Reflection - Visualisation Tool

1. Challenge – As business analyst my role demands me to act as bridge between customers and

system development team. In role of business analyst opportunity to engage with customer and  obtain required information is only available to me. So I have to make sure that any system  customisation that customers requires is completely understood to system development team  that involves various developers, testers, product owner and required change is delivered as per  customer expectations.

In this entire process in order to understand the customers’ requirements I usually make use

of tools like interviewing and analysing data and patterns. It helps me to gain insight of the  change requested by customer and impact or benefits of the same.

At the same time it is crucial that understanding that I have obtained from the customer of

their business needs is also understood to the team who is going develop, test and deliver the  change back to customer. Any drop in client business requirement could result in failure client  delivery and waste of efforts and time of all stakeholders involved as well as impact client  business objectives.

2. Selection – As advised in the challenge section that it is crucial that all stakeholders who are

involved in the delivery of the customer change must understand the due business need and  impact and benefit of customisation required by the customer, So that delivery of the same is  done as per customer expectations.

Such requirements are usually documented in long text documents giving detailed

background and various examples and illustrations. Going through such all documents line by  line with entire team at times becomes boring and time consuming. For stakeholders who come  with less understanding of business and possess technical skill it become really difficult to follow  through at times and testers as well fail to realise the real crux of the changes required by  customer and fail to validate the change properly.

Therefore I have decided to make use of “Visualisation” tool to ensure entire development

team is able to visualise any such customisations requirement as I do in my mind after various  discussions and analysis of the data.

3. Application –As advised in the application section, I started using visualisation tool with entire

stakeholders involved in the customer delivery. I started with providing required business  background using whiteboard instead of using just long texts speeches. I start drawing entire  business flow as it is today and then I highlighted all the current problem areas using different  colours, so that the problem areas are registered clearly into stakeholders’ mind.

Side by side then I had prepared the proposed business flow and highlighted how in this new

business flow customer requirement would be met and entire process be improvised and deliver  value into customer. These business flows were then used during the entire development and  delivery process as first reference point for any ambiguities.

4. Insight & Approach – Upon utilising visualisation tools – business flows the change that I had

noticed is that, All stakeholders involved in the delivery process understood from the day 1 as to  what is the problem area and how are we going to address it and made continuous and timely  progress towards final delivery and managed to deliver before time. Using this visualisation tool  helped us save time in various iterations that earlier we used to have. Earlier after giving long  speeches and reviewing long documents line by line, I had to conduct various sessions with the  team explaining and re-explaining the same requirement again and again and still the final

delivery was coming under question if it is as per customer expectations, reason being team  involved was unable to see the complete picture and it’s impacts and it kept us wondering  whether we are moving in right direction.  This tool has proved very helpful and if implemented at initial stage when I am engaging with  Customers to discuss their business needs and impacts then it may certainly help reduce the  discussions and iterations at the initial stage as well.    Thank you Ilaria & Darden team for providing uplifting insight into these various tool to work  efficiently and deliver with business value into customer and benefit our team and organisation.

