- Recently I've noticed an increasing amount of people coming to my desk with predefined solutions, whist to a large degree this is admirable, on further probing there's often a lack of definition about the problem is that needs to be addressed or perhaps more specifically the root cause of that problem.
It's logical that people do this… traditional business teaches that we shouldn't dwell on the problems but instead be taking action to resolve/improve them, and after a while it becomes a habit, and ultimately an addiction. - We start to think about answers faster, faster and stop taking the step back to really look at what we're trying to achieve. A really clear symptom of this is when new information (inevitably) emerges or challenges arise and U-turns are required on solutions as a result (or worse). Framing problems and root-causes up front help with this enormously… if your solution is addressing the root-causes of a problem, new information can only help to build and evolve a better solution.
It's our role as analysts to do this, so how do we go about it? The first is step helping people to admit they have problem (i.e. not that they have solution). I've attached an 8 min video to a presentation by lady called Mary Poppendieck - she's a prominent voice in Lean based software development techniques and in this video she does a fantastic recap of pareto charts & fishbone diagrams and the importance of testing your analysis by completing what she terms "Many Rapid Experiments" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhxyO6jUubQ.
These techniques will no doubt be familiar but digging them out of your toolbox and dusting them off is always a valuable thing to do.
If you've got any questions on the techniques Mary talks through do let me know.
Enjoy and have a great weekend-
No comments:
Post a Comment