Excerpt:

A few months ago one of my favourite bands, The Scissor Sisters, were playing in my home town here in the UK.  I bought some tickets as soon as they were released, and I wasn’t disappointed – they put on an excellent show.

During the show, just before they sang one of their most popular songs, they thanked their crew and the “roadies” that help keep them sane throughout the tour.  As they were introducing their song  “I don’t feel like dancing”, Jake (the lead singer) explained that when they are on tour, visiting countless venues in different countries, sometimes they just don’t feel like dancing. They love their music, they love what they do, yet some days they just don’t feel like performing.  It’s those around them that give them the energy to continue.  This support allows them to get psyched up and put on an outstanding show every night.

I wouldn’t for one moment compare the art of Business Analysis to the art of surviving a world tour… however, sometimes it does feel like there’s an element of performance in our work.  There are times when we need to be “on stage” facilitating a workshop, playing back a requirements document or meeting stakeholders for the first time.  All of this requires an element of extraversion and an element of energy.  To do it well, it’s necessary to build rapport and build relationships.  Yet it has to be said that not all analysts are natural extraverts (I know I’m certainly not).

This leads to a challenge.  Sometimes you might be on your way to work on a Monday morning knowing you have a couple of stakeholder interviews booked, followed by a workshop that you’ll be facilitating, followed by a week of stakeholder interactions.  If it’s raining, you’re tired and you just aren’t in extravert mode (or, as the Scissor Sisters might say, you “don’t feel like dancing”) what can you do?

Click on the link below to read the rest of the article:

http://www.bridging-the-gap.com/how-to-push-through-when-you-dont-feel-like-dancing/

When faced with a dilemma like this, organisations often look towards their direct competitors.  What sort of innovations are going on in the marketplace?  How are any competitors behaving, and would it be best to follow suit or follow a different strategy?  Whether it’s an informal market analysis, desk-based Internet research or a thorough and formal analytic benchmarking exercise, the aim is the same: To understand your position against that of your direct competitors.

Whilst this is undoubtedly a useful activity, it exposes only part of the picture and understanding the customer is vital.  I was thinking about this as I sat at my local airport a few weeks ago.  I was waiting to take an internal flight between Southampton (in the South of the UK) and Manchester (in the North).    Since Southampton airport is relatively small, there is only one airline that flies this route, and on the surface this would seem like a monopoly.  After all, if you want to fly from Southampton to Manchester, you have to fly with them.  In that comfortable monopoly position, it might seem that the logical thing to do would be to invest in maximising capacity to meet demand. It might also seem logical to focus on providing premium services and finding ways to maximise passenger spending by offering additional in-flight meals and snacks.

Well, sort of.  As the famous quote (attributed to Havard Business School’s T. Levitt) reminds us:  “People who buy drills don’t need drills; they need holes.”   In my case, people who book air-travel don’t need air travel; they need to reach their destination in relative comfort in as short a length of time as possible.

This introduces an interesting and sometimes overlooked aspect of business: If you understand the value that your product is adding to the customer, you can start to understand what substitute products they might buy instead.  If I was a regional airline in the UK, I’d be paying close attention to the new high speed rail link that is being built.  When it is built, it is quite conceivable that passengers might choose to travel by rail rather than train.  There’s no “checking in”, no need to wait around at airports, and a train is likely to get you closer to a city centre location.   However, it doesn’t stop there: I’d also be paying attention to the growing acceptance of home-working and remote working.  Perhaps online conferencing software is yet another competitive pressure, particularly for those airlines that cover short-haul “arrive in the morning, back home by 6pm” routes.  These two substitutes are very different – if people continue to travel, but choose rail over air, an airline might console themselves with the fact that they are still travelling (so can be won back through marketing or by enhanced service).  In a world where online meetings became the norm, it might be much harder to win them back.   Michael Porter described these competitive substitute forces as the “Threat of substitute products or services” in his 5 forces model.

Understanding substitute products and services is important to organisations, whether mid-size or multinational, for two reasons:

1. You can adapt, develop or differentiate your product and adopt other strategies to encourage your customers not to switch

2. You might find new markets (as you might be able to market to customers who traditionally purchase the substitute product).

It’s important for organisations to scour the external landscape, understand how things are changing, and ensure that they are able to generate and use actionable data and insight in order to make the strategic decisions that will make them stand out from the crowd.  Understanding likely substitute products and services is an important part of this.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Fast forward to today and things feel extremely different.  As a consumer, I’m able to compare prices and propositions far easier than ever before using online comparison technology like Google Shopping or LoveMoney.  Not only that, I can very quickly share my opinion about any product or service on any number of consumer forums or “gripe sites” that exist as well as letting hundreds of people know through social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter etc.

Quite sensibly, organisations of all sizes – whether large corporate or mid-size – are engaging with social media in a proactive way.  They are analysing sentiment and may even tap into social business intelligence.  All of this is extremely valuable, but I want to ask one question:

Why wait until a customer Tweets it before fixing issues?

I saw an exchange on Twitter recently from a customer and a budget hotel chain.  The exchange went something like this (I am paraphrasing, and have changed the names to protect the identities involved):

JohnT:  @[HotelBrandName] : I have a problem and I’ve e-mailed your support several times. No reply.

[HotelBrandName]: @ JohnT:  Sorry to hear that John, what is your reservation number

@JohnT: It’s xxxxxxxxx – I booked for the wrong night

[HotelBrandName]: @JohnT: Customer services will e-mail you shortly

@JohnT:  Thanks

You might at first glance look at this exchange and think “That’s excellent.  A customer has raised a concern, and it’s now on its way to been resolved”.  To some extent you’d be right – but look at it a different way.  How many customers haven’t bothered to Tweet (or aren’t on Twitter anyway)? How many have taken the old-school approach of just walking away? And how many are slating this hotel chain via their private social networks rather than contacting the company directly?  Plus, has the organisation in question actually fixed the root cause?  Yes, they may have solved this individual customer’s problem, but how many other customers are stuck waiting for e-mail replies?

It’s impossible to answer this with any accuracy, but it highlights the importance of providing a good and slick customer experience the first time around and spotting and acknowledging when this doesn’t happen.   On occasions when customer service standards slip, it is of significant benefit if you can spot this internally, without having to wait for a customer to tell you.  You then have the option of resolving the customer’s issue swiftly and examining whether any changes are necessary to ensure it won’t happen again.

One way of spotting potential customer services issues is to ensure you have set the right Critical Success Factors and are tracking the right Key Performance Indicators.   Ensuring that these indicators are balanced, and include measures that are aligned with customer experience is essential.   Taking the example above, if the e-mail response time is unacceptably high, this identifies a problem area.  However, the solution to that problem might not be e-mail related at all – as tempting as it might be to go and  put pressure on the customer services team to “reply quicker”, it would be necessary to examine the e-mails to find further insight.  Perhaps the real issue is that the website is poorly designed, leading to people accidentally booking the wrong date and then having to e-mail a correction.

As well as carrying out appropriate measurement and investigating trends and variances, it’s important to build feedback into business processes.  Asking the customer whether they are happy is important; is there anything else we could have done?  Perhaps the customer would have liked more information throughout the process – often a 2 day wait is tolerable if you’re expecting it.  If you were expecting your goods to be ready in 30 minutes then it’ll come as quite a shock!  Equally, your front-line staff may well have ideas about where the issues are and how they could be improved.  Regularly collecting, analysing and actioning this insight internally is better than waiting for sentiment to trickle over to the Social Media Sphere.

Finally, it’s vital to take action when appropriate improvement opportunities are spotted.  Here, mid-size and smaller companies sometimes have an advantage over large multinationals.  In some cases, Mid-size organisations may find it easier to roll out new processes, procedures and even systems compared with larger companies. In some cases,  their larger competitors may have less flexibility due to the challenge of communication and the rigidity of existing systems and processes (or even governance and the sign-offs that are required).   This can be a way of quickly adapting to the environment and seizing the opportunity.

I’m certainly not arguing that businesses should ignore social media.  It’s an important avenue and should be embraced.  However, it is beneficial to look internally as well as externally to provide balanced insight on how customer experience might be improved.  Having adequate processes and having an appropriate analytic capability to keep a proactive eye on performance (from the customer’s perspective) is vital.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

The conference is always a highlight of my year, as it provides a real melting pot of ideas.  It’s a great place to meet other BAs and exchange knowledge. There are fantastic presentations from real-world practitioners, and there’s also the opportunity to relax and chat over a beer (or two) after the conference has closed.  If you haven’t been before, I’d highly recommend taking a look.

The conference is being held in London, from 23 – 25 September. You can find full details of the conference here:

http://www.irmuk.co.uk/ba2013/

And if you’re on Twitter, you can keep tabs on the preparations for the conference (and the conference itself) using the #BA2013 hasthag.

I hope to see you there…

Adrian

Excerpt:

Business analysis is a wide and varied discipline that relies on the practitioner’s honing and developing skills in a number of areas.

Laura Brandenburg recently described more than a dozen skills in her article “What Business Analyst Skills Are Important for a New BA?”. In Laura’s article, she mentions a number of technical skills, but she also highlights some of the softer behavioral skills that we analysts need.

It’s certainly true that on bigger projects and when working in more political environments, softer skills such as stakeholder management, networking, and conflict resolution become even more important. However, there is one important business analysis attribute that is rarely talked about—resilience.

Click on the link below to read more:

http://www.techwell.com/2013/03/resilience-and-softer-side-business-analysis

A short excerpt is shown below:

Excerpt:

“One of the challenges that business analysts face is getting into business and project stakeholders’ heads so that an accurate understanding of goals, objectives, and needs can be defined. As anyone who has undertaken this activity will attest, this simple sounding exercise can be deceptively difficult.

Stakeholders are often so knowledgeable that they aren’t even aware of the tacit knowledge that they are privy to—there might be some things that seem so obvious that the stakeholder doesn’t mention them. There’s also a real danger that a stakeholder might have pre-supposed a solution and might inadvertently and unconsciously guide the project in a certain direction.

Throw in the fact that a user who has operated a process the same way for twenty years might find it very difficult to articulate the bigger-picture improvements that they need— focusing instead on the smaller pain-points—and you have the potential for a perfect storm.

We know that successful projects need a firm understanding of the underlying objective or improvement that the stakeholders and users need. Balancing these challenges is part of the day-to-day business analyst role.

Surmounting this challenge involves asking probing and open questions, and perhaps employing a combination of elicitation techniques such as interviews, workshops, and observation. It’s often said that the quality of the answers we receive will be in direct proportion to the quality of the questions we ask.

As such, I’m always interested in finding ways to ask better questions. One technique I’ve started learning more about is Clean Language…”

Click on the link below to read the rest of this article

http://www.techwell.com/2013/03/clean-language-business-analysis

I remember, early in my career, working for a Financial Services organisation that relied on regular reporting from its mainframe system.  Every night, the mainframe would spew out pages and pages of reports and lists of data on continuous tractor-feed paper – each with a header page showing who the report was for.  The mail-room would collate and sort these reports, and within a few hours the report would be directed to the relevant person.  At least that was the theory…

The reality was quite different.  Often bespoke reports had been created that were no longer required.  Managers had changed jobs, moved or left, yet still their reports were being generated.

In some cases the mail-room would re-direct these reports to other people; in other cases, I suspect they ended up in the recycling.  I heard one story of an entire store room in an organisation being used to hoard months’ worth of reports that were being sent to an absentee manager as “nobody knew whether or not they were important”.

Back in those days, it was very visible when a report wasn’t being used any more.  It sat unopened on someone’s desk, or it simply couldn’t be delivered.  But let me ask you this:  Of all the MI and reporting that happens in your organisation, how much is read?  And how much is actually used in decision making?  And how much leads to corrective action being taken?

In some organisations, the answer to these questions is “not that much”.  This is true of organisations of all sizes, but in my experience it is particularly relevant for mid-size and larger size organisations that have a range of stakeholders with varying informational needs.

In these organisations, often reports contain huge amounts of information that is only occasionally required.  As anyone who has worked on a major system upgrade or migration project would attest, there’s often redundant functionality (including a significant number of reports) that simply aren’t used at all anymore.  However, this is understandable.  Often managers have “one shot” to define the report that they want – knowing that there will be little time and budget to change things in the future.  So they throw everything at it – every piece of data that they imagine they might need at some point in the next 10 years.

There are three issues at play here:

1. Appropriateness & flexibility of data and information
2. Timing
3. Right recipients

A better solution would be to have a solution that allows the right people to access the right data at the right time – and provides the precise data and information they need.  This is easy to say, but more difficult to achieve.  The key is to understanding the precise needs of the business stakeholders, analysing their real requirements (i.e. what information and data they need and when they need it) and then building, buying or customising an analytic capability to suit.  Plus it is much better, where possible, to allow flexibility so that stakeholders can access a range of data.  With today’s system this doesn’t have to be a report – perhaps an interactive dashboard might do the job. The discipline of business analysis and requirements engineering is key here.

By understanding requirements without immediately defaulting to assuming that “more reports” are the solution, we’re able to ensure our stakeholders get what they really need – insight and actionable data that enhances decision making capability.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions

Excerpt:

One of the real challenges associated with business analysis is drilling down to the real business need and requirements.  Often stakeholders will come to us with a preconceived idea of what the solution might be, and through a range of elicitation and questioning techniques we help crystallize an understanding of what they really need.

Ironically, this challenge can be even more prevalent when speaking to the most experienced end-users.  Often, large organizations benefit from having extremely skilled and knowledgeable staff who have worked in their roles for decades.  They can provide a mine of information and can really help us to understand the context of the organization and the role they undertake.  Often, these stakeholders know a huge amount about what customers really think about the organization and where the organization’s processes aren’t working as efficiently as they could.

However, in some cases they may struggle to “see the wood for the trees”…

Click on the link below to read the rest of the article:

http://www.bridging-the-gap.com/helping-stakeholders-to-see-the-wood-for-the-trees/

Having searched for the printer receipt, I noticed that it was less than a year old and still under warranty. “Fantastic”, I thought, and I rang the manufacturer’s warranty helpline.  A rather long phone-call ensued… I’m sure we’ve all experienced these types of phone call when trying to deal with some organisations.  Whilst the phone call ended in a good outcome, it reminded me of the importance of understanding business processes from end-to-end, and the pitfalls that can happen when organisations compartmentalise their processes and focus on silos.  Here’s a summary of what happened:

• I rang the telephone number and was prompted to enter the serial number of the printer.  It wasn’t recognised, so the automatic call-routing system made a “best guess” at where to direct me.
• I was initially directed to the wrong department, so had to explain my issue several times before reaching the right person.
• The manufacturer’s records showed the incorrect purchase date, so I had to speak to the “out of warranty” department first.
• I had to e-mail a copy of my purchase receipt to prove the printer was under warranty.  This enabled the operator to transfer me (again) to the “warranty returns” department.
• Having been transferred to the right person, and proved the unit was in warranty, the operator arranged for a replacement to be shipped out the next day (fantastic!).
• However, the operator also arranged for the current (non-functioning) printer to be collected three days later.  I explained that I was going to be away on business for a week, but was told there was no flexibility – the collection would automatically be scheduled for three days later (even though I wouldn’t be available).  This seemed crazy!  The printer manufacturer was going to send a courier knowing that nobody would be home.
• A courier arrived three days later, and left a card saying they’d attempted to collect an item.
• The courier tried again for two subsequent days; both days I was away on business.
• I e-mailed to request a new collection slot upon returning home.
• Finally, the courier arrived at a time when I was available, and I returned the item.

So why does this matter?  Well, after the call, the operator asked whether I’d be prepared to speak to his supervisor to give some feedback about his performance.  I did so – but the supervisor was only interested in how effectively that operator had undertaken the specific tasks that he was involved with.

I have to say that the operator I spoke to was extremely friendly and knowledgeable and helped me to solve my problem.  I have no doubt he was carrying out his task efficiently given the constraints he was working under.  However, the process that the operator had to follow was inflexible and certainly wasn’t designed with the customer in mind.  In fact, I wonder whether anyone had ever mapped or analysed the process and customer experience from end-to-end.  Certainly, it seems unlikely that the organisation would be able to understand the true cost (waste) that had been caused by the misdirection, multiple delivery attempts etc.

It’s common in organisations of all sizes, whether multinational or mid-size, to see situations where every individual task or activity is optimised, but the end-to-end process (i.e. the one that delivers value to the customer) has delays, duplication and waste.  This is reinforced by individual teams measuring performance of individual tasks: Perhaps a call-centre is focussed on keeping call lengths to 3 minutes or less (which may conflict with serving the needs of the customer); as I have written before you get what you measure and inspect, but that’s not always what you expect.

Two key take-aways from this story:

• Analyse processes from end-to-end in the eyes of the customer:  In this case, the trigger was “Customer rings with broken printer” and the end of the process should have been “Printer returned”.  It doesn’t matter how many organisational boundaries this crosses, it’s essential to see the handovers, delays and potential problems from end-to-end.  And it’s important to collect relevant and appropriate tracking metrics to allow the end-to-end process to be monitored.

• Your front-line staff know where the problems lie:  In this example, I am certain that the operative I spoke to knew there was a problem with the process.  Front-line staff are often closer to understanding real customer needs than many middle-managers give them credit for.  Continuous improvement can start from the front-line.

Getting processes right is important for organisations of all sizes.  For mid-size companies that are growing, it might just give you the edge over your competitors.  Good customer service is a great competitive advantage.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions

Excerpt:

Here in the UK, we’ve recently seen some very high profile companies receive some extremely bad publicity. A number of large organisations are alleged to have dodged paying tax on their earnings and have faced a tough grilling from the UK Government and Public Accounts Committee.

In fact, a recent report cited in The Economist alleges that ninety-eight of the companies in the FTSE100 used offshore havens to avoid tax. That’s a staggering statistic and in a time of austerity and recession represents a significant loss of national income.

Putting all moral arguments aside, this is an interesting case study in policy, procedures, and most importantly what we business analysts would call business rules. One of the inherent aspects of tax avoidance is that companies can choose to operate globally and locate subsidiaries anywhere in the world…

Click on the link below to read more:

http://www.techwell.com/2013/03/importance-consistent-business-rules