4Knowledge's Sake, 10/26/2023

In honour of the upcoming celebration of all things spooky, I’d like to talk about skeletons. Not the anatomical kind. Not even those nifty fishbone diagrams used in project management and product design. No, the skeletons I’m referring to are the metaphorical ones that lie buried in every business environment, waiting for a transformation leader to uncover them at the most inopportune moment. Scary stuff.

Whether you’re using an agile or waterfall delivery framework for your project, there will be vast amounts of information that needs to be ingested and synthesized. It can be hard to know where special attention needs to be paid to foresee what business processes and requirements are going to prove the most difficult to accommodate.

Wouldn’t it be useful to predict where your company’s particular skeletons are hiding? Over twenty years of participating in and then leading business transformations, I’ve developed a checklist that helps to do just that, and I’m going to share it with you.

Here is my go-to list of areas to focus on:

· Groups or processes that have remained static for a long time. Maybe it’s a way of invoicing that hasn’t changed since the turn of the millennium, or a tax department that’s inherently resistant to change. Either way, the place where rapid change and old-school practices meet warrants a thorough examination.

· Side of desk work. Time-and-motion analysis is great for uncovering those moments where business users pivot away from standardized workflows to accomplish a vital task. There’s usually a reason these tasks haven’t been automated or systematized yet. Find out what it is.

· Parallel vs. sequential work. Parallel workflows may be more efficient, but they are incrementally harder to transform and automate. Make special note of them.

· Points where multiple systems converge or diverge. Look for points in a business process where inputs are required from two or more external sources to proceed, or where the output of a business process must be shared to multiple systems. Data map those areas to death.

· Anchor points. These are non-negotiable requirements around which the business transformation must conform. A ancillary system that can only be updated during a maintenance window. A customer identifier that must remain masked. A product whose configuration differs from the rest of the catalogue.

· High traffic areas. These are business processes or workflows with a lot of cooks in the kitchen. Each one of those stakeholder groups will have their own ideas of how best to transform their function, and mediating between those often-contradictory inputs takes time.

· Business case KPIs. This should probably go without saying, but often gets overlooked. If your project has time savings as a key component of its business benefit, then focus on where and how turnaround times are measured today, and how that measurement might need to be updated or improved post-transformation. Likewise, if customer engagement rates are a critical outcome, then understand the data needs of teams that perform that analysis and incorporate them into your plan.