Work rooted in research and discovery

Ask what others in your organization need from this work. You never know until you ask. At the start of a project, we outline who the stakeholders are (or who needs to be consulted). We outline the activities, such as interviews or a stakeholder alignment workshop. we set the purpose, outcome, and goal of these activities.

I give clear instructions for who should be invited and how; what technology to use; when it will happen; how long it will take. We write up our findings and can present a summary back to those interviews. It says, “We heard you!”

Asking others what they need from our project helps generate new ideas. At the very least, it’s a great way to engage in change management activities. Tell people what’s happening, ask them what they need, then reflect back to them what they said.

Often I hear, “We want to make the process better, we just don’t know how.” The secret to business process improvement isn’t (just) inviting in an expert who will magically change things. The secret is to know what your process are now so that you can change them.

In our business process modeling, I work with stakeholders to uncover what the current tasks in the process are, who is doing the tasks, when the hand-offs occur, and what the result is. Collaborating with stakeholders is a great way to get input from everyone and highlight inconsistencies.

The collaboration process involves one-on-one interviews and stakeholder workshops. At the end of the modeling process, you’ll know what the process is, what is not working for you, and ways you can address these issues.

Domain modeling, or conceptual data modeling, helps clarify what things are important to your organization and what you want to track about the things that are important. However, language is contentious. One of the most contentious meetings I ever had was around a label for a field!

With domain modeling, you get clarity around what is important to you and other stakeholders. You also define what these things mean, and what you want to know about them. I take you through that process.

The process for domain modeling is very similar to process for business process modeling. Instead of focusing on activities, we focus on the “things” in those activities.

User research is not to be neglected on our projects. I talk to users to ask them what they need to do and what they’re having trouble doing. I do surveys, user interviews, workshops, and consolidate this all into findings, personas, and user journeys.

When I go through this with you, we create an overarching user research plan. You know what we plan to do, based on your available time and budget. For each activity, I outline the purpose, outcome, and goals. We discuss who should be invited and how; what technology to use; when it will happen; how long it will take.