Webinar: Bits and bites

BPM: Aligning People, Process & Technology
Monday March 26 @ 12:00pm (EST)

Join Paul Harmon, Executive Editor, BPTrends and Principal, BPTrends Associates and Roger Burlton, Founder, Process Renewal Group and Principal, BPTrends Associates, for an insightful and lively discussion about the advantages of aligning your people, processes and technology to achieve improved enterprise performance.

Deliver what the business expects
One of the webinars mentioned in a previous post has made its slides available as well as access to a 2006 IDC research white paper by Ballou.

Building trust

A business analyst bridges the communication gap between different parties through precise communication and understanding. Part of this process requires the development of strong working relationships with clients, or more simply, client management skills.
Like any relationship, professional or personal, establishing trust, confidence and credibility is of the utmost importance. Here are a few of my suggestions:

1. Set expectations. Make sure your clients understand the necessary inputs and outputs from the engagement. Make sure they understand their own role.
   
2. It's all about execution. Do what you say you will do. Develop a plan and show your are executing against it. This improves your client's transparency into your activities as well as shows your accountabilities.
3. Present the good and the bad. By nature a lot of us will 'sugar-coat' the bad things or make them small footnotes. Present the bad news and its impacts however, provide options, alternatives and recommendations.
   
4. Be able to justify your work. Be prepared to run someone through your thought process. I remember one instance where I had prepared reporting showing assets under administration a few hundred million dollars short of the previous month. Naturally the lead accountant questioned my data. I walked him through the process of developing the report and after he saw the diligence and supporting numbers he agreed with my conclusion. Afterwards, he never questioned any of my work and was always satisfied with the results.
   

Whenever you are starting an engagement with new clients there is a feeling out process. This is your opportunity to set the stage and provide exceptional value-add service.

Webinar: Deliver what the business expects

Compuware is providing a webinar entitled, Deliver what the business expects, at 2:00 PM EST on February 27, 2007. Here's a brief synopsis:

By establishing a sound requirements gathering and management process and tightly aligning it with QA and the rest of project life cycle, IT can deliver relevant and business-facing applications faster and more efficiently. IDC’s November 2006 research white paper, "Driving Effective Requirements Through Quality Coordination for Adaptive IT/Business Collaboration," by Melinda-Carol Ballou shows that leading global companies are looking deeper within the IT organization to deliver competitive advantage.

Webinar: From Process Understanding to Business Innovation

ebizQ will be hosting a webinar called From Process Understanding to Business Innovation on February 6, 2007 @ 12:00 PM (EST.) Here is a brief description of the event.

Transformation and innovation are the cornerstones of your success. It's no longer enough to be efficient. Business innovation is the name of the game if you want to stay ahead of your global competition. But enhancing customer experiences, increasing operational agility, and re-thinking the way you create value is no easy task. It requires you to change and continually improve your processes.

Business intelligence basics

Business intelligence is defined as,

The process of gathering information about a business or industry matter; a broad range of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help make business decisions.

While I am not an expert in this field I do have a fundamental understanding of the key concepts. The picture below shows a high level view of a simple business intelligence configuration.There are:

1. Source systems which gather the information that will be analyzed.
2. Information from the source systems are stored in their native databases or other data sources. Typically the database are configured for speed of processing. This is good for processing transactions quickly but bad for analyzing them.
3. Information from the data sources goes through a process known as ETL where the data is extracted from the source system, transformed (to meet business needs) and loaded into a data warehouse. Many different data sources can be consolidated.
   
4. Information from the data warehouse is made available to end-users in the form of data marts where the data is organized to answer specific types of business questions (e.g., sales data can be cross referenced by product, region, time, sales representative, etc...)
5. Finally, reporting and analytic tools are used to analyze the information in the data marts. This genre of reporting tools are known collectively as on-line analytical processing (OLAP for short.) There are a few different variations of OLAP tools: MOLAP or multi-dimensional OLAP and relational OLAP or ROLAP. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. For more information on OLAP I suggest going to the OLAP report.
   

Considerations

• Do you need real-time reporting? Is it important to understand what is going on right now? By nature, most business intelligence configurations update their information at a frequency insufficient for real-time reporting.
• Are there standard reporting needs or are reporting needs of a more ad-hoc nature? The answer to this question my mean that one of MOLAP or ROLAP may be more relevant.
  

Webinar: Requirements-driven testing

There's a webinar offered by Compuware called, Requirements-driven testing—The journey from business needs to test and user acceptance. The event will occur on February 6, 2007 @2:00 pm EST (11:00 am PST.) Here's a brief description of the event.

IDC’s research indicates that 70-80 percent of IT project failures result directly from poor requirements gathering, management and analysis. With a requirements-driven testing approach, you can improve the quality of your requirements, involve QA earlier in the life cycle and maximize the ability of your projects to deliver on all of their objectives.

Decisions and consequences

Early last year I wrote a post called, Thoughts on decision-making, where I outlined some decision-making techniques and myths. One item I would like to add to that topic is to understand the consequences and ramifications of the decisions you make.
Let's step back and examine this from a business context. Suppose we are working on a project and one of the requirements is simply, "to be able to process transactions from external sources." The design team proposes two solutions:

• Processing batch files
• Processing individual transactions (real-time)
  

Based on cost estimates, the batch file solution seems more appealing. One should consider whether, in the foreseeable future, real-time processing is desirable and whether the benefits of that approach will outweigh the increase in costs. It may turn out that the batch file design still wins out but the ramifications of the decision are fully understood and can be communicated.

You may think the consequences of a decision will be minor and short-lived, but they may become temporary like income taxes.

Ode to preparation

There's a short but interesting post on Mark Cuban's blog, Blogmaverick. He paraphrases former Indiana Hoosiers coach, Bobby Knight, "Everyone has got the will to win, it's only those with the will to prepare, that do win."
When you are working on business requirements, presentations or anything at all, good preparation will improve your performance. Words to live by.

Tips for end-user acceptance

Any solution, no matter how well it has been conceived will not be successful unless it is embraced by its intended end-users. Here are some quick tips to help promote acceptance (though I don't guarantee it.)

1. Understand how end-users work: Find out why they do the things they do. If you show an interest in them, they will be more comfortable with what you're trying to accomplish.
2. Provide opportunities for feedback: This is particularly important when there are user interfaces involved. At regular intervals, let people see the development and direction and be willing to listen to suggestions and feedback.
   
3. Manage change: If something has to change let your customer understand the rationale. "Because it has too..." is not a useful response. If the change is meant to make things better explain how.
   
4. Make it seem familiar: People by nature are resistant to change. Perhaps there is opportunity to gradually phase in changes (smaller changes are easier to digest) or provide an interface that is similar to an existing one.
   
5. Enlist champions: End-users that can teach other end-users are a great way to provide support. It also gives the champions a sense of ownership for the adoption. Early adopters are good individuals to use as champions.
   
6. Teach don't point: When someone asks for help one of the worst things you can do is point them to a manual. Spend time to teach them how it works. Show them they're important.
   
7. Measure & report: If the new solution is meant to improve productivity, show them the gains that have been made over time as the end-users become more familiar and move up the adoption curve. This type of information shouldn't just be provided to the project sponsors and management.
   

Projects are usually justified quantitatively based on achieving benefit targets (e.g., gains in efficiency or increases in sales.) Maximum benefits will not be achieved if the end-users do not embrace the solution wholeheartedly.

Why we do things - ROI

Long ago, one of my professor's told me, "The purpose of education is to increase pleasure enjoyment." I've yet to fully grasp exactly what he meant (he was a professor of philosophy and often spoke in riddle), but I think it was something along the lines of, "Knowledge allows us to improve our station in life." It may take the form of allowing us to obtain better jobs, improve our ability to appreciate things or allow us to take better advantage of the opportunities presented to us.

Let's examine a familiar concept - investing. Whether it is because we want to be able to make a large purchase (a house or car), enjoy a comfortable retirement, or live out some of our dreams, most of us are putting money aside. This money is invested based on our individual risk / reward preferences. If you lie awake at night worrying about your investments, you may be outside of your risk / reward sweet spot.
Individuals who want to be safe, invest in financial instruments such as money market mutual funds, treasury bills or other assets where the risk of losing the investment is small (note that small risk generally implies small potential return.) Individuals with a higher risk tolerance purchase financial assets with higher potential returns.

The prudent investor analyzes their assets periodically to ensure a suitable return on investment (ROI) is being realized. There is a good guide on ROI available on SearchCIO.com explaining basic ROI concepts from a business perspective.

I want to introduce another concept - opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is defined as:

The cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. Put another way, the benefits you could have received by taking an alternative action.

In business, all else being equal, you fund projects that have better rates of return for your company. Businesses use capital from their shareholders and money they've borrowed to fund their projects. Furthermore, a company is expected to invest in projects with ROI that exceeds their opportunity costs (e.g., projects that make them grow!) From the perspective of an individual investor you probably wouldn't be willing to purchase shares in a company that wasn't trying to increase its future earnings. Would you?

Thus, in business the ultimate goal is to increase profitability. A business does this by undertaking projects that are expected to yield a return above their opportunity cost. These projects have specific goals and objectives that support the business' strategy. This is why it is important to tie requirements back to business goals and objectives. As well as business goals and objectives back to strategy.In business and in our personal life, we do things to improve, to grow, and as my old philosophy professor would say, "...To increase pleasure enjoyment."