on estimation accuracy, then talk to your leader about re-planning and how it fits in the incentive plan.

Effective BAs know that re-planning will be required to protect the project value. They look at the tasks and deliverables like puzzle pieces that need to be flipped, turned, and shuffled until they all come together in their proper place.

Habit #5: Effective BAs use visuals, often.

In most cases, visual communication is more effective than text-heavy documents or verbal descriptions—humans process visual information more quickly and completely. Effective BAs understand the importance and efficiency of visual communication. They always look for new and improved ways to use visuals in their meetings, presentations and documentation.

Skilled visual communicators:

Create high-level conceptual visuals, low-level detailed visuals and everything in between.
Tailor their visuals to meet the needs of their audience. Does a CEO want to review a 20-page process model? Does a group of SMEs want to focus on the whole organization or just their piece of the pie?
Draw spontaneously on white boards when discussions start spinning.
Use visuals in virtual meetings too. They use virtual whiteboards, post-it notes, flow charts, etc.
Know that visuals do not need to be perfect. You don’t need to be an artist. You don’t need 100% accuracy on day one. A flawed visual is so much better than starting with a blank page.

Habit #6: Effective BAs develop Underlying Competencies.

Obviously, BAs need techniques and tools to complete their practical tasks, but they also rely on underlying competencies. The techniques are like the tools in the tool box, but underlying competencies (UCs) influence how the tools are used and how the techniques are applied. UCs are the artistry, the finesse, or the soft skills.

Effective BAs continuously refine their UCs in many of the same ways they develop techniques: research, training, observation, experimentation, etc.

Effective BAs maintain dozens of UCs, but here are a few of the most important:

Critical thinking and Problem Solving
Teaching
Leadership and Influence
Facilitation and Negotiation
Personal integrity
Organizational Knowledge

Habit #7: Effective BAs consider politics.

Politics exist in every organization.

In project work, politics usually play out during prioritization efforts: which work will get funding, whose projects fit into an implementation, which requirements get cut.

Skilled BAs don’t ignore politics, but they avoid playing. They work around and within them.

How do effective BAs walk this fine political line? How do they understand and manage politics without getting involved? Good questions. Here are a few ideas:

Build wide support to eliminate politics as a factor.
Always redirect the team back to the project value. Which requirements, timelines, bug fixes, testing strategies, etc. best support the goals of the project and value to the organization?
Gather data. In many cases, good data can tell as story that transcends politics and makes the right answer obvious.
Lead with empathy. Understand what each stakeholder is seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling. Use these insights to help you influence each stakeholder.
Understand the definition of success for each stakeholder.

Which habits make you a highly effective project professional?

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Seven Candid Strategic Questions that Every Business Leader Should Ask

Written by Richard Lannon on June 2, 2014. Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on Seven Candid Strategic Questions that Every Business Leader Should Ask

Good questions are the key to successful planning and decision making. Throughout the business planning process we must consider strategic questions to help us understand the current situation, focus areas and our vision for the future. Strategic planning is an intensive process and should be a team effort – it should not be done in isolation.

A good place to start in the planning process is to focus on ‘what’ questions. What questions are extremely powerful tools for thinking about your business / personal strategy, goals and objectives. The key is to know which questions to ask and to be willing to take a candid look at your business.

Here are seven candid “what” questions that every business leader should ask:

What are the overall strengths and weaknesses of your business?

Strengths and weaknesses exist in all organizations and should include considerations for people, resources, culture, work processes, tools, supply chain, financial situation, etc. The list goes on and on. The important thing here is to start the process by first looking at your organization and its resources.

What are the overall opportunities and threats to your business?

Focus here on your external world, the things you cannot control but must be aware of. Some items could include a market shift, retirement and succession, competitive movement and changes, the global business climate (local, national or international), obstacles or climate and weather effects. We often miss the opportunity to do environmental scanning. Look outside your office to truly understand the opportunities and threats to your organization.

What political, economic, social and technological conditions impact your business?

What’s happening in your local business scene (economics)? Is there a product or service that people want or need to buy? Is technology impacting your team and their need for training? What important social change will impact the business?

Are you developing leaders for tomorrow? Every answer should lead to another question. Dig deep, exhaust yourself and find people to help you through the process.

What do you want to achieve, protect, avoid and eliminate?

This question contains all the elements of risk planning. There are always things we want to achieve, protect, avoid and eliminate on a personal, team or organizational basis. What are they? Identify as many as possible and make a list.

Examples vary but could include increased sales, keeping an established portfolio, avoiding trouble or accidents, establishing an employee health program or helping people drop a few pounds. The point here is that whatever is identified must be relevant to your business and its challenges.

What are the key challenges you face today, tomorrow and in the distant future?

We’re in an era where we must be predictive and adaptive business leaders and professionals. Strategic planning is about time frames with past, present and future considerations. Establish what your work world should look like with time frames. Planning used to focus on 3 to 5 year cycles. That has changed. Now we must keep our eye on short-term road trips with long term implications.

Where are we and how did we get here?

This question is a pure honesty question. It is used to establish your present situation and to help you accept complete responsibility and accountability for it. No blame-storming allowed. Outside forces might have contributed, but at some point decisions were made to set your direction. As a business leader, you were either active or reactive and there were consequences. Capture it, leverage it and be prepared to let it go.

What key initiatives are going to be placed on the strategic agenda of your business? Why?

At some point you need to focus and make key decisions that will make a difference in your business. Building your strategic agenda is a different type of challenge and may require another approach. This may take ‘why’ questions, questions that focus on benefits and value. Before adding anything to your strategic agenda you must first clearly establish the benefits and values of those items.

Being honest about your business, the organization and its people is a challenge. When strategic planning it’s important to remove yourself from the natural tendency of coming up with solutions. Establishing solutions is the action part of planning. Consider engaging an expert strategic facilitator to help. Remember that you don’t plan to fail, you fail to plan and planning requires asking the right questions.

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Initiating ITIL Implementation in a Small Organization

Written by Shriram Divakar on May 26, 2014. Posted in Articles.

Understanding the need for improving the process and what exactly the organization is trying to address is very important before we plan to apply any framework to an existing system. ITIL address many critical issues faced by any IT industry (small/large). Let us consider the below aspects,

Service downtime that the business tolerate
SLA /acceptable recovery time
Creating customer value from a service industry perspective
Running an integrated help desk
Reducing IT Operational Costs
Improve availability
Optimization of resource Utilization

Considering the above benefits, it truly does not matter if it’s a large or a small organization, it’s very lucrative and we definitely get a lot of advantages by implementing ITIL framework.
I will try and capsule my ideas of implementing ITIL (specific to Small organizations) and document in a very simple and understandable format. This is purely from my perspective; I have implemented and it served and worked effectively in reality.

Depending upon the industry (service or product), ITIL implementation can be initiated by conducting the discussion between the business and engineering. Outcome of the discussion can be multiple action items and the most important will be the agreed SLA.
Second and very important step will be to form a strong team of resources which understands each and every issue/requirements from both functional and technical standpoint. We can name the team as the control team and will be the approving authority for any change to the existing system.
ITIL has a lot of process and it is very tough to implement all of them right from the word go. I feel, it’s a good practice to start with Incident Management, Problem Management, Knowledge management, change control management and release management and setup the process, expectation and teams accordingly.
Implementing the above 5 process and meeting the SLA will give the results which will address the important ROI’s like service downtime that the business tolerate, acceptable recovery time, running an integrated help desk, reducing IT Operational Costs, Improve availability.
Assign process owners/leads.

The flow can be as below,

Strong Help desk team which will record the incident and check for available solutions in the KMDB or raise a problem ticket, assign and follow up.
Effective Problem management/production support team which will work on the solutions and request for change.
As mentioned before, control team which will analyze the change and approve. (Post approval–Close problem management)
A hands on release team to deploy the changes (Post deployment–Close change Management)
Incident Management/Help Desk to confirm the successful change and update the KMDB accordingly (Post confirmation–Close Incident Management)

There are many other aspects which will be controlled by implementing the above process. The control team can make sure of approving the required and correct CMR (change management requests) by which we can control and minimize the after change errors which is the main cause of production outages.

Some of the other key processes are capacity management, availability management, information security, risk management, configuration management, asset management, event management, access management and each process has their own benefits. We can initiate, implement and sustain with these 5 processes first and once successful, we can try and sneak the other process one by one and will fall in place.

What organization doesn’t want an increase in productivity? Or is there an organization that does not entertain cost and operational benefits. We can always customize the framework and implement process to meet our needs.

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It’s Time to Put Value in the Driver’s Seat

Written by Ellen Gottesdiener on May 12, 2014. Posted in Articles.

Deliver value. It is the mantra of every agile or lean team and a big part of the conversation among traditional or waterfall teams as well. You would expect, then, for all teams to define a product’s value explicitly and transparently—to make it the basis for every decision, the determining factor behind every potential product feature. Yet, too often this is not the case.

Let’s explore how successful teams define value, use it to drive decisions, and consider and reconsider value throughout a product’s lifecycle.

Let Value Be Your Guide

According the Value Standard and Body of Knowledge value is “a fair return or equivalent in goods, services, or money for something exchanged.” In other words, value is what you get for what you give up.

What one company considers valuable, at a certain time, might be completely different than what matters to another company, or to the same organization at another point in time. For example, one team we recently worked with selected a minimum set of product features, or slice of functionality, that could be delivered to their primary end users within two months, so as to stay within the bounds of a highly profitable purchase agreement. Another organization identified the set of features that simultaneously reduced operating costs and flagged conditions in the field that could risk life and limb.

So how did these teams decide on what to deliver? What enabled them to quickly, transparently, and collaboratively select the highest value features? They relied on value to steer their product in the right direction.

Choose Your Destination

Defining a product’s desired result, before building it, is fundamental to that product’s success. As the old saying goes, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. Successful agile teams start by determining where they want to finish.

In our first article in this series, we described how product stakeholders from the customer, business, and technology realms become collaborating partners. These product partners envision the product, define goals, and specify measurable objectives, creating a high-level view of the desired product outcomes. These key markers describe and quantify the product’s anticipated value, ensuring that the team is always moving in the correct direction.

One aspect to consider is the tangible, financial qualities, including measures such as IRR (internal rate of return), ROI (return on investment), TCO (total cost of ownership), and EVA (economic value added). Value, though, is about more than money; it is also about intangible aspects, such as user experience, joy, belonging, convenience, sense of well being, trust, alignment to strategy, upsell potential, or brand projection. These intangibles can often be as or more important than tangible value qualities, such as cost or profit margins. Though these intangible considerations are more elusive to measure, they can be quantified by accounting for uncertainty and risk. (For more on this, we recommend Hubbard’s How to Measure Anything).

One of the ways to uncover both tangible and intangible value is to have the product partners explore and share their own value considerations. A value consideration is some variable that is used when assessing the value of your product options. For example, the customer partners might include safety or a convenient-to-use product among their value considerations. Business partners (the people sponsoring the product’s development) might be most concerned about market positioning or protecting the company’s reputation. The technology partners (those who build the product) might be more interested in feasibility and compatibility with existing and future architecture. Making all of these varied (and often competing) value considerations transparent is crucial for making good decisions.

Identify Potential Hazards

Another aspect to consider when making value decisions is risk. Like value, risks change with time and can impede, mitigate, or even obviate delivered value. These risks include rework (if the wrong thing is delivered or technical debt is incurred), noncompliance, opportunity cost, and more. We recommend you consider risks along the same categories as we consider product partners: customer, business and technology.

Dependencies—product and project, internal and external—also constrain product decisions. For example, the partners need to understand the consequences of deviating from an optimal sequence, in both time and cost.

Plot the Preliminary Route

With the guideposts of vision, goals, and objectives in sight, and a clear view of all the tangible and intangible value considerations, the product partners can select the best set of high-value product features (options) for the next planning horizon. (In our second article in this series we define options and describe how teams discover them for all 7 Product Dimensions.) To do this, they consider the costs, benefits, risks, dependencies, and value considerations of each option. They then adjust each option’s value up or down accordingly, always ensuring the option is aligned with the product’s vision, goals and objectives.

Together, the desired outcomes, value considerations, benefits, and risks make up the business value model for a product. The product partners use the value model during discovery and delivery to guide their decisions. In the next article in this series we’ll describe how the partners plan collaboratively, choosing decision-making rules and the timing of the decisions, favoring the last responsible moment.

Adjust Course As Needed

Discovering value isn’t a one-and-done activity. The product partners repeat the process at every planning horizon: the long-term (Big-View), the interim-term (Pre-View), and the short-term (Now-View). Throughout the product’s lifecycle, the partners stay alert to changes in market conditions, availability of resources, costs of delay, etc., and their potential impact on the product, modifying the business value model as needed.

After each delivery cycle, the partners determine if what was delivered actually realizes the anticipated value. This comparison may uncover gaps to be addressed in future releases. Though the Lean Startup movement has made this seem like a new concept, we’ve long had a name for it in requirements engineering: validation. In Discover to Deliver, we call it “confirm to learn.”

Ensure Optimal Visibility

Before value can drive decisions, it must be defined, visible, and well understood by all concerned. Teams need to understand what value means through the eyes of the stakeholders—the product partners from business, customer, and technology. They can then view potential product options (requirements) in the context of these values to choose the most valuable set of features for each release.

When was the last time you collaboratively discussed and purposefully validated your value assumptions? Take some time in your next planning session to honestly and transparently define your product’s value, so that value truly becomes the driving force behind your product decisions.

Don’t forget to leave your comments below.

References:
Gottesdiener, Ellen and Mary Gorman. Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning and Analysis. EBG Consulting, 2012.
Hubbard, Douglas. How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business. 3rd edition, Wiley, 2014.
SAVE International. Value Standard and Body of Knowledge. June 2007. Available online here.