Karl Wiegers started programming in 1970 and has collected 60 lessons he has learned in several areas of software development including requirements, design, project management, culture, teamwork, quality, and process improvement. Each of these lessons bring insights that can help you to and your organization to become significantly better at creating high quality, valuable solutions to your customers.

The Need to Iterate

Almost everything we do takes more than a single shot and design is a good example. The first lesson in the design category of Karl’s book is “design demands iteration”.  There’s always more than one design solution for a software problem and seldom a single best solution.

The first design approach you come up with is unlikely to be the best option.  A good rule of thumb is that you’re not done with design until you’ve created at least three designs, discard them, and take the best ideas from those three and build something better.

The same holds true for requirements.  It will take a few iterations to get it right.  These are cyclical things that you have to plan in your project management approach.  You’re going to have to build in some reviews, get some feedback, prototype, and do some modeling to make sure we’re on the right track.

Icebergs are always larger than they first appear; that means that there’s going to be growth in the project. There’s going to be new information and new ideas that come along.  You have to build in that growth and include contingency buffers into your plans.  The bigger the project, the more unknowns and ambiguity and the more likely it is to change.

Understanding Stakeholders and Customers

Usage-centric development (as opposed to user-centric) is more likely to satisfy customer needs than product or feature-centered development.   We shouldn’t care about features as much as you care about knowing what people need to do with the product.  That’s the difference between the usage-centric approach and the product-centric approach.

That begins by understanding your stakeholders.  Stakeholders are individuals, groups, or even systems who can shape or influence the direction of a project or who are affected by the project.  To be successful, you need to identify your various user classes and identify who’s going to be the literal voice of the customer. Keep in mind that the customer isn’t always right, but they always have a point.  Many times, the customer may ask for a solution, which may or may not be the right thing.  To provide valuable solutions, we need to understand the underlying problem.  If the solution they propose is the answer, what is the question?

Listen to the full episode for more lessons and advice on stakeholders, quality, applying what you’ve learned, and more.

• Karl’s Personal Website – KarlWiegers.com
• ProcessImpact.com – Karl’s business and book information
• Information on Karl’s book, Software Development Pearls

Karl Wiegers

Karl Wiegers is an independent consultant, author, speaker, and thought leader in the project community. His books on software requirements are considered required reading for Business Analysts and Project Managers. As a consultant and trainer, Karl has worked with more than 100 companies and government organizations of all types, helping them improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their software development activities.

To get more valuable content to enhance your skills and advance your career, you can subscribe on iTunes.

Also, reviews on iTunes are highly appreciated! I read each review and it helps keep me motivated to continue to bring you valuable content each week.

• MBA027: Elicit User Requirements with Legos – Interview with Ellen Grove
• MBA009: Exploring the 7 Product Dimensions for Better Requirements Discovery – Interview with Mary Gorman
• MBA045: The Agile BA – Myths and Misconceptions
• MBA084: Agile Modeling with Scott Ambler
• MBA019: Why Start with Why? Interview with Stephen Shedletzky
• MBA018: Step Up to Leadership with the Five-Rule Framework – Interview with Scott Stribrny

The post MBA228: Software Development Pearls appeared first on Mastering Business Analysis.

Many organizations, especially as people are trying to work in more Lean and Agile ways, work towards producing a minimum viable product (MVP) and move on after achieving it.  These organizations aren’t thinking about the value that could be delivered after the MVP.

They believe that if they put a minimum viable products in our customer’s hands, they know whether or not it’s a great product.  Instead, people need to be working towards a minimum viable business as opposed to the minimum viable product.  You could put a great product out there, but if you haven’t designed it to solve for the customer’s ultimate needs by testing it and getting early feedback

and created a degree of stickiness in a business model that will help you retain and add clients, you have a problem.

You don’t necessarily have a business and you haven’t necessarily solved the problem.  Over optimization towards what you believe to be a viable product is not necessarily that MvP. It’s a business model that’s going to have sustainability.

What’s Valuable to Customers

When you’re developing a product, the easiest person to fool is yourself. You may believe that you have a great product, but you need to test it to validate that belief.  That could be as simple as using a survey to check the validity of your idea. Building a product (even a scaled-down version of a working product) is a very expensive way to test an idea.

If you build the product first and then try to go out in the market and then make the adjustments, you’re going to have to build it again.

Faster Delivery

There are two major inhibitors to speed to market.  One is trying to do everything yourself.  The desire to understand exactly how the product is built and have too much control over the process of building that product is not efficient.

When you’re building a product, it’s not reasonable to be so in the weeds that you’re concerned about using a specific technology or growing to an understanding of how everything works.  When starting your business or starting your MVP, don’t try to have one person do everything. Have people that are specialized in their given fields and fractionally use their time.

The other big impact to speed to market is if you don’t have a needed skill set in house.  Training that skill and building competency can take a long time.  You don’t necessarily have to hire for it as that could be much more expensive than using an outside party.

Listen to the full episode to understand how to test and discover the right solution and how approaches such as DevOps can help accelerate both discovery and delivery.

IAN Reynolds

Ian is the Chief Solutions Architect at Zibtek and Head of Venture Partners at Golden Section Studios. In his role as Solutions Architect, Ian matches business needs to technical solutions that solves the customer’s problem.

To get more valuable content to enhance your skills and advance your career, you can subscribe on iTunes and other podcatchers.

Also, reviews on iTunes are highly appreciated! I read each review and it helps keep me motivated to continue to bring you valuable content each week.

• MBA020: The Value of Certifications – Interview with David Mantica
• Lightning Cast: Trust – The One Thing that Changes Everything
• Lightning Cast: Simplified Value Stream Mapping
• MBA102: Product Management – Build the Right Thing
• MBA105: The Best Advice I Ever Received
• MBA021: Is the Business Analyst Role Just Overhead? Interview with John Sextro

The post MBA227: The Minimum Viable Business appeared first on Mastering Business Analysis.

In a recent interview, Elon Musk shared the 5-step design process he uses at Space X to achieve better results.  Below are the details of this design process.

Step 1: Make your requirements less dumb.

Make sure you start with high quality requirements and that you truly understand the ‘why’ behind each.  Simply using requirements because someone told you that’s what they want makes your requirements dumb.

“It does not matter who gave them to you. It’s particularly dangerous if a smart person gave you the requirements because you might not question them enough.  Everyone’s wrong.  No matter who you are, everyone’s wrong some of the time.”

Elon recommends that for whatever requirement or constraint you have, it should come with a name, not a department.  That’s because if there’s a question of concern, you can’t ask a department. You have to ask a person.  The person who’s asking for the requirement or highlighting the constraint must agree that they will take responsibility for that requirement.

If you fail to do this, you may run into the situation where some random person who’s no longer with the company came up with the requirement off the top of their head with no foundation in a real need.  That’s a dumb requirement.

Step 2: Delete the part or process

Look critically at the process or piece you’re developing and try to remove pieces instead of always adding new things.  Work to understand the value that’s added by each part or each step in the process and reduce or eliminate those that don’t add value.

“If you’re not occasionally adding things back in, you are not deleting enough. The bias tends to be very strongly towards ‘Let’s add this part or process step in case we need it’. But you can basically make in-case arguments for so many things.”

Step 3: Simplify or optimize the design

Optimizing should only be done after you make your requirements less dumb and try to delete the part of process.  The most common mistake you can make is to optimize something that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

Step 4: Accelerate cycle time

We want to reduce the amount of time from when we start working on something to when we finish.  The easiest way to do that is to focus on one thing at a time and eliminate task switching.  With that focus, you can get things done more quickly . . . just make sure they’re the right things.

“You’re moving too slowly. Go faster, but don’t go faster until you work on the other three things first.”

Step 5: Automate

Once you’re confident you have the right requirements with the right ownership, removed unneeded steps, optimized the design, and done things quickly, you can automate the process.  Don’t spend the time and effort to automate the wrong thing or automate too soon.

Using Elon Musk’s five-step design process may help you and your organization to innovate faster and focus on customer value.

• MBA228: Software Development Pearls

To get more valuable content to enhance your skills and advance your career, you can subscribe on iTunes and other podcatchers.

Also, reviews on iTunes are highly appreciated! I read each review and it helps keep me motivated to continue to bring you valuable content each week.

The post MBALC: Elon Musk’s 5-Step Design Process appeared first on Mastering Business Analysis.

In every process or value delivery system, there’s one constraint (bottleneck) that limits the flow of value of the entire system.  If you want to deliver faster, you must identify and address the bottleneck.  To improve the flow of value, we can apply the Theory of Constraints, a process improvement methodology that focuses on addressing the bottleneck.

Eli Goldratt’s famous book, The Goal, introduced readers to the Theory of Constraints and how to apply Goldratt’s Five Focusing Steps to address your constraint.  However, many people are unaware of or confused by the Five Focusing Steps.

In you’re confused about how to address the bottleneck in your process, you can use Clarke Ching’s FOCCCUS Formula instead.  FOCCCUS is an acronym that stands for the steps you can take to address the constraint and improve the system.

FOCCCUS

The first step in the FOCCCUS Formula is “F” for find the bottleneck.  You can’t improve the bottleneck if you don’t know where it is.  To find the bottleneck, look for work piling up of long queues in front of a step in the process.  Work typically builds up in front of the constraint.

Once you find the bottleneck, the next step is “O” for optimize. You want to optimize the bottleneck so that it can get work done faster.  You can do this by making sure the work that goes to the bottleneck resource is ready (has everything they need) and the bottleneck is focused only on value added work.

After you optimize, the next step is collaborate.  Collaboration helps the bottleneck deliver faster because non-bottleneck resources may be able to off-load work that the bottleneck is doing.

In addition to collaboration, you can apply the second “C”, which is coordinate.  This step involves finding ways to coordinate activities of both bottleneck and non-bottleneck resources to optimize delivery.  This can include rearranging process steps or changing the timing of certain pieces of work to smooth the flow.

The third “C” in the FOCCCUS Formula is curate.  When you curate, you decide what to put in a limited amount of space.  Essentially, you prioritize work to maximize the value that can be delivered.

The “U” in the FOCCCUS Formula stands for upgrade.  This can mean buying faster equipment, holding training to improve skills associated with the constrained task, or hiring more people.  Upgrading can be expensive and you should only upgrade after completing the other steps.

The final step is “S”, which stands for start again.  The FOCCCUS Formula is a continuous process.  After you complete each step, you should validate that the bottleneck hasn’t moved.  If it has, continuing to the next step with the same bottleneck won’t improve the flow of value through the system.

Check each time to ensure that you know where the bottleneck is and start with the simplest, cheapest intervention.

Listen to the full episode to understand how to use the FOCCCUS Formula to improve your process and accelerate value delivery.

Clarke Ching

Clarke has been powered by the Theory of Constraints for over 20 years and Agile since 2003.  He wrote Rolling Rocks Downhill (the Agile business novel that never mentions Agile) and The Bottleneck Rules (which was featured in The Guardian newspaper, and was briefly the #2 best-selling leadership book on Amazon.com, just behind Steven Covey).

• MBA228: Software Development PearlsKarl Wiegers shares his lessons on requirements, project management, design, quality and more. Karl’s advice can make you significantly better at what you do. Show Notes Karl Wiegers started programming in 1970 and has collected 60 lessons he has learned in several areas of software development including requirements, design, project management, culture, teamwork, quality, and… Read more: MBA228: Software Development Pearls

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Creating product requirements and delivering features is one thing. Understanding the business context and business models associated with your product and identifying different avenues to drive value is quite another.

Understanding your business model can help drive value for your organization and increase the value that you contribute as a Business Analyst, Product Owner, or Project Manager.

A business model incorporates how you package a product, how you sell it, how you market it, how you deliver it, and how you get paid for it.  The packaging refers to the offer itself, not the box it comes in.

Your business model gives you insight into how you extract money or time from somebody for the product and understand the expense necessary that actually deliver it and the margins associated with it.  You then tie in how you fit in the value chain of your organization and where you fit from a competitive standpoint.

Business Models for Internal Products

The first thing we have to remember with internal products is that revenue is considered with use and adoption of the product. Instead of revenue being much somebody paid for something, your internal customers pay for what you build based on their time; if they’re using it more, they’re paying a lot of money for it.  Once you understand the use, you could tie value back to productivity.

We need to consider that there are different ways that you can deliver; all the different ways you can sell, all the different ways that you could generate revenue, ways that people engage with your product are different.  You can commoditize the same solution but within two different business models and get two totally different results.  You can understand the business model from an internal perspective by digging into how you deliver something.

How do you package that delivery?  What’s the value proposition?  What’s the internal marketing associated with it?  How you judge success?

Increasing Value

To validate the value of a product, service, or feature, we don’t just need to test ideas. We also have to test how the idea is delivered, the information that is given, and how we monetize its use.

As Business Analysts, we’re a lynchpin between what can happen and who uses it. We have to start influencing the groups in the middle that deliver elements of the product to help them see the fact that their scale and repeat model is in need of an adjustment or needs to be replaced by something else.

By serving as internal management consultants, we can work to understand the changes in the business model and educate people on potential failures and view the business model together to enhance the product value.

One of the failures could be how we support someone when they have a problem or not delivering the service appropriately.  Perhaps it’s the wrong platform.  Perhaps there’s an external impact based on use that we have to incorporate because all of our customers are using a different software system and they have different experiences.

Understanding how business models change due to a digital transformation is critically important. Looking at options associated with the business model may help you to see different options.  Perhaps you can license the product. You can sell the software, sell the data, or provide information online.

Understanding the concept of how a digital transformation starts to impact some of these production environments that we’ve been working on for quite some time is a good educational step to start getting yourself a better understanding of what may occur and then also being able to truly understand the market.

Listen to the full episode to get more advice and insights on using business models to bring more value to your organization and your customers.

David Mantica

David Mantica believes leaders should be servants to their organizations and people.  He is the Vice President and General Manager at SoftEd, a consultancy that offers advisory and education services to help organizations discover new ways of working for better business outcomes.  David is a frequent speaker on Project Management, Business Analysis, and leadership.

To get more valuable content to enhance your skills and advance your career, you can subscribe on iTunes and other podcatchers.

Also, reviews on iTunes are highly appreciated! I read each review and it helps keep me motivated to continue to bring you valuable content each week.

• MBA228: Software Development Pearls

The post MBA225: The Value of Business Models appeared first on Mastering Business Analysis.

We’re often called upon to apply our problem solving skills and help organizations make better decisions.  The challenge is when we face really tricky problems.  To solve these, we need an innovating problem solving approach.

Corkscrew thinking is about how to come up with clever ideas when you’re facing what seems like an impossible situation.

This approach helps you to be creative and wander around to figure things out.  You’re trying to invent something or discover something new.  If you’re facing two choices and they conflict or directly oppose each other, corkscrew thinking can help you discover new solutions.

When we make decisions, we often make out a pros and cons list.  What we’re trying to do with corkscrew thinking is to get the best of both options while eliminating the negative aspects.  Start with the two options that are in conflict and figure out what to get the benefits out of each of those options and then solve a different problem, which is to come up with new options. It allows you to get a better solution than the options you started with.

One way of envisioning corkscrew thinking is to imagine that you’re holding two choices or options, one in each hand.  Next, think about the benefits of each option and stack those on each shoulder.  These are the requirements or the positive outcomes that each choice will help you to achieve.

Now imagine the higher purpose that you’re trying to achieve related to these two options.  Imagine this overall mission on top of your head.

Finally, consider the benefits on your shoulders and the higher purpose above your head and search for options that combine the benefits of both while serving your higher purpose.

This exercise can best be done with a quick drawing or sticky notes.

Listen to the full episode to understand how to apply corkscrew thinking to solve your tricky problems.

• Connect with Clarke on LinkedIn
• Corkscrew Solutions – Clarke’s book on Amazon

Clarke Ching

Clarke has been powered by the Theory of Constraints for over 20 years and Agile since 2003.  He wrote Rolling Rocks Downhill (the Agile business novel that never mentions Agile) and The Bottleneck Rules (which was featured in The Guardian newspaper, and was briefly the #2 best-selling leadership book on Amazon.com, just behind Steven Covey).

To get more valuable content to enhance your skills and advance your career, you can subscribe on iTunes and other podcatchers.

Also, reviews on iTunes are highly appreciated! I read each review and it helps keep me motivated to continue to bring you valuable content each week.

The post MBA224: Corkscrew Thinking appeared first on Mastering Business Analysis.

As knowledge workers, we rely on our brains and relationships to get things done. That’s where some of the challenges lie. The hard skills of business analysis, project management, and product ownership are relatively easy to learn. But the soft skills . . . that’s the real challenge.

It’s amazing how little education knowledge workers get about how our brain impacts our ability to be successful. Our brains operate for two things; survival and efficiency. That efficiency word is very scary when it comes to complex cognition.

The survival aspect can be even more difficult because it ties back into the physical survival mechanisms of our body, because we really haven’t evolved yet to understand that we are an apex predator. A lot of the initial reactions that our brain drives in our system is protecting us from a physical perspective when fear occurs. So the manifestation of fear around losing your job becomes a physical manifestation similar to being chased by a saber tooth tiger. You lose a lot of the power of cognition in that.

The first step is not so much getting into the details of communication skills and emotional intelligence. It’s getting a better understanding of the fundamental workings of our brain and how you have to combat that to be healthy and to be able to thrive in constant change.

Cognitive Distortions
One thing we do a very poor job of is feeding our brain to operate with high level of cognition over an extended period of time. Since our brain wants to be efficient, it will process and gather information and look at the information using its stereotypical heuristic patterns it’s used to. This is why you see yourself having a tendency to try to solve the same problem using the same tools and getting frustrated. You’re not realizing that you have to force yourself to think deeply about a problem to get your brain processing at the cerebral cortex level and to get into something called deep literacy.

And then on top of all that, it’s our society’s goal to pound this with sound bytes of information so that we’re always operating on that system. That’s important for us because the first technique you need to be thinking about is when analyzing a complex future state situation, taking a step back and doing some deep thinking and try to push away the emotional stimulus that’s around you to get your cognition going; it’s critically important because it doesn’t naturally occur.

We’re bombarded with data all the time and our brains want to operate efficiently, so we ignore a lot of the data that we see in our daily lives. That can lead to snap judgments and unconscious biases, leading us to thinking down the wrong path.

One such cognitive distortion is confirmation bias. It’s a tendency that we look for things that agree with what we’re thinking about and block the things that don’t agree with what we’re thinking about. It’s a preservation technique, it’s an efficiency technique, and it drives a lot of failure in the workplace. This can also lead to tensions in working relationships.

Another common cognitive distortion is loss regret. The concept of the loss regret is that I would rather do nothing and not have to lose then do something and have the potential to lose, even though when I do something there’s a chance I could win.

That fear of change is so scary for the brain because it wants efficiency and it wants survival. It’s going to force us to try to stay in the status quo. That’s why we all have that tendency to stay in our bubble and we don’t take certain risks.

These cognitive distortions and others affect how you interact with stakeholders and could be at the root of some of the challenges you face.

The Stress Response
When faced with a stressful situation, our bodies release chemicals that often lead us to a freeze, fight or flight response. Our evolutionary biology predisposes us for pessimism, and that pessimism drives all of those cognitive distortions. But that pessimism also drives a lot of the emotional distortions and the emotional distortions we fear. Fear centers around two things; one is the limbic system of our brain processing that information, using the concept of the physical survival mechanism.

Our bodies release adrenaline and cortisol; both are great for muscles and running fast and getting your heart pumping so you can really handle something. But it’s horrible for cognition. It makes cognition more difficult. That pessimism also leads to negative self talk, which fuels a lot of the emotional distortions that become physical.

These situations can trigger a vicious cycle where get the stress response, you can’t think or behave properly, and then you do poor work. As a result, your boss yells at you and creates this cycle over again, creating a downward spiral.

Understanding the human work machine and the how our brain operates will help us to better deal with the emotional and cognitive distortions.

Addressing the Distortions
The first thing you can do to address the impacts on these cognitive and emotional distortions is to do an analysis of your mindset by taking a step back and asking yourself “What are those things that you believe? What do you believe about work? What do you believe about people?”

From that, you can see how those beliefs would manifest itself in the behaviors and actions which then would start building up the stress response. Better understanding the mindsets that drive behaviors and actions is key to effectively dealing with the distortions we all experience.

In addition, we need to look at yourself to be more aware of what you’re feeling and where those emotions are coming from. This also helps you get a handle on your self talk.
Meditation is also a powerful tool to be able to teach your brain to slow down and not be as reactive. Pause, take a deep breath, relax yourself, clear your mind for a moment and picture what you’re trying to do and the intended outcomes. Simply pausing for a second and mentally shifting your mindset or stance to curiosity changes your behavior.

Listen to the full episode to get David’s tips on how to make the mindset shift to better adapt to challenges.

• SoftEd.com
• The Better Work Project Podcast
• Head Strong – a book on brain energy and thinking faster

David Mantica

David Mantica believes leaders should be servants to their organizations and people.  He is the Vice President and General Manager at SoftEd, a consultancy that offers advisory and education services to help organizations discover new ways of working for better business outcomes.  David is a frequent speaker on Project Management, Business Analysis, and leadership.

To get more valuable content to enhance your skills and advance your career, you can subscribe on iTunes and other podcatchers.

Also, reviews on iTunes are highly appreciated! I read each review and it helps keep me motivated to continue to bring you valuable content each week.

• Lightning Cast: Confessions of a Recovering Perfectionist
• MBA172: Decide Smarter Faster with Kupe Kupersmith
• MBA013: Trust is the New Workplace Currency – Interview with Nan Russell
• Lightning Cast: The Business Alchemist

The post MBA223: The Human Work Machine appeared first on Mastering Business Analysis.

Studies show that 7 out of 10 products fail to deliver on expectations.  We often fall into the trap of moving forward with a project, product, or business idea without first validating it.  This results in wasted time and money from solutions that don’t have a good market fit or aren’t solving the right problem.

The most expensive way to find out if you’re right or wrong is to build the whole thing.

The Three Lenses

When testing your idea to reduce risk, look at the solution through three lenses; desirability, feasibility, and viability.

Desirability implies that customers want your solution.  Feasibility means that we can build and support the solution.  This is isn’t just technical feasibility; we also look need to look at overall regulatory, policy, and governance that would prevent you from making your solution a success.

While customers may want your solution (desirable) and you can build it (feasibility), perhaps there’s not enough of a market for it or people won’t pay enough for it.  This is viability.

We want to unpack our risk and then test our way through it, going from no evidence to some evidence and then from some evidence to strong evidence that we’re on the right path.

Process to Validate Your Idea

If you have an idea that you want to validate, start by understanding the higher level risks.  Who’s your customer?  What’s your value proposition?  What’s your revenue model and the cost it’s going to take to do this?

This information helps you map out desirability and viability.  Then work to understand the big activities you need to do, the resources you need to have, and anything else related to feasibility.

A business model canvas may help you to understand the things that have to be true for your idea to succeed.  From there, you can identify the things that have to be true that you have no evidence to support.  You can then select experiments that would help generate evidence about those things.

Listen to the full episode to understand how to sequence your experiments, discover simple yet effective ways to test your business ideas before spending a lot of time and money, and more.

• David’s website DavidJBland.com
• Precoil – David’s company
• David’s Book – Testing Business Ideas

David J. Bland

David Bland is the founder of Precoil, an organization that helps companies find product market fit using lean startup, design thinking and business model innovation. David has helped validate new products and businesses at companies such as GE, Toyota, Adobe, HP, Behr and more.

David has also written several books and is the co-author of Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation.

• MBA228: Software Development Pearls

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We live in a complex, rapidly changing world. In order to support our stakeholders and our organizations, we need to expand our view and adopt a systems thinking mindset. This allows you to see the whole and the interconnectedness between the parts, which in turn allows you to help stakeholders make the right decisions.

Systems thinking makes business agility possible. With business agility, your organization is able to sense its external environment, really work out what’s significant, and then respond to it.

To be really agile, your organization needs to see what’s changing. It needs to work out how it needs to change and then it needs to actually do it. Many organizations see that there is a strategic problem and something they really need to do, but they can’t quite configure themselves to respond to it. Business analysis is central to that because you think about sensing and seeing what’s coming.

There’s a huge amount of strategic business analysis that fits into that space. You think about assessing how to change and there’s a lot of solution evaluation, problem solving, and understanding that fits in that space.

Who’s Responsible for Strategic Systems Thinking?

There’s often a belief that the top c-level executives should be doing this analysis. In reality, systems thinking and strategic thinking should happen at all levels. Think about what might change out in the world and how it might have an impact on how this project runs or how this product will need to incrementally change.

Understanding what’s going on outside our organization or even internal – it can be “what if the priorities of this department change or what if we lose this key person” or some other event. That speaks to systems thinking; understanding the upstream and downstream impacts as well as all the pieces that are at work in a delivery system.

We may write process and procedure manuals, but nobody really thinks about how they can adapt. So when something unexpected happens or some competitive threat comes along, we haven’t built variety into the processes. We lean out all of the slack and there can be times when that’s necessary. Systems thinking would encourage us to look more holistically and to recognize the complexity and to think about how the environment might change. Business analysis is a big part of that.

Listen to the full episode for tools you can use to apply systems thinking and tips on providing next level value to your stakeholders and organization.

• Adrian Reed’s Blog: https://www.adrianreed.co.uk/
• Blackmetric Business Solutions
• Sign up for the BA Digest

Adrian Reed

Adrian is a Principal Consultant and Director at Blackmetric Business Solutions where he provides business analysis consultancy and training solutions.  He also speaks internationally on topics relating to business analysis and business change.

To get more valuable content to enhance your skills and advance your career, you can subscribe on iTunes.

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The post MBA221: Systems Thinking and Business Agility appeared first on Mastering Business Analysis.

We’re all experienced products that are confusing, difficult to use, and cause frustration. Author Karl Wiegers has pulled together a collection of products with a thoughtless design and created a set of design principles and lessons to help us create solutions with the user in mind.

If the solutions that we create aren’t usable, they’re not valuable to our customers.

Design Lessons

Karl’s first design lesson is to focus the design on usage, not on product features. Studies show that a high percentage of the features that are included in software packages are rarely used.

Let’s think about what people want to do with the product and the environment in which they’re going to be using it. Then we can design the product to make it easier for users to get the job done. Let’s understand the disease before we come up with a cure.

A second lesson is that design demands iteration. You’re not going to get the design right on your first try. You have to iterate. You have to sneak up on approaching a better design with each cycle until you have a design that’s good enough to satisfy the requirements and usability.

You can iterate at multiple levels. You can iterate with each product release similar to the iPhone. When you iterate at that level, you may also get a lot of new bugs and increase complexity of the product.

Making a product, marketing it, then seeing how people like it and making another try in a year is an expensive way to iterate. We want to iterate as cheaply as possible as many times as we can, and that requires doing things with prototypes and mockups. We can have an incremental growth of the level of precision and detail with the prototypes.

The third lesson is we need to involve real users whenever possible. If you’re iterating on a design, how do you know what to change on your next cycle to make it better? Ideally, you’ll have some user representatives that are working with you; perhaps working with a prototype or a mockup under realistic usage conditions, as we can come up with a design. The users are going to show you things and tell you things that you just don’t get in the design lab.

Sometimes you may not have real users available. You might have to work with user surrogates, but whenever possible, there’s just no substitute for having real people work with something that’s similar to the real product and tell you all the reasons why you’re not there yet.

Fundamental Design Principles

There are nine design principles in Karl’s book that are fundamental to good design. The design principles include:

• Make the product easy and obvious to use: The product should provide visual cues to the user to make the product easy and obvious to use.
• Make it hard to make a mistake: The product should be designed in a way that makes it hard to make a mistake, or at least have the user verify their intentions before taking a step that potentially could be a mistake.
• Design for the user’s convenience: Think about what the user is trying to do and create a design that allows them to get the job done. Avoid designing for the business’s convenience at the expense of the user.

Remember that thoughtful design is something that makes it hard for users to make mistakes, doesn’t waste the user’s time, and is for the user’s convenience. Let’s try to detect unsatisfied preconditions and erroneous inputs as early as possible in the test sequence so the user doesn’t waste time on a task they can’t complete.

Listen to the full episode to get more of Karl’s tips and advice on building products with the customer’s usability in mind.

• Karl’s website – https://karlwiegers.com/
• The Thoughtless Design of Everyday Things book site: http://thoughtless-design.com/

Karl Wiegers

Karl Wiegers is an independent consultant, author, speaker, and thought leader in the project community.  His books on software requirements are considered required reading for Business Analysts and Project Managers.  As a consultant and trainer, Karl has worked with more than 100 companies and government organizations of all types, helping them improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their software development activities.

Karl’s most recent book is The Thoughtless Design of Everyday Things

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