Thinking It Through

When thinking about this work-life balance, so many questions come to mind:

• If I become a workaholic, I will earn more. But what time will I have to enjoy it?
• What about my family? Will they be upset with me?
• What about my own well-being? What’s in it for me?
• If I take time off, I will have time to run errands and have fun. But will I earn enough money and will I eventually get fired?
• What will my employer think of me? Will I still be considered a dedicated worker?

Being a single mom of a 7-year-old, I sometimes feel like an extra pin was thrown into this juggling act – what if I need to take my son to an appointment, what if his school calls and I need to go get him, what if he has no school, what if I need someone to watch him so I can travel for work?

It’s a Struggle for Employers Too

The struggle impacts employers as well as employees. Providing exciting work employees are good at, being respectful as a manager, providing fair compensation, discussing career paths, and providing flexible hours are just some of the contributing factors to organizational pride, a willingness to refer others to the workplace and higher overall job satisfaction. All of these factors lead to higher employee retention rates.

Making the balance even harder, more and more, people are utilizing computers, emails, and cell phones to work outside the workplace and work hours. This tends to blur the line between work and life. The psychological stresses and strains of always working tend to affect our health and could lead to more serious long-term negative effects on cardiovascular and immune systems.

As an employer or employee, what do you think about when considering work-life balance?

This is a topic on which much is written. Here are some books and articles that might inspire your thoughts.

• Off Balance: Getting Beyond the Work-Life Balance Myth to Personal and Professional Satisfaction: Matthew Kelly: 9781594630811: Amazon.com: Books
• Life Matters: Creating a dynamic balance of work, family, time, & money: A. Roger Merrill, Rebecca Merrill: 9780071441780: Amazon.com: Books
• Balancing Life and Work Around the World – NYTimes.com

This design fatigue can make a Web Designer or Information Architect feel like they’re stuck in quicksand, suddenly we are stuck and the more we push the more stuck we get.

How to Shake It Off

When I find myself in this space, there are some techniques I think are particularly helpful:

1. Create some space. A mind that is very filled has no room for something new to enter. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” (1)  Sometimes we have to let go of all of the effort, all of the accumulated knowledge, and just go for a walk. We put the design to the side and let our minds focus elsewhere.  Exercise, meditate, walk the dog, bake a cake, whatever!
2. Show the design to people who are not involved. A creative audience can be the spark that launches your design into a new trajectory. From time to time, I find it very helpful to have other people in my office who are not involved with my project look at my design. Even people completely outside of the industry can provide a fresh perspective.
3. Change your medium.  If you normally work in a particular program – try working in another. If you don’t normally sketch on paper – sketch on paper. I often print out my wireframes and look at them on a desk. This is especially helpful if I have looked at them on a screen hundreds of times.  It always surprises me how just that simple shift in perspective helps me see differently.
4. Surround yourself with creative energy. Go to an art musem or a gallery, look at creative works across a variety of disciplines, or seek out a scenic place.
5. Work on the project in a space other than your usual environment. If you have a laptop, take it someplace interesting.
6. Find time to laugh. It can be just the thing you need to melt the creative ice.

What do you do to get a fresh look at your work?

¹ Shunryu Suziki[c3] , Zen Mind, Beginners Mind[c4] , page 12

The stand-up meeting is a must-have agile event and for good reason. The meeting, if done correctly, can add a lot of value to the team and process by combining a bunch of typical management practices into a single daily meeting. All types of projects, including those working in a waterfall process, can effectively use this agile technique.

What is a Stand-Up Meeting?

The daily stand-up meeting is a time-boxed event (15 minutes) that gives the development team a forum for communicating individual status and any impediments that are blocking them from completing the work. Typically, the meetings are held with the team members standing to promote a quick meeting, which is why it is called a stand-up meeting. The general format for the meeting is to have each team member answer the following questions:

1. What did I accomplish since yesterday?
2. What am I going to accomplish today?
3. What obstacles are in my way?

How to Make the Stand-Up Meeting Effective

The following practices will make your standup meeting effective:

Time and Logistics:

• Extend the Time-box – The stand-up meeting is generally time-boxed to 15 minutes. If you have a larger team (pushing the limits of the ideal agile/scrum team of 6-9 members), you should consider extending this time to 30 minutes. This will allow team members to each have a few minutes to talk but still keep the meeting short.
• Meeting Space – If possible, meet where the team works. If you have a distributed or co-located team, conduct the meeting using online conference software like WebEx or Skype. Ideally, this would include the ability to videoconference, but being able to present or share the work at hand will suffice.
• Task Board – Present the work using a task board. A task board (a storyboard in agile) is simply an outline of the individual tasks associated to the work that needs to be completed. It is best to use a physical task board during the meeting. You can use large sticky notes on a wall or whiteboard as long as you can make it readable from reasonable distance. Again, if you have a distributed team, it is critical that you are able to share the task board, so consider using a task management system to track the work such as VersionOne or Pivot Tracker.

Meeting Format:

• Focus on the Work – Use the work at hand to establish the format of the meeting. The team should provide the standard information – yesterday, today, and obstacles, but the information should focus on the work. This way the entire team has insight into the work and can quickly jump in to help remove obstacles or make suggestions. This also tends to shift the focus from the individual’s tasks to the tasks necessary to get the work done.
• Questions – As the team gets more experienced, the exact structure of the questions is not as important as the information being given. For example, the team member may want to focus on the obstacles that they are facing first or who to hand off work to next. The focus of the information given should be on how the work is moving towards getting done.
• Obstacles or Blocking Issue Board – Create a board to track obstacles as they are brought up in the meeting. This is a quick way to capture the obstacle and who can help remove it. Posting this within the work-space allows the team to at any time during the work-day to look at the board and quickly understand the status or pick up an item to be worked.

These simple practices will help you add effective stand-up meetings to your waterfall process. They will give the team insight into individual status, help them to quickly collaborate on solutions and improvements, and focus them on the progress being made towards completing the work.

What are some of the techniques you have found to make your stand-up meetings better?

The next post will discuss improving your review and retrospective events. Please stay tuned for more information on Adding Agile Practices to a Waterfall World.

What else does a Business Analyst do?

The primary role/function of a BA is to solve business problems and elicit, analyze, specify and validate requirements, but we also perform many other functions. We act as intermediaries, functioning as a go-between among the business, IT, and upper-level management. We perform the role of a filter, sifting through new requests and requests for changes from the business. We investigate and elicit information in order to determine the problem and come up with the solution. We facilitate to help the business, management, and the solutioning team understand problems, and we work with them towards coming up with workable solutions. We act as diplomats, assisting in conflict resolution among parties and negotiating collaborative solutions. We improve the business by looking for ways to improve processes. We perform the role of Quality Assurance (QA), making sure that the solution solves the problem completely and effectively. We also act as change agents, ensuring that the solution is accepted by stakeholders throughout the development process and efficiently placed into production.

Our role is not just limited to gathering or eliciting requirements, and it is not only done during the define/requirements phase. During the course of our work, we perform various activities and wear many hats throughout the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).  Steven Blais, in his book “Business Analysis: Best Practices for Success,” goes into much more detail explaining these roles. He lists a diverse list of activities that a BA may have to perform. The list of activities that he has included in his book, although not complete, demonstrates the breadth of the BA’s reach in the organization, and the importance of their role.

Specific Responsibilities

Here are just some of the activities that a BA may have to perform. I for one as a BA, at one point or other, have performed all of these activities during the course of my career.

• Facilitate and document meetings with stakeholders to determine the underlying business need
• Create functional roadmap
• Identify potential issues and troubleshoot
• Produce project plan
• Produce high-level requirements
• Assist with a design
• Create page flows
• Create use cases
• Business requirements analysis – Organizing and specifying and ensuring they are complete and unambiguous
• Business requirements documentation in a format that can be shared with stakeholders
• Validate requirements – Ensuring the requirements map to the business need, are approved by all relevant stakeholders, and meet essential quality standards
• Act as a liaison between the stakeholders and the IT department
• Walk IT through approved business requirements
• Manage change requests
• Validate the system requirements – Ensuring that the system requirements meet the business requirements
• Provide traceability of all documents
• Create system and user acceptance test plans
• Create and execute system and user acceptance test cases
• Research and resolve system bugs
• Provide training and ongoing support to the end user

So, next time anyone suggests that we as BAs just write requirements, please list out some of these activities and proudly say, we do much more than just write requirements!

According to a recent blog on Hubspot :

• 80% of consumers look for recommendations from people they don’t know
• 51% say these recommendations are more important than opinions of friends and family
• Reviews are key to purchases of electronics, cars, travel, credit cards, and insurance

Here are three tips to help you incorporate UGC into your marketing strategy:

1.     Product Reviews/Tips & Tricks

Encourage your customers to write reviews or Tips and Tricks on your products.  Whether you have an e-commerce site or a brick-and-mortar location, you can ask people to give you a review.

Amazon is a great example of a company that asks for reviews.  Anytime you make a purchase, they follow up about a week later with an email asking for a review on the product you bought.

These reviews and product tips and tricks can be used to generate discussions via your social channels, and you can incorporate them into new campaigns.

2.     User Photos and Videos

Ask your users to share their photos and videos.  You can have them share via your social channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc..) or include this functionality into your own website.

For instance, Nylabone, a manufacturer of pet products, encourages Facebook fans to share photos of their pups with Nylabone products. They re-post these photos on their page which generates user engagement and brand awareness.  Check out the Nylabone Facebook page.

Online retailer ModCloth has taken this a step further and incorporated photos users have submitted of them wearing ModCloth clothing into their own Style Gallery.

If your users are submitting photos via Twitter and Instagram, don’t forget to ask them to include a #hashtag so that you can search for this content to repurpose it.

3.     Social Discussion/Comments/Polls

The best way to harness UCG content is to create marketing campaigns that garner content from your fans and incorporate it back into your brand’s website.  A study done by Incyte “found that consumers who wanted to learn more about a product were 4x more likely to visit the company’s website than the Facebook brand page- even after originally learning about it through a social network.”

Putting the Tips to Work on Your Website

Implementing these tips on your web site will provide new ways to leverage your traffic. Imagine your web site with the following new features and expanded interactivity with your customers:

• Include a Facebook comment box (or build your own) on your blogs or in a contest campaign
• Start a discussion based on user reviews, tips and tricks, and/or user pictures and videos
• Incorporate a user poll to gather feedback on products and/or features

How do you help create user-generated content for your favorite brands?  Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Master These 4 Soft Skills

So what can a project manager do to succeed in their role while keeping morale and efficiency at a high level for the life of a project? I suggest these four steps:

1. Work with the team to create project schedules: There’s no better way to alienate your team right off the bat than to tell them what they’ll be doing and when it needs to be completed. A surefire way I’ve found to improve collaboration and success on a project is to meet with the team early on to identify milestones, deliverables, and target dates. I don’t assume that the only project that team members are working on is the one that I happen to be managing. Your project is likely to have some rigid dates identified by the program that can’t change but, where possible, the team should contribute inputs to the schedule based on their own workload and availability.
2. Don’t just rely on formal calls to collect status: Many Project Managers wait for weekly status calls to find out what’s happening with the project team. Sometimes waiting until that meeting could be too late. A simple call or email to touch base with a key resource prior to the status call can help identify a risk and get a mitigation plan in place before it becomes an issue. I have found that team members will also appreciate that you’re paying attention and tracking the project so closely.
3. Reach out and offer a hand: This one may get me in trouble with my Project Manager colleagues, but I’m revealing it anyway. When a resource indicates a deliverable is in jeopardy of being completed, I ask a couple of questions: what can we do to remove any obstacles preventing on-time completion and then, if that doesn’t work, I ask how I can help. I like to be involved enough in my projects so that if resources are strapped for time I’m able to pitch in and help with any task, no matter how trivial. I have found that in addition to helping move the project along, offering to help improves the relationship between me and the project team. I believe team members that know I’m willing to roll up my sleeves and do whatever it takes are more likely to reach out to proactively communicate any risks or concerns and work to create a plan to resolve them.
4. Praise the individual: Humans are social creatures and they all appreciate a little public recognition for their work. As much as telling a resource “great job” one-on-one is a good step in increasing that team member’s confidence, praising them during a project team status meeting or in an email to the team goes even further towards increasing their confidence and motivating them to continue to work hard.

Hard Skills + Soft Skills = Success

Being an effective Project Manager is much more than tracking milestones, deliverables, percent complete, and budget. Though those are essential skills, I have found the soft skills detailed in this blog have served me well in my career as a Project Manager. I’ve learned that by employing these tactics, I earn the trust of my teams while continuing to deliver successful projects and, most importantly, maintain my sanity and the sanity of my team members.

How important are “soft skills” in your work? Please share your story in the comments.

How traceability is managed

Some organizations manage traceability very carefully using a traceability matrix. A traceability matrix has columns for each project document (like scope document, business rules document, functional requirements document). Columns in the matrix for each project document are populated to show how each requirement in the scope document is connected (or “traces”) to one or more specific rules in each of the other documents. And working backwards, the matrix also shows how each rule in a project document traces to one or more specific requirements in the scope document.

Some organizations use the traceability matrix in a limited way, and just use it to track traceability of scope requirements to business rules. Other organizations use it very comprehensively, and track traceability from scope document, through business rules and functional requirements, and right on through test cases.

Some software development organizations use traceability matrixes very religiously, and others do not use them at all.

The value of tracking traceability

The value of a traceability matrix, and of traceability as a concept, is that throughout the process there is a control on scope being added or missed. So if you have a scope requirement, and the traceability matrix shows that no business rules trace to it, there is project scope that was missed in the requirements. And if you have business rules that do not trace to a scope requirement, that means you have “scope creep,” rules that introduce functionality into a project that is not part of the approved project scope.

How does a Business Analyst manage traceability when there is no traceability matrix?

My personal opinion is that tracking traceability between the project scope document and the business rule document is enormously helpful, and should be done even if it is not required by the organization I am supporting. Whenever I track traceability, it reveals scope elements that I have not addressed fully, or places where my business rules are bringing functionality into the project that is not part of the approved project scope. Going through the exercise of checking traceability always improves the quality of my business rules document.

Of course, sometimes I just do not find the time to track traceability when my project doesn’t specifically require it, and this is a disappointment. However, I resolve to do better at this, and to make tracking traceability a standard part of my process for writing business requirements.

Traceability Matrix Template

Click here to find a traceability matrix you can use for your projects. You can add columns to it, or drop columns from it, to match the sequence of project documents used in your organization.

Do you track traceability when writing business requirements? How is this done in your organization?

Learn more about business analysis and the concept of traceability:

• Requirements traceability – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• The Value of Requirements Traceability > Business Analyst Community & Resources | Modern Analyst > Business Analyst Articles & Systems Analysis Articles | Modern Analyst

A valuable aspect of the Agile project methodology is its ability to gracefully manage change.  As much as folks don’t like to admit it, we know that project requirements change throughout the life of a project. Even when much time and effort is put into requirement analysis at the beginning of a project, adjustments in business priority, new products or vendors, revised regulations or missed requirements can all result in changes after development has begun.

Traditional change management wastes time resisting change

Working on projects where traditional “waterfall” methodology is being employed, I have often noticed a somewhat punitive attitude taken toward requirement changes.  When a missed or new requirement is uncovered, there is a lot of time spent asking: “How did this get missed?” or “Why are we just hearing about this now?”  After, sometimes, several meetings attempting to answer these questions, the request is then subjected to cumbersome change control and approval processes. Meanwhile, time is ticking and no work is being done. I have found this process especially frustrating in cases where the delivery team is ready and willing to implement the change.

Agile embraces change

Agile offers a kinder, softer approach toward change.

Rather than expecting the business “ask” to be fully defined up front and then frozen ever after, Agile openly acknowledges the changing nature of requirements. It recognizes that project stakeholders cannot know what they don’t yet know.  Change is not viewed as a negative, merely a reality.

As such, Agile provides a vehicle for easily and quickly submitting new or changed requirements for consideration at any point during the project.  This is not to say that Agile projects, particularly those with set delivery dates, can absorb an endless amount of change.  Agile simply provides a way to evaluate changes against remaining project work.  If a new requirement is of a higher priority, it moves to the top of the project’s backlog.  This, of course, means that lower priority items may not get delivered.  The requirement backlog is constantly being evaluated and adjusted based on the current priorities.  In the same way, the overall release plan is continually evolving and communicating changes in the project.

Approaching new requirements in this way changes the dialogue from “How could this happen?” to “How can we get this done?”  Project team members’ energy is focused on solutions rather than on perceived problems.  Change is treated as an expected guest instead of an unwanted visitor. Although stakeholders are required to consider the impact of their request to the overall project, they are not discouraged from introducing changes that are vital to its success.

Embracing change is a good idea for all projects

Although pure Agile will not be the right methodology for every project, adopting some level of Agile’s flexible attitude toward change will result in more nimble and effective change management for any project.

Learn more about change management and Agile:

• Disciplined Agile Change Management | Dr Dobb’s
• The “Change Prevention Process” Anti-Pattern
• Project management: How to apply agile techniques to change request management – by Philip Lop – Helium

Question:  What has been your experience with Agile or more traditional approaches to change management?

Omni-Channel Retailing brings a consistent shopping experience to consumers whether they are shopping for a brand in a retail store or on the web.  Companies are acknowledging that consumers are not buying by channel, they are buying by brand, which in turn creates a new company mission – to deliver consistent products, pricing, promotions and customer support via phone, email, web and retail stores.  With the wide use of smartphones and tablets today, delivering an Omni-Channel experience is even more important. Wikipedia defines Omni-Channel retail as follows: “Omni-Channel Retailing is very similar to, and an evolution of, multi-channel retailing, but is concentrated more on a seamless approach to the consumer experience through all available shopping channels, i.e. mobile internet devices, computers, bricks-and-mortar, television, catalog, and so on. Retailers are meeting the new customer desires by deploying specialized supply chain strategy software.”

The biggest challenge companies have to face is figuring out how to achieve optimal Omni-Channel Retailing.  The first and most critical step is to consolidate all product, pricing, and promotional data into a single repository and have all shopping channels use that data. This will ensure that all customers shopping on all channels will receive the same treatment.  The next critical step is for all channels to work cohesively as a team with the same goals in mind. As simple as this all sounds, it is a timely and costly transition. However, with the right team, patience, and perserverance…it can be achieved!

Have you seen this cross-channel shift in your business?  How are you accounting for it?  Please comment and share your struggles and/or critical success factors.

Read more on Omni-Channel retailing in the Harvard Business Review “The Future of Shopping,” which examines the blurring lines between digital and physical markets and the major challenges and opportunities for retailers in both.

Covey was a bit baffled by his success.  He said he was simply telling people what he thought they already knew.  All that people had to do was “form habits out of their best instincts,” he said, calling his “Seven Habits of Highly Successful People” natural laws, like gravity.

Covey’s seven habits are:

1. Be proactive

2. Begin with the end in mind

3. Put first things first

4. Think “win-win”

5. Seek first to understand, then to be understood

6. Synergize

7. Sharpen the Saw

Although these habits appear to be personal behaviors, thousands of business leaders flocked to his talks each year to learn how to apply these “habits” across companies, processes, projects – virtually every aspect of industry, work, and organizations.

My personal favorite is #2, “Begin with the end in mind.” While it applies to lots of circumstances, I believe it can be applied specifically to the process used to design web sites.

It is typical, when creating a web experience, to design screen flows from the beginning of a process, heading down or right towards the end of the flow.  For example, a flow might start at login, work through the creation of an account and the setting of preferences, and end with the ordering of a product or service.

What if we designed the user experience by starting with the last screen or action taken by the user, and worked left or up towards the beginning of the flow? Would the resulting experience flow be different? Would it result in a better design and a better experience? I think it could be.

I have read how this “backward design” approach works well when designing things like education and training, automobiles, and skyscrapers.   And I think it could work just as well with web interface design.

What do you think?

Learn more:

• Begin with the End: The Key to Successful Web Site Design and Promotion | TalentZoo.com
• Backward design in education and training – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• For good design, start with the end user — UC Berkeley College of Engineering