Business Requirement Gathering Ch - 7 : Understanding the Real Problem

When stakeholders ask for some feature or capability, they quite often state their request as an implementation. This is a business stakeholder asking for a solution to a problem, but not really saying what that problem is. How can you know if it is the correct solution? You can’t and until you know what the real problem is.

One should also focus on the abstraction, as it means focusing on ideas rather than solutions.

The Brown Cow Model- Thinking above the line:  In the brown cow model, it also represents the lower-left quadrant of the model, the How-Now view of the business. In fact, anything below the line - the “how” - shows the physical devices and human organizations used to implement the solution.

The Essence: Now if we move above the horizontal line that separates the “how” from the “what.” Here’s where you see the real business - that which we refer to as the essence of the business. The reason for spending time above the line is to discover the real problem and avoid what happens in many organizations where people waste most of their time finding solutions to the wrong problems. Moreover, it is BA's duty to know what is the real need of their stakeholders and find the problem before the solution is considered. Additionally, the problem, meaning the real business problem you are trying to solve, exists regardless of any technological implementation. If the requirement contains any implementation then it is a solution, not the requirement. Now when the problem is clear then you can think about the solution. Because you have described the real, essential requirement, the designer can now cast about and find the most appropriate solution to the correct problem, and the eventual solution will almost certainly be superior.

Abstraction:  Abstraction and getting to the essence are pretty much the same thing.  This is a Latin word. Here - 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, abstraction is an idea, not the implementation.

Swim Lane Begone: Some business analysts go to a great deal of trouble to add swim lanes to their process models.  it is also important for the business analyst to ensure that current implementation details are not unnecessarily carried any further. An important step in looking for the essence of the business is to see the end-to-end process and to ignore the current way of dividing the work up among departments.

Moving into the Future: Once you understand the current essence, it is time to move on to what you want the business to be; this is shown in the Future-What quadrant of the Brown Cow Model.  The future business will not be the same as the previous business—your project is meant to improve the work, and here is where you do it. moving to the future involves questioning and enhancing the current business essence to make the business more effective, efficient, and innovative.

How to be Innovative: Very few people think of themselves as innovators, but we suggest that almost anybody can be innovative if given the opportunity and some techniques to work with.  your stakeholders might not know what they want; at least they have trouble telling you what they want. But you know that there are three things that people do want and are willing to spend their discretionary money on pleasure, prestige, and convenience.

Systematic Thinking: As well as innovating, moving into the future means thinking systemically about the work, the whole problem, the end-to-end system. Sometimes, when you consider the entirety in preference to the parts, you are better able to see how you can rearrange those parts to form a more beneficial system for the future. One should instead of concentrating on the first solution that you are given, you step back and look at the problem from a wider scope.

Value:  You make your decision as to whether to buy something based on its value to you. Sometimes making the value decision is straightforward.
Do not have to deal with easy stuff like personal preferences and values. Rather, you are focusing on an organization’s value- specifically, the organization that is to own the product you are developing. You have to determine what this organization values and what it wants to achieve.
For any business use case, you measure value with the objective of including only those facilities that are valuable.

Personas: A persona is an invented personality. An imaginary but nevertheless archetypical user or customer for whom you are gathering requirements for your product. A persona is a virtual image that represents the group of same users when your users are not able. These personas are created from the data that is collected from your users during their interview. Using a persona makes it easier for business analysts and innovators to think about their customers’ needs. When they can see a photo and speak about the persona by name as someone real, it puts a human face on what otherwise would be abstract data about potential customers.

Challenging Constraints: A constraint, in this case, is an imposed restriction on the problem or solution space—it might be a piece of business policy that says a process must be done in a certain way, a directive about the way in which the solution must be implemented, or about almost anything at all. Challenging constraints often result in some surprising innovations for the business.

Brainstorming: Brainstorming takes advantage of the group effect. That is, you gather a group of bright, willing people, and ask them to generate as many ideas as possible for the new product.
There are some simple rules for brainstorming:

• This mixture of backgrounds brings many more creative ideas.
• Produce lots of ideas. Come up with as many ideas as possible. Quantity will, in time, product quality.
• The wilder the idea, the more creative it probably is, and often the more likely it is to turn into a really useful requirement.
• Piggyback a new idea onto an old one. That is, build one idea on top of another.
•  Write every idea down, without censoring.