The Situation
So you have identified
the business problem and at a high level you’ve defined an approach for solving
the issue. You have the idea – how do you turn it into a solution? How do you
turn that idea/solution into a product which has a life and a vision which can
support changing as your business changes? How do you execute your vision for
the product through the agile project management framework? Where do you start?
This is the most common
situation thought leaders face when acting as product owners/intrepreneurs for
their organization – how do you define the initial Product Backlog for the
potential project?
The process of generating, developing, and communicating
a new idea is referred to as ideation.
Recently I worked with a
Client seeking to replace an antiquated data mining software tool which had
been in place for 10 years without any maintenance, updates, or even an
assigned technical resource. The tool had hobbled along maintaining usefulness,
but falling behind in performance and features. Finally the time had come to
determine if the data that the tool mined was useful to the business and if the
tool should be reengineered. Management was pushing hard to understand the
business value of the data being mined to determine if pursuit of moving
forward with tool selection was worthwhile, or if the business should abandon
it all together.
As an Enterprise
Business Analysis (BABOK v2.0, Chapter 5, p81) project, your ideation should
include the following activities:
- Define Business Need
- Assess Capability Gaps
- Define Solution Scope
- Determine Solution Approach
- Define Business Case
Define the Business Need
You will need to first define
the business need, which is the problem to be solved or opportunity available
to your organization. During our engagement, the Product Owner surveyed the
organization to understand the businesses perception of how the mined data led
to business objectives and tasks. I then assisted the Product Owner, conducting
qualitative interviews with key stakeholders and thought leaders. The goal of
the survey was to determine the value of the mined data to each stakeholder’s
role and their perception of the value that this data had to other business
areas. The overall objective is to get others to tell you that the resolution
of your situation is crucial to the business and not just to you alone.
After you’ve collected
all of your research information, you will want to sort things out. I used a
thematic analysis approach for synthesizing, to emphasize and record patterns found
within the data. We interpreted various topics from the thematic analysis of
both the interviews and the responses to the open ended questions used in the
survey.
The final step to
defining the business need is to validate your findings and your assumptions
with the business. I facilitated a brainstorming session with our Client’s key
stakeholders, thought leaders, and expanded functional managers using the
thematic topics identified via the team idea mapping approach. The session was
framed by disclosing the results of the survey and qualitative interviews and
reviewing the dominant themes. Individual ideas of similar context from the
session were combined and consolidated. The group then prioritized the ideas
ultimately identifying the epics for the forthcoming solution.
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| Brainstorming Session |
Assess Capability Gaps
Using the Client’s
existing ten-year strategic plan, I conducted a capability mapping of the
Client’s defined tactical activities to accomplish identified strategic
objectives and create a model associating the business capabilities, processes,
and functions with a factor that the data being evaluated supports towards
enabling them. This capability mapping allowed me to model the most stable
elements of the business and associate a value by which the mined data
contributed to the accomplishment of business objectives. I then performed a value
chain analysis to understand the sequence of activities the Client performed
and how the data in question sustained the development of final service
offerings.
 |
| Value Chain Analysis |
 |
| Strategic Alignment |
Not all organizations
have a well-documented strategic plan, so you will need to identify the measure
you will use to align your business need to the overall objectives of your
organization.
Determine Solution Scope
Now that you have a good
understanding of the business problem, the need of the organization, and the
business value your solution contributes towards the accomplishment of business
objectives, you need to define just how much of the problem you want to actually
fix. It may be tempting, but you should not try to solution for the entire
problem all at once. It provides more benefit to your organization if you
solution for the highest impact items first and then proceed with fixing the
remaining aspects over time.
Using the interview
notes and ideas generated from the brainstorming session, I identified the new
capabilities required to meet the business needs. We accomplished this task by documenting
the high-level requirements elicited during the qualitative interviews and the
facilitated brainstorming. These requirements were then aligned to the epics
defined during the brainstorming session and further categorized into
functional groupings, resulting into an initial product backlog. The product
backlog was entered into the organization’s requirements management tool,
capturing all of the features and functions necessary to characterize the
product which are critical to the solution success.
Determine Solution Approach
The project team posited
three solution options with Rough Order of Magnitude Estimates for each:
- Option 1 – Buy a New System – from commercially available options
- Option 2 – Leverage an Existing Platform – using an existing technology stack which the organization has great familiarity to create a custom tool
- Option 3 – Leverage an Existing Product – expanding the use of a product solution already implemented to include managing the data in question
Define the Business Case
The final step in the
process is documenting the reasoning for initiating the project. Our
deliverable outlined the:
- Business problem with supporting background,
- Assessment of business value,
- Risks, and
- Critical success factors for the project, and
- High Level Business Requirements
You have finalized your
case for persuading management to take action. You will need to present the
ideas and associated findings to the key stakeholders and decision makers. Working
along with the Product Owner, I presented the findings to the organization’s
leadership demonstrating the business value in a pitch to secure funding for
the project.
Your organization may
have a PMO or other formal project governance entity in place. Once your
project is approved, the final Business Case can be leveraged to create any
Project Charter documentation as well as any other PMO required Project
Initiation deliverables. Regardless of the Solution Approach, once your project
receives funding, as the Product Owner, you now have the initial Product
Backlog which will support all Pre-Game Scrum Activities.
– And you are on your
way to the start of a successful Agile project!
Good luck!
