Archive for the ‘Consulting’ Category
Posted by James King on May 10, 2012
I have previously blogged about a number of approaches to assessing a team’s readiness for change, including the 7-S framework and the arenas of change approach, but today I thought I would explain a less well known approach – the “moments of truth” assessment.
Actually I made it up so it is not too well understood outside of my own loungeroom. The approach is essentially the same as the 7-S style of assessing the interaction of the multiple systems, skills, stucture and other elements of the team’s whole ecosystem. But this is a little different because we start by looking at when (and why) the team’s internal or external customers interact with it. Then we assess the team’s ability to support those interactions.
Moment of truth(n) a moment when a person or thing is put to the test
Collins English Dictionary as quoted at www.thefreedictionary.com
Any interaction with a client is “a moment of truth” for the team. It tests the connection between the team’s value proposition, strategy, implementation, staff, skills and systems and it generates the experience that lasts in the customer’s memory until he or she interacts with the team again.
A “moments of truth analysis” therefore starts by identifying the interactions a team has with its customers, stakeholders and potentially vendors.
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Posted in Implementation, Investigation, Leading change | Tagged: moment of truth, user based service design | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James King on May 7, 2012
The goal of your interview is the single most important thing to know before the interview, but it is also useful to know a bit more about what you are hoping to achieve before you start the interview.
So that is where I use the powerful “GRIFT” model to do my preparations.
Actually it is not a very powerful model, it is simply a checklist of things to think about, in some sort of order, before interviewing someone. GRIFT is short for the following headings
- Goal (as defined in my previous article)
- Roles (What is your role in the interview? What about the stakeholder?)
- Issues (What issues to you think you might encounter? What will you do?)
- Focus (What is your focus for the interview?)
- Takeaways (What will you deliver as a result of the interview? Are there any action items?)
Since I explained the goal in my previous article I will explain the remaing items in this one – RIFT, I guess.
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Posted in Idea management, Investigation | 1 Comment »
Posted by James King on May 7, 2012
You might be surprised to find out that people often turn up to interview a stakeholder with little or no preparation.
You would probably not be surprised to find out though, that when the interviewer is poorly prepared, the interview results in a conversation without a real resolution and the interviewer has missed an opportunity to get off to a clean start.
So I thought I would add a simple (but very long) guide to some ways you can prepare for an interview. This article, and a couple that follow, are based on the “GRIFT” model that I developed while training BA’s.
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Posted in Idea management, Investigation | Tagged: GRIFT, interview techniques | 2 Comments »
Posted by James King on March 26, 2012
Every retrospective I do on every project seems to include the conclusion that “we need less meetings, less emails and more communication”.
In fact SCRUM and agile approaches even try to define the bare minimum number of meetings that are needed and only have them (Actually one of my friends claims that they have removed all the meetings – “In agile we don’t have meetings, we only have workshops. Meetings are discussions and Workshops produce something tangible each time”).
Yet the reality seems to remain that meetings (or workshops, or gatherings, or war councils) often end up getting in the way of doing the real work:
So what would you do if you had to look at the return on investment of each meeting? Would they actually stack up from the point of view of making money for shareholders, making life easier for the crew or improving the experience for our customers?
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Posted in Agile development, Implementation | Tagged: agile, effective meetings, waste on IT projects | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James King on March 9, 2012
This article is part of a series on making regression testing useful rather than painful. The most recent article was (as you would guess from the title to this one) about day 2 of our regression testing adventure.
So far we have been looking at how to do some testing, and then do some basic scripting and mapping as we do more testing. In doing so we have (hopefully) been learning more about the system we are building but our main focus is on making sure it is still performing the way we want to.
Now we are going to evolve our testing onto a proper OODA loop. I have created another article to explain what an OODA loop is, but for our purposes it means this:
How fast and how well can the team move between the following 4 tasks?
- Observe the world around them – the way users are operating, the way the system is performing and the way things are coming together.
- Orient themselves or make sense of all that data (interpreting, analysing, integrating and assessing).
- Decide what to do next with all that information.
- Act on their decisions as a cohesive group.
To do this we need a little lesson in OODA regression testing theory
Posted in Agile development, Capability growth, Idea management, Implementation | Tagged: agile testing, OODA, regression testing, testing knowledge capture | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James King on February 28, 2012
I was just reading an article on performance appraisals by Shane Hastie. It is a good summary of some of the issues that traditional performance appraisals cause on agile projects.
But it leaves two questions unanswered:
- Where would you start if you actually had to do a performance agreement; and
- How would you actually know what was expected of you if you didn’t?
The situation is made worse, according to the links in Shane’s article, when you want the team to be jointly accountable for shared success rather than individual success. This is important if you want to work out how to evaluate testers or BA’s for example, because their purpose is to make the team successful rather than to stand out on their own.
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Posted in Agile development, Capability growth, Leading change | Tagged: agile projects, OODA, performance agreement | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James King on February 27, 2012
When I started to learn agile approaches to projects, OODA was all the rage, but it seems to have disappeared from view as modern agilistas move from Scrum to lean to Kanban to ultra-velocitus development.
I guess I am still a bit old school, because I still think the OODA loop is the essence of the agile approach.
So what is an OODA loop?
OODA loops began as an approach for fighter pilots to avoid dying. It is a way to train fighter pilots and also a way to design fighter aircraft, develop tactics for air combat and win wars in the air. It turns out that it is also really useful for agile projects, production support teams and anyone rolling out a product in a competitive market.
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Posted in Agile development, Idea management, Investigation | Tagged: agile, OODA, success | 1 Comment »
Posted by James King on February 17, 2012
I stumbled on a letter from Mark Twain where he comments on “the interview”:
Inteviews are pure twaddle
Controversially, he claimed that interviews are appalling and should be completely abolished … which would seem to be a strong position for a business analyst to take these days. But then Mark Twain was around at the beginning of last century and we have learned a lot since then. Maybe he just didn’t know any better.
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Posted in Idea management, Investigation, Observations, Reflection | Tagged: business analysis; interview; agile; requirements | 2 Comments »
Posted by James King on February 14, 2012
A long time ago I used to do production support as part of my role (I was a Unix administrator/DBA/system analyst).
In those days requirements were really easy for me: people would come to my desk and ask for something, or they would email me or maybe even leave a scribbled note on my desk. There were no standard formats, no formality and (usually) no problems.
But even back then I had to work with vendors and sometimes that was when the trouble started. Some were happy with my “give me a call” approach to requirements, while others required a ticket and some even required a complicated work request form.
Now days, some production support teams are more professional that I was and they actually have real requirements or (if they are agile) stories. And most of them seem to be flooded with vendors.
So, do stories work with vendors? The obvious answer is YES. For example, if you receive a story in the following format then it should work for you and also for your vendor:
- As a coffee club member I want to be able to see a list of future coffee appreciation classes so that I can enrol in those that look interesting.
But what about complaints and bugs?
- As a coffee club member I don’t want to have my name spelled incorrectly because it is really annoying me.
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Posted in Agile development, Idea management, Implementation | Tagged: pieces of the puzzle, system analyst, work request | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James King on February 14, 2012
I have encountered Use Cases on several occasions, sometimes they seem like a simple tool that can be used to better understand how a system behaves from a users perspective, while at other times people describe them as terrifying monsters that have murdered people and led to the destruction of entire projects. So I am going to recommend only using the good kind.
But what is a use case? It is simply an example of how a system (or business service) could be used by someone.
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Posted in Agile development, Idea management, Implementation | Tagged: agile, regression test, scenario test, use case | 2 Comments »
