Chapter 5 - Investigating the Work
Author: Zac Dewit
Trawling
- Trawling is usually a term for fishing. It defines hanging out your net and continuing to drive the boat so that fish will be caught without much effort as they can be unaware they were caught. This also applies to requirements gathering.
- A person that is good at trawling will know where to find the fish or information as it is usually in similar locations from one day to the next. Once you have found a spot that works, it can be smart to revisit it for future projects.
- It is also important to realize that you can't be too slow whilst doing this. You need to get through this stage so the project can truly begin. Do not worry as you can always come back if there is something you missed.
- One last thing to realize is that all stakeholders are different and need to be addressed as such. You need to understand how the business works, how the project will help the business and what each stakeholder wants out of the project.
Formality Guide
- For each of the project sizes, there are different guides to finding your requirements.
- Rabbit - For these small projects (less than 6 months) it is especially important to work as fast as you can. You are encouraged to go to the shop in small slices and to understand how it works and what needs to be fixed. Projects like this are usually iterative projects meaning they are repetitive and steps are usually repeated. Using a repeated process will also help you save on paperwork and other documentation.
- Horse - Since a horse project (6 months to 2 years) has a high capacity of stakeholders, different techniques like apprenticing and interviewing are key. Use case workshops can also be a very helpful tool. These three tools can help with documentation which will help with the decisions later in the project. These projects can have a much larger scope and effect range. This means that the BA needs to have a greater knowledge of the company.
- Elephant - Since these projects can take such a long time (over 2 years), it is important to keep up to date documentation. Other parts of elephant projects can include outsourcing. This also needs special documentation.
Brown Cow Model
- One unique way of looking at the work and requirements is by using the brown cow model. This model splits everything into 4 sections. How now, What now, Future What, Future How.
- How now - This quadrant is the usual place to start. This shows how the work is being done currently. This view is the ground zero for where your new system or idea will come into play. It is important to realize that this new thing needs to be unique and different from the current way or else it is not worthwhile. There must be a change.
- What now - This part is all about the essence of the work. This view is technologically neutral meaning it shows no direct link to the tech or humans within the company. It is a clean way of thinking about how the company operates.
- Future What - This is where you put your dreams. This being anything that you could want or need from your company. In this section you can put all the ambitions you have as an owner.
- Future How - This last quadrant takes all the aspects of the previous and finds a technological way of solving and implementing that into the current system.
Business Use Case Workshops
- A business use case or BUC is all about how business events trigger a response in the form of work. This work is then broken down and divided into manageable chunks.
- Now that the work is in chucks a helpful tool to analyze and make improvements is a BUC workshop.
- In these workshops, the interested stakeholders discuss what work they are currently involved with and what they hope to do in the future. This is like the "how now" and " future what" sections of the brown cow model.
- Then you can uses scenarios to help people understand what will help them achieve what they want.
Interviewing Stakeholders
- Interviewing stakeholders is a basic way to understand what the company needs and what the solution to the problem could be. This is one of the simplest ways to understand the company and all the different aspects that can be changed.
- This, however, is not without its downsides as it requires the stakeholders to verbalize what they want. For some people that is easy but for many, it is difficult to explain what they do to someone who hasn't had their level of training. The BA also needs to ask specific and targeted questions so the interviewee can stay on track and give accurate replies.
Trawling is a method of fishing that involves pulling a fishing net through the water behind one or more boats. Projects using outsourcing are always elephants—they need a formal specification. Microsoft use the view to cleanse our ideas on what the current business is actually doing without inhibiting it by referring to processors and physical artifacts that might not be part of a future implementation. The business use case workshop is an effective way of understanding each partition and making improvements. Interviewing the stakeholders is a technique that is commonly employed, but is not without its problems
ReplyDeleteThe Brown Cow model is a way of reducing the complexity of systems modelling by dividing the model’s viewpoints. For example, the business analyst needs to separate the current view of the system from the future. Additionally, he or she must be able to demonstrate a technological view of the system, along with the technologically-agnostic essential view. The Brown Cow Model illustrates four points of view that help to uncover the real business problem and identify useful innovations. The four quadrants which are - What-Now, What-Future, How-Now, and How-Future show the different viewpoints of work. Generally, it is not sufficient to have only two views of business - the "as is" and the "to be". To get a true light on the business problem and to ensure innovations, more views are necessary.
ReplyDeleteNot spent much time with the most critical tools for a business analyst—the ones attached to either side of your head, and the big gray one between those. Listening is the most important technique in requirements gathering. If you can listen to what your owner and your other stakeholders are saying, and if you can think about what they say and understand what they mean, then the tools described in this chapter will be useful. Conversely, if you don’t listen and don’t think, then you are highly unlikely to uncover the product that the user really wants. The trawling techniques are communication tools; they help you open a dialog with your stakeholders and provide the feedback that is so essential to good communication. Use them well and wisely.
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