Someone else's shoes

Continuing from my last post, spending a day in another person's shoes will give you an appreciation and understanding of their point of view.
Try this simple exercise - Drop any preconceptions or notions you may have and pretend you are in the position of one of your clients or end-users. Do a little role-playing to increase your empathy.

• What would you want or need to be successful?
• Why would you want it? What would you do with it? What's the value?
  
• When would you need it?

By no means do I suggest you use this technique to gather requirements for a client, however, it will help you look at things differently and with a more open mind.

Change your perspective

Perspective influences how you view the world. It allows you to see things in a different light than another person, but it can also keep you from understanding their point of view. When you are gathering requirements from a client, having empathy enhances your ability to understand their needs.

Benefits of being able to view things differently:

1. Allows you to be open-minded, receptive and patient.


2. You learn to think like your client. In some of my engagements, I found my clients could not articulate exactly what they wanted. I needed to perform a lot of facilitation to help gather and define requirements. Being able to think like them allowed me to probe more effectively and determine the underlying objectives.


3. Because you understand your client's point of view, you can anticipate their next question. This is an excellent value-add to your ability to provide service.

Changing perspective isn't a foreign concept. If you have ever created user stories, you have in essence used an approach that incorporates the different perspectives of the people involved. User stories are easy for the different parties to understand -- clear communication is always the goal.

Make understanding your client's perspective a part of every engagement.

Webinar: Getting the Right People on the Right Projects

Getting the Right People on the Right Projects (Wednesday April 18, 2007 @ 2:00PM EST)

Completing projects isn't enough anymore. The real challenge is building applications that are on target, on deadline, and on budget, to save your company money and provide a competitive edge. Therefore, ensuring you've got the right people on the right projects at the right time is more important than ever. That means effective project management.

Slew of webinars and resources

Why requirements definition is a critical first step (April 18, 2007 @ 1:00pm EST)

Managing your requirements is only half the battle. For management to be truly effective, taking the first step of defining complete, accurate requirements is absolutely critical. In this webcast, Forrester Senior Analyst Carey Schwaber will explain how you can build agreement around requirements right from the start, so there are no uncertainties down the road.

Aligning Business and IT (on demand)

Many CIOs are struggling in their quest of aligning IT with the corporate business strategies, objectives, metrics and culture. CIOs need to become more involved in the development of strategic initiatives and build an understanding of the corporate and line of business missions and goals if they seek to align IT with the corporate directions. Moreover, CIOs need to interpret that knowledge into a flexible IT strategy if the alignment is to succeed long-term.

Business Intelligence Trends (podcast)

As business intelligence (BI) evolves, new trends emerge. But whichimportant BI trends should you pay attention to? And how should yourorganization incorporate this information into BI strategies?

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.