Final Assignment: Reflection

Challenge:  As an IT Analyst I was on a project to rewrite a small but highly impactful financial application onto a  new modern platform. The original system had existed for over 10 years and over those 10 years had  been managed by various business teams and supported by different staff members of an outsourced  team.  When new features were added to meet the current business team needs, it was at times done  in a piecemeal fashion. So there was not a lot of technical cohesion and no one person knew the  application well enough to determine what should be in the new application and what should be  sunsetted with the original.     Selection:  To start off this project I used the visualization tool, Visio. Since this was an application with workflow,  roles and business rules, creating a diagram where the audience can see the process steps and flow  was critical.  It was also important that when I presented information and made recommendations to  both business and technical stakeholders that a common language was being used. And pictures,  diagrams and symbols are non-intimidating, generally universal, and neither side had to interpret  business or technical jargon when we were in discussions.     Application:  As I started the initial analysis, I essentially dissected the original system from both the frontend and  backend. I evaluated the code that supported the core business process and the features that were  added to enhance the process.  After that, I took to diagraming the workflow in Visio with swimlanes,  depicting decision making and exception processing.  There were about 4 distinct roles, about 10  workflow states, and a few exception handling processes.  As I presented the current state visual  diagram to the stakeholders, it was the first time they saw for certain what the system was and was not  doing. It gave them a greater appreciation for IT and the support we provided to keep the system  running and it helped them make informed decisions of how their future system should look.  The  stakeholders were able to negotiate amongst themselves what processes and features they absolutely  needed to go forward and from there, we were able to create the future state diagram. After stakeholder  approval these visual diagrams later acted as a blueprint for the development team to design the new  system.

Insight:  Using a diagramming tool to depict what is really happening from a system and user/customer point of  view was imperative to making the new financial application a success.  Applying workflow techniques  helped draw out where there was time wasted and where a user may encounter frustration. The  visualization tool also aided in allowing the team to easily depict scenarios for the various user groups  and come up with the rightsize solution.  I think this is core to design thinking where we should be  looking at what the human is experiencing and the technology should be aiding not impeding the end  goal.     Approach:  I don’t think I would have used a different option if I had to do it again. When it comes to workflow  applications where your stakeholders have ownership of some or all parts of the business process,  visualization tools makes them see the whole process cycle from end to end and helps them make  informed decisions around bottlenecks, waste, mis-steps, etc.

