Entries for November 2015

Customer journey mapping is a great way to understand your customer intimately to provide insights into providing targeted customer experience that empower the customer positively to drive better business outcomes.  This technique places the customer first with a deep emotional understanding, then looks backwards toward the experiences provided by the operating model, thus enabling good aspects to be reinforced and negative ones to be managed. It provides a complete 360 end to end experience of the customer to be realized driving customer insights, allowing more blue sky approaches to offsetting emotional deficits...

This article discusses a tool for documenting, categorizing, ranking and decomposing various types of requirements (business/user and solution).  The business analyst (BA) can use this tool to capture high-level business and user requirements and then decompose them into solution requirements. In fact, the tool can be used multiple times and results strung together to provide forward and backward traceability of requirements through specification and test cases. 

Despite of all the extensive literature available on Requirements Analysis, it is hard to find one which proposes an established framework on how to use this tool in general sense of application. However, let’s try to map a generic algorithm that can be leveraged for suitable circumstances since every problem or situation is different from the other. We need to calibrate our analytic skills such that a general algorithm can be applied suitably depending on the situation(s).

There are several interpretations of Business Process Design, which is concerned with devising a cost-effective approach for the various tasks to be performed in a business. Here is mine which has worked effectively for me for several years. It's not a matter of what tools I use, but rather understanding the principles behind the design process itself.

Developers complain that customers don’t know what they want. At the same time, customers complain about having to explain the obvious. Many projects can get stuck in this type of behavior.

Fortunately, there is a loophole. Many of the problems that business people find don’t actually require a fully working application. Often, a simple “picture” (aka mockup) is enough.

This is a story of an outsourced product implementation contract between two companies, FinCo and ProdCo. What started out as an exciting contract turned out to be a bitter experience for both the companies. There are lessons to be learnt from this story – about outsourced contracts, about setting expectations and above all, about good old business requirements.