Chapter 8 - Starting the Solution

Starting the solution, in which we bring the essence of the business into the technological world of the implementation.

This diagram shows how you can decide and how you are going to implement the essential business.

So, we are moving from an abstract world to the physical world; from policy to technology; from problem to solution; from purpose to design. We have arrived at the point where we move away from the virtual, abstract, and perfect world that exists above the line, and bring the business requirements into the reality of the technological world that lies below the line. in every step of our life we need solutions for getting better outcome. So, to arrive at an elegant solution, you must consider, and probably design, the experience that results from your choice of automation boundary. In other words, you must deliver the required functionality so that it works in a way that readily fits into the users’ work customs, meets the operational needs of the organization, contributes to the organization’s goals, and does so at a price that pleases the owner.

Iterative Development

Iterative development techniques don’t always appear to do much in the way of upfront design, relying instead on frequent releases of software to gauge the design’s suitability. Although this approach can certainly work, it can be time-consuming if the initial releases are not very close to what is actually needed, or if the problem is so poorly understood or defined by the stakeholders that any solution is bound to be wide of the mark. In any event, it is usually more efficient to begin the discovery of need with abstract models and conversations, instead of concrete implementations.

Essential Business

The functional needs can be presented to you in the form of a business use case (BUC) scenario, a collection of atomic functional requirements, or properly crafted user stories. The level of detail that you address before thinking about the solution will vary depending on your project strategy and the way in which you are working with all the stakeholders. An understanding of the non-functional needs of the essential business is important to crafting a valuable solution. The non-functional requirements, such things as usability, look and feel, operational, environmental, security, and so on must be taken into account when making choices about the solution. The non-functional needs are largely responsible for specifying the kind of user experience appropriate for the intended audience. We will return to these needs later in the chapter when we look at designing the experience. As we have said before, it is crucial that the business analyst and the associated stakeholders have a clear understanding of the real needs that is, the essential requirements before attempting to find a solution.

Determine the Extent of the Product

As noted earlier in this text, business use cases are responses to requests from the outside world for the work’s service. The optimal response is to provide the most valuable service (from the outsider’s point of view) at the lowest cost in terms of time, materials, or effort (from your organization’s point of view), and in the most pleasing and encouraging manner (from the end user’s point of view). Thus the product you craft should be a contributor to the optimal business use case one that makes the product cheaper and faster and more convenient and all of the other things your project is to deliver. Your task in determining the future product is to find the best way to achieve the desired outcome for the business use case. The one closest to the essence of the work. The product is the part of the business use case you choose to automate; so let’s look at an example of how we determine what part of the essential work is to become the product.

The user, in this case, the telephone representative takes the order over the telephone and enters it into the product, which then does the credit card check and records the order. Not bad, but perhaps we could do better. Boundary number 3 automates all of the order-taking work. Customers make a telephone call to a product capable of recognizing voice input or recognizing commands from the telephone keypad. Provided no questions arise and no serious responses are needed, customers get the advantage of calling 24 hours a day. An alternative solution to boundary number 3 is that customers could log on to the grocery company’s website and submit their orders online. Solution number 3 might be convenient for the grocery company, but what about the customer? Does this approach depersonalize the shopping experience so much that the customer feels alienated? Alternatively, which type of service should the grocery company provide to keep the customer’s loyalty? Also keep in mind that before picking up the phone (or logging on), the customer would have to survey the groceries already in the home to see what is needed. What about solution number 4? This solution would take over most of the work previously done by the customer. This solution would count the groceries and trigger the order, perhaps with some collaboration with the customer. This is a higher-risk solution, but it might be attractive enough to the customers to make it a worthwhile approach.

Consider the Users

If you alone will use the product, or if you just couldn’t give a damn, then feel free to skip ahead and ignore this section. Conversely, if you intend to sell your solution, or if you need people to voluntarily start using it, then it stands to reason that you will want to make the product attractive to its intended audience. If you have a substantial budget or if your project has to deliver some absolutely critical product, then it would be appropriate to study the users in significant detail. One way of doing so is to use ethnography—the study of the customs of people and their cultures. The intention of an ethnographically study is to describe the nature of the targeted subjects. Originally ethnography entailed the study of ethnic groups, but for our purposes we are usually not interested in the ethnic background of our users, but rather, as a group, how those users behave and how they think. Ethnographic studies usually involved longish-term close observation, and sometimes interviews and surveys. Ethnographer Bruce Davis describes this type of investigation as “deep hanging out with the subjects.”

Naturally if you have only one or two users, then you can interview them directly. However, we urge caution at this stage, as many people cannot be relied upon to say exactly what they do, and observation is the more likely method for you to understand what your users do and how they feel about how they do it. You can also use prototypes and observe the users’ reactions to them, thereby discovering how they are most likely to respond to your proposed product.

Innovation

This is the time for you to be innovative. If no innovation occurs, then the new product will be much the same as whatever it replaces. It is, of course, important not to disrupt the essential requirements, but there are a number of things that you can do to make a more innovative and acceptable end product. Innovation, as we use the term here, means thinking differently about the problem to find a new and better way to do the work, or in some cases to find better work to do. Instead of rushing ahead with the first-to-mind solution or the obvious solution, we urge you to spend just a little time with fellow business analysts and other stakeholders to come up with something better, something that will be longer lasting and more appealing, something innovative. This section introduces some innovation triggers. We use these concepts with our project teams to suggest innovations, and to find fresh and better solutions. We suggest using any of these triggers as a way of helping you to think differently and discover an innovative solution.

Convenience

We love convenience; what’s more, we are willing to pay for it. We typically pay more for mobile phone calls than we do for landline calls, and we usually pay more for our mobile phones than we do for our landline phones. We are willing to pay more because it is just so wonderfully convenient to carry the phone around with us instead of being limited by a cord connected to the wall.

Active Adjacent Systems

Active adjacent systems are humans who can interact with, or participate in, the work. When active adjacent systems initiate events, they have some objective in mind, and will collaborate with the work provide data or bio-metrics, respond to questions, indicate choices until their objective is satisfied. Given this fact, you can usually locate your product boundary as close  as possible to the adjacent system. Active adjacent systems are able to interact with the work; this interaction can occur face to face, by telephone, via a mobile device, with an automated machine, or over the Internet. Even though the active adjacent system is technically outside the scope of the work, you should consider whether you might be able to extend the scope of your product to include some of it.

Autonomous Adjacent Systems 

An autonomous adjacent system is some external body, such as another company, a computer system, or a customer, that is not directly interacting with your work. It acts independently of the work being studied, but has connections to it. Autonomous adjacent systems communicate through one-way data flows such as letters or e-mails or online forms where no back-and-forth interaction is possible.

Cooperative Adjacent Systems

Cooperative adjacent systems are automated systems that collaborate with the work during the course of a business use case, usually by means of a simple request–response dialog. A cooperative adjacent system might be an automated system containing a database that is accessed or written to by the work, an automated system that does some computation for the work, or any other automated system that provides a predictable and immediate service to the work. Because so much of the functionality of our organizations has been automated, several cooperative adjacent systems almost always appear in your context model.