Chapter - 7 Understanding the Real Problem

This chapter is of particular importance to rabbits. 

As a rabbit project, you are likely to be using techniques such as story cards, Post-it notes, or sketches on a whiteboard. These artifacts display, more often than not, proposed solutions to unstated problems.The essence does not have to be written as the first draft of the story card (it helps if it is) but it must be revealed during the requirements conversation.

Horse projects’ aspirations to informality are helped if the business analysts and the stakeholders talk about only the essence of the work. Using this approach, they generate fewer models and possibly cut down on the amount of communication needed.

Elephant projects might involve outsourced development, in which case it is vital that they solve the right problem. If not, the delivered product has to be corrected and the outsource charges for the corrections.

The Brown Cow Model

Abstraction 

At this stage, it might be helpful to talk a little about abstraction. Abstraction and getting to the essence are pretty much the same thing, but possibly abstraction is the more natural way to think about this concept. The word has Latin roots—abs, which “means away from,” and trahere, which means “to draw.” Thus abstraction, as we use the term here, is drawing away or removing physical implementation so as to reduce it to its essential characteristics. In other words, an abstraction is the idea, not the implementation. 

Solving the Right Problem 

The way of thinking discussed here follows from understanding the abstracted essence. This section is relevant to all requirements analysts, regardless of the size or nature of the project. It is equally applicable to iterative and traditional development methods.

Moving into the Future 

So far in this book we have been looking at the current implementation of the business, and then deriving the essence of the business and arriving at the correct problem to solve. Of course, all this activity relates to the current business, its current technology, and its current essence. If you refer to the Brown Cow Model, you have achieved respectively the How-Now and the What-Now views of the work. 

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We suggest something along these lines for planning and running innovation workshops: 

1. Set the scope of the innovation. It should not be too narrow, as many innovations are originally thought of as outside the remit of the team. Invite all stakeholders who have an interest in this scope to participate in the workshop. 

2. Partition the scope using business events to allow the participants to concentrate on the end-to-end business processes, while keeping in mind that systemic thinking usually involves all of the business events. 

3. Plan the workshop. You will probably have to use several innovation techniques. Some of these are discussed in this book, and a number of excellent texts on creativty also available. You will have to facilitate the workshop and lead your stakeholder through the techniques. 

4. Record everything that happens in the workshop. Do not try and assess ideas during the workshop. Innovating and assessing are two separate activities and should not be tackled at the same time. 

5. After the workshop, feed the results back to participants. 

6. Incubate. Sometimes the really great idea does not happen for some time. People are quite capable of coming back days later with some profound improvement to one of the workshop innovations. These workshops are intended to be more structured than regular brainstorming sessions. The intention is to use a mixture of innovation techniques to generate a more interesting outcome. 

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Brainstorming Brainstorming 

It is one way of innovating. It is useful for generating lots of contributions regarding the scope of the problem,or what it could be. This strategy is not intended to promote unconstrained scope creep. Instead, the brainstorming session generates ideas that could lead to a better product without incurring additional expense.

Piggyback a new idea onto an old one. That is, build one idea on top of another. 

Write every idea down, without censoring. 

If you get stuck, seed the session with a word pulled randomly from a dictionary, and ask participants to make word associations that have some bearing on the product. 

Make the session fun. You cannot mandate creativity; you have to let it come naturally. 

You won’t see many ground-breaking ideas if the boss is present at the session and says something like, “I want to hear only ideas that are marketable.” 

Back to the Future 

Let’s return to what we are doing here. Your task is to change the current work into the future work, or as we have described it previously, to transform the How-Now into the Future-What. Looked at it another way, this effort involves changing business policy, and the new policy should be innovative. As we have said several times—and it is worth repeating—there is little value in simply re implementing some old piece of work. If your project is to provide something valuable to the organization, then it must provide an advance, some fresh thinking, to make the end product as useful as possible.