Adrian Reed

If you’ve ever read the fantastic book ‘Mastering the Requirements Process’ by James & Suzanne Robertson, you’ll be familiar with the ‘Brown Cow’ model.  If you’ve not read it, I’d highly recommend you get a copy, and in the meantime you might want to watch this short video which explains it.

The ‘brown cow’ model gets its name from English elocution lessons where well-to-do students were taught to annunciate correctly by repeating ‘how now, brown cow’.  When used in a business analysis context, it reminds us that we tend to start a situation with a “How Now” view, a current state.

The brown cow model has two dimensions: it separates the ‘real world’ from the ‘conceptual essence’ (how vs what) and it separates what’s happening now from what could happen (now vs future).   Although it isn’t designed to be used in a strict order, one way of navigating it when looking to understand problematic situations and solve them strategically is to look at the situation through all four of the brown cow ‘lenses’.  It is usually the ‘above the line thinking’, the redesigning of the work between the ‘what now’ and the ‘future what’ where the innovation really starts to take shape. See the diagram below:

As anyone who has implemented a business process will tell you, whenever humans are involved there will be variation.  It doesn’t matter how well-documented or well-drawn a process model is, people will put their own interpretation and their own ‘flair’ onto a process.  This can lead to a temptation to continue specifying the process in increasing levels of detail until almost every movement and every keystroke are documented.  It can lead to a temptation to rigidly enforce standardisation, to ensure that all processes are consistently followed irrespective of who is undertaking them. 

There might be specific contexts when this level of control is necessary, particularly in safety critical applications.  Yet in many others it is overkill, and this level of rigidity can act as handcuffs that constrain staff from actually meeting real customer needs.  However many personas we create, however much data we collect, we will never uncover every customer need.  There will be circumstances that we couldn’t have predicted, and this might involve us needing or wanting to service customer needs that we can’t easily predict in advance. These tricky situations might be ‘moments of truth’ from the customer’s perspective.

This is when our customer-facing colleagues are faced with a dilemma: should they do what the process (and by implication the organisation) is dictating that they should do? Or should they find an option that is more suitable for the context that they find themselves in.  Should they use their own judgement to balance the customer’s needs against those of the organisation?

When people think of business analysis, they think of many things, but they probably don’t think of martial arts or magic.  In this article, Paula Bell and Adrian Reed talk about these seemingly curve-ball topics, and their relevance to business analysis.

When people think about business analysis, they probably don’t think about magic or martial arts.  Are there really similarities?

Organisational change is hard at the best of times, and one ‘warning sign’ I’ve learned to look out for is when people position a chosen ‘solution’ as logical, straightforward and somehow ‘easy’ to implement.  This is typified by the following statement:

 “But we’re just <<insert nature of change here>>, how hard can that be. It’s not rocket science is it?!”

These types of statements are often hard to rebut because they are built on logic, from the perspective of the person that expresses them.  However, they rarely embrace the complexity of the situation and environment that is being changed.  Let me explain, with a bit of a curve-ball example… the tricky issue of weight loss.

Ever Tried To Lose Weight?

One thing you probably don’t know about me (unless you’ve known me for a very long time), is I used to look quite different to the way I do now.  Going back a few decades, I was somewhat overweight.  If you saw a picture of me from back then you almost certainly wouldn’t recognise me.