I recently presented a webinar, hosted by IRM UK, focussing on the importance of avoiding early solutioneering during projects. The webinar is entitled Helping Stakeholders to Take a Step Back and Avoid the “Solution Illusion” and I’m pleased to say that the recording is available to watch below. The recording is around an hour long, so grab a coffee, sit back and enjoy!
(NB: If you find this webinar useful, you may be interested in our pre-project problem analysis course.)
Webinar description: Helping Stakeholders to Take a Step Back and Avoid the “Solution Illusion”
Imagine the scene: you’re assigned to a project that’s entering its detailed requirement phase. You trawl the existing project documentation and discover that a decision has been made to buy a major new enterprise-wide IT system – and it’s your job to write the “system requirements”. Your heart sinks: No analysis of the underlying problem has been made, and it looks suspiciously like the decision over which IT solution to buy may have been taken extremely prematurely. Project failure seems inevitable!
This is a hypothetical example, but I suspect many readers will relate to it. Sometimes organisations get blind-sided by the “Solution Illusion” – stakeholders fall in love with a solution and run projects to deploy it without a holistic understanding of the problem.
In this webinar, Adrian Reed of Blackmetric Business Solutions asks what we can do to help our organisations avoid the “solution illusion”. During the webinar you will hear tips and techniques to:
- Encourage stakeholders to think more holistically
- Quickly establish the rough scope of a problem
- Elicit or validate the drivers of the project.
What are your views on the subjects raised in the webinar? How do you help stakeholders to avoid the “solution illusion”? Please add a comment below, and if you’ve enjoyed this article please subscribe.
About the author:
Adrian Reed is Principal Consultant at Blackmetric Business Solutions, an organisation that offers Business Analysis consulting and training solutions. Adrian is a keen advocate of the analysis profession, and is constantly looking for ways of promoting the value that good analysis can bring.
To find out more about the training and consulting services offered at Blackmetric, please visit www.blackmetric.com
