IIBA gaining momentum and finally mature enough to provide value

The IIBA continues to gather momentum in the business analysis and architecture community and is finally over its post-natal difficulties.

After earlier (perhaps over harsh) criticism from my side on the initial versions of the BABOK, I am finding real value in the community materials and (even more) the discussions.

I found the initial form of the practice to be at once too high-level and too "traditional" systems analysis focused for the increasingly varied role of the business analyst/ architect in organisations (see here and here). This was quite a feat since high-level and systems-level analysis do not always happily mix! It was descriptive, but not hugely insightful.

To see how this has changed, delve into the latest monthly newsletter or even better into the related online commnunities which contains a great range of interesting articles on topics as broad as developing business architecture to truly impact an organisation to BA handicraft (eg. handling constraints, assumptions, dependencies and risks and the definition of business analysis models). 

I can only encourage people involved in any facet of business analysis (from financial engineers, business architects, demand-managers, business strategists, management consultants, process, business and systems analysts to software engineers) to get into this community. Business analysis is a great blend of soft and hard skills that requires an incredibly broad often conflicting capabilities from the practictioner/consultant and this is reflected in the contributions to the IIBA online.

On a slightly geeky note, my favourite article this month is, in fact, one on BA-handicraft rather than any strategic contribution - the author argues that the best way to handle "CADs" (Constraints, Assumptions and Dependencies) is to basically convert them to risks or requirements and manage them accordingly - that is, to give them priorities/impact values and probabilities. The author argues that this will result in a more meaningful discussion of these items (which too often get lost in projects) and shift the discussion to a dialogue rather than a "cover your arse" list of things that were "signed off" on. 

I could not agree more and - as many of my colleagues would, I hope, attest - I have been pushing this approach (and in particular the use of impact/ probability/ maturity/ certainty) in our eBusiness practice for years. This stuff is - obviously - not rocket science, but discipline and rigour in this space are so crucial to success in projects and increasingly business in general, that I believe it is worth emphasising again and again!

Seth Godin's blog: Eleven things organizations can learn from airports

Given my numerous postings from the airport, I can definitely identify with some of the findings in Seth Godin's recent posting on learnings from the airport for organisations.
That said, having spent a reasonable amount of time around airline/travel professionals I do have to say that Mr Godin is perhaps stretching the negativity of the airport experience a little bit... at least until I next visit spend some time at Heathrow Terminal 1.
Here is the link.

Trial and error - a beautiful thing

It has been a while since I posted a blog entry directly to blogger.com (though I hope that some people are enjoying my weekly roundup of interesting findings via diigo.com).

I finally have the beginnings of a plan for a bunch of entries that will hopefully say something interesting about the connections between systems thinking, design thinking, agile methods and business modeling.

I suspect that it is going to take quite a while for me to formulate this out (think years rather than months), but I just watched a talk by Tim Harford (known from the "undercover economist" books and newspaper columns) at TED Global 2011, that I think is a good way to kick things off, since it made a lot of sense to me and brings together the iterative and exploratory methods of both agile and design thinking for innovation with a degree of structure:

The basic premise is a simple one; the world is too complex for us to be able to find solutions to issues by thought and analysis alone, we need to accept that we do not understand everything and, more importantly, accept that trial and error is a valid way to find solutions. As Harford says, this is obvious, but not accepted (check out some of my earlier posts on common sense solutions not necessarily being applied).

Having accepted this premise, the key thing in my eyes is to work out how to become great (and efficient) at trial and error - that is, learning incrementally from what we do and the agile, design thinking worlds have a lot to offer on that front, be it sprints, retrospectives, exploratory design, customer centric learning. Add to this the rigour of systems thinking approaches to build better understanding of complexity to building or support decision-making frameworks and you have a winning combination.

More to follow.

Here is the video:

And so the year begins..

Sitting in Heathrow Terminal 5, waiting with a growing sense of gloom as the Departures board stubbonly refuses to post the gate to Duesseldorf, I think that I need something to take my mind off the delay to my flight that is inevitably coming; some New Year resolutions.

Some may recall, that last year I resolved only to improve the quality of meetings that I organised. Though it is for others to judge, I feel that I have been reasonably rigorous in applying the common sense rules, that we all know, but fail to apply to make sure that meetings are not a waste of time:

• No meeting without an agenda in advance (and that means with owners, objectives and timings - see entries on the Manager-Tools effective meeting protocoll, EMP for short - see here for previous posting on this).
• Prepare for meetings, thinking about what it is you actually want to achieve.
• Start and finish on time (and postpone/rearrange if necessary)... OK, this is one that I have not been entirely successful with for other peoples' meetings, but my own I have pretty much kept in plan.
• Meetings without agreed actions are just nice chats - "who does what by when?"
• Follow up on actions consistently ("duh, of course", as my younger brother would say, but if we are honest, it is this point that is almost always lacking).

Since, I was reasonably successful on this front last year, I am keeping my (professional and publishable ;-)) resolutions slimline once again:

1. Apply the principles to all meetings I attend rather than just my own - I think this is going to be really tough, but hopefully worth the effort.
2. Use the time available to me for work effectively - As with the EMP, it is a "no-brainer" to wish this, but how many truly prioritise work items appropriately consistently (I consider myself to be pretty good at this, but I certainly cannot say that I *always* apply rules a la Drucker's "The Effective Executive" - see also previous postings from me on this) and perhaps even more critically in the consulting industry, how many properly plan enough time for the different types of activity (and in particular thinking time)? A smart colleague picked me up on this last week - when do you do your thinking, he asked. My immediate response was, "19:00-20:00 and after 22:00". Though accurate, I do believe that a better response would involve some working hours and this leads to point 3.
3. Sleep more ... see the recent TED posting on this topic.

I hope I will be able to post a similarly positive update 1 year from now. We shall see. Wish me luck.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Twinstan's interesting links roundup on Diigo (weekly)

• Cool Infographics - Blog - The Ride of Your Life

• E-Commerce News: E-Commerce: The Towering E-Commerce 3.0 Wave

  Ignore the title and it is a pretty succinct blog entry on ecommerce organisation within traditional companies

• Epic Win - Level-Up Your Life

  Another example of gaming technology being used to change behaviours in the real world. Will try this one out for sure...

• European Multi-Client Retail Mass Market Benchmark 2010

  Some nice stats on retail mass market

• InfoQ: IT And Architecture: Inside-Out Perspectives

• The Relevance of User Experience: Using Every Opportunity to Impress Users | UX Booth

  Good anecdotes for the value of user experience for non-converts...

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Twinstan's interesting links roundup on Diigo (weekly)

• Getting Creative Things Done: How To Fit Hard Thinking Into a Busy Schedule :: Tips :: The 99 Percent

  This certainly resonates with me.

• Agile UX in Practice - some tips | Agile UX

  A little general for my liking, but covers some of the methods that I have also found to be very useful in bringing together UCD type approaches and agile.

• Herding Cats: More Agile Claims

  Another intelligent and balanced explanation from Glenn Alleman (Herding Cats) on why comparisons between agile and more "traditional" approaches are often flawed and unreasonably slanted towards the agile camp.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Twinstan's interesting links roundup on Diigo (weekly)

• How the BA Can Take Advantage of Free Online Diagramming Tools > Business Analyst Community & Resources | Modern Analyst > Business Analyst Articles & Systems Analysis Articles | Modern Analyst

  the perfect tool is not yet there,but this shows a good selection of free web drawing tools

• Book Reviews | ManagerTools.com

• Before You Think Outside the Box, Think Inside of It

  Refreshingly obvious!

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Another TED talk on gaming

It seems that this whole behaviour manipulating gaming thing is very much in vogue (see also several posts from earlier this year (why not try my tag cloud? ;-)); TED published another talk on the topic from the Oxford TED conference earlier this year.

Although there was not much new material in the talk, Tom Chatfield certainly made a convincing case for the creativity of gamers. I particularly liked an anecdote about how a MMPORG required gamers to join forces in large numbers to defeat an evil dragon, but only rewarded a couple of the players. The result? A website set up by players to exchange an entirely invented currency ("dragon kill points") for items they wanted in the game.

If we can apply the same kind of motivation (or "engagement" as Chatfield calls it) to learning or enterprise "games" we can change the way we do business, whilst making it more fun in the process. Sounds to me like something worth exploring (think how performance reviews might work in a gaming context - check out the New Zealand company, sonar6 for a taste of where this is going!).

The talk can be found here; Tom Chatfield: 7 ways games reward the brain | Video on TED.com.

The Powers Behind the Prime Minister - a book review

Two hits in a row (see also previous post).

I admit that I am a bit of a politics nerd, but "The Powers Behind the Prime Minister" has a huge amount to offer for anyone interested in organisational dynamics.

The author describes in detail the inner workings of Number 10, the departments, their relative power and, most interestingly, the effect that the individual at the top has on the organisation.

Of course, the heart of government is a particularly intense organisation and the megalomania necessary to seek such an office, mean that career politicians are bound to be, well.. political, but there were loads of interesting lessons in the book from each government since the Second World War; from the support organisation that Churchill put in place when he returned to government in the fifties, through Heath's disciplined professional setup (proving that focusing on process alone without output is not enough) to the modern day (much expanded) office run for Mr Blair.

Another element of the book, that I had never really considered much, was the power of architecture and space in shaping the organisation within it - Number 10 has been confined by the building itself and has adapted accordingly. Compare it with The White House, the Kanzleramt or the Kremlin and it feels parochial.

As a study of power politics and the relationship between leaders and organisational culture, this book is simply outstanding!

Why checklists aren't all bad!

Just a short entry today...

Let me start with a bold statement; I hate checklists - people begin to rely on them and then stop thinking outside the lists....

However, at latest since Atul Gawande's "Checklist Manifesto" the checklist is back in.

I have been reminded over the last weeks of how useful a few simple checks are when you are in a hurry. More than this, checklists can be used to enforce standard behaviours - perhaps not the most up-to-date and empowered management thinking, but effective.

The key is to keep them lightweight, keep them simple and keep questioning them - they are the armbands for swimming and do not replace kicking your feet!

A useful link to finish: a checklist for checklists.

Tribes & leading vs managing

Over Christmas I finally got around to using up a couple of Amazon vouchers that I have had for a while... OK, it was well over €500, which means that I have got enough in the way of business reading material to keep me going for most of the year (I try to balance my reading by cycling through 1x professional book, 1x non-fiction, non-business, 1x fiction and back to 1x professional book etc., but now have far too many in the professional category to make this work this year!). As such, you should expect to see a few reviews, or at the very least references to books worth checking out.

The first two books on my backlog this year were "Tribes" (by Seth Godin) and "Building great customer experiences" (by Colin Shaw & John Ivens) and I have to admit I was slightly disappointed with both:

Having seen a few talks by Seth Godin, following his (unbelievably popular) blog and enjoyed "Permission Marketing" immensely, I was really looking forward to Tribes. The underlying premise (that in the "new world" organisations need leaders of "tribes" of interest to innovate, make changes happen and to create new value and that these leaders are not the managers of old, but rather thought leaders) is potent and attractive - especially for someone working in a professional services organisation that lives from subject matter expertise alongside management competence ;-), but the book failed to deliver any "meat" to back this up.

That said, the book is a quick and easy read. Its appeal to individuals to be passionate about things that they believe in - and to channel this passion into a community to effect change - resonates.

"Building great customer experiences" has the same informal journalistic style as "Tribes", and lays out a set of "philosophies" for delivering customer experiences across channels. To be fair, the book is several years old and may at the time have been innovative, but today it seems to reflect the received wisdom - the power and importance of emotions in customer experience, designing processes "outside in" (rather than "inside out") etc.

The authors are clearly very experienced (and the case-studies within the book are certainly interesting and varied), but the frameworks that they provide are rather generic.

Nevertheless, there were definitely a couple of points that they really hammered home -

1. that brand and customer experience must be aligned to be effective and
2. only by seeing customer experience as a central part of one's overall strategy (complete with a gimmicky, but helpful "customer experience statement" a pinnacle of a "customer experience pyramid" (TM), will it be possible to truly deliver a customer-centric service
   

In summary, two reasonable, but certainly not outstanding books.

Fantastic complex information visualisations

I just stumbled across a wonderful collection of images showing complex data/information sets in a easily understandable way. Check them out here.

Anyone can draw apparently - effective visualisation

Not being the greatest at drawing, but having an acute awareness at how useful visualisation is for communicating ideas, I am always interested in learning useful techniques that can be applied easily (see also my review of "The Back of the Napkin"). Over the last year I have had the opportunity to work with some very bright and creative people to create conceptual imagery to and have been impressed on how effective it can be.

As such, I was pleased when I stumbled across this nice set of video guides to drawing on VizThink (a favourite website of mine). Ultimately this is the same material that comes up in every 101-type book and course that I have seen, but it is succinct and easy to remember (my favourite kind of method!).

Having said this, I was a little disappointed that the post did not go beyond how to visualise particular elements to how to really use them effectively in presentations, meetings and workshops and simply to guide one's own thinking. On this front, I have been much more taken by the simple approach:

1. Start with identifying the elements that are relevant to the problem or issue to be visualised
2. Then decide upon the relationships between the elements (which are important and what flavour are the relationships)
3. Once you have the block diagram in place, start playing with "visual metaphors" that can transport the key message best.

Coming from a traditional business analysis background I was struck by how similar this approach is to the simple domain modelling approaches (OK, UML doesn't really allow for much in the way of visual metaphor, but the process is much the same!), but the results are so much more effective in transporting the ideas than such dry (if intellectually satisfying) diagrams.

Of course it is the third step that is the most challenging (and the one that I certainly struggle with the most), but the good news is that there are literally hundreds of interesting sources for ideas on this front.. but that is something for later post!

What about an effective meeting?

Like so many others, I made some resolutions at New Year and will probably only manage to keep to them until the middle of February, but one of them was - how predictable - to rejoin the gym. In fact it was not just to rejoin the gym, but to actually go to it several times a week too and therein lies the challenge!

To keep my motivation, I am combining the gym attendance with working down my backlog of podcasts (I have about 100 hours of "stuff" that I want to get through). This evening one cast really stuck in my head - "Timely meetings" from the manager-tools team.

Admittedly, I have written about manager-tools' "Effective Meeting Protocol" before (see here for links and a brief overview), but I think it is worth reiterating (at least for myself if not for others!). In this latest cast they focus on the timeliness element of effective meetings - starting on time, having the agenda out in advance (and with time allocations for each discussion item).

18 months ago, when I first wrote about this, I was humble enough to admit that I am not the best at this (humble not necessarily being a trait that I am really known for, I think it worth mentioning). Today, I find I have to admit that I have got worse. It is frustrating to recognise how easy it is to slip on very simple things when under time pressure and when it is seen as nothing unusual.

So it is time to "get back to basics" and that is, in fact, my small business related resolution for the year; be on time to meetings, no meeting without an agenda, define goals upfront, seek to have actionable results leaving the meeting.

I remember well one of my first managers when I started in the consulting industry; a charming man, but ruthless in the workplace and the lesson I learned from him (though I admit, I find myself getting sloppier over time) was that simply keeping meetings running on time has an enormous effect on increasing focus and raising the sense of urgency within a project.

For that I thank him, (though we never did see eye-to-eye on my belief that it is possible to achieve the same effectiveness in meetings with a "light touch" (i.e. without forcing the formality of a meeting structure artificially and cutting off fruitful discussion - do "timeout" and "take that offline" sound familiar?).

Good luck to us all on improving our effectiveness with simple small steps this year!

"Working through screens" workbook

Well, for once I have to admit that I had a nearly perfect flight experience this morning; the flight was on time, the airport was empty, the seat was great, the bags were waiting for me once I got through passport control. The only thing that made it slightly less than absolutely perfect was landing in a cold and snowy Duesseldorf having been in South Africa for two weeks ;-).

Whilst trying to warm up in a freezing cold flat, I stumbled across an interesting online book this morning that provides insights into the design process for creating applications for knowledge work. From Flashbulb Interaction, it aims to support the product development team in the early concept phase ("100 Ideas for Envisioning Powerful, Engaging, and Productive User Experiences in Knowledge Work"), but from my perspective it offers a more complete view for application design than that.

What I really like about the book is that it is built around three concrete "knowledge domains" (building for architects, clinical research and financial trading). Although I guess this is more a product of the experience of Flashbulb as an organisation than a conscious decision of these industries as good examples. The domains make the concepts much more concrete. That said, by far the best element of this beautifully presented framework are the "Application envisioning questions" for each of the ideas.

It is available for download as a PDF, or as an online reference.

Killer innovations blog

Another weekend, another wedding. This time near Cambridge in a beautiful castle / private school a la Hogwarts. And guess what, the flight to and from the UK was delayed (as I have already warned here and here, this is definitely going to be an underlying theme of many of my blog entries!).

And once again, this gave me an opportunity to catch up on a view podcasts. I really enjoyed a recording of a livecast given by Phil McKinney (www.killerinnovations.com) about the creative economy. His message was simple; creativity is not innate, it is a skill and can be learnt. He provided a couple of ideas on how to do this in the presentation, but on his website he provides loads more.

I rather liked his "FIRE" approach to innovation (Focus innovation search, Ideation, Rank ideas, Execute), having failed frequently to get the most out of "creative" sessions with both colleagues and clients. In particular, the "Ideation" step (basically asking sufficiently difficult questions to force a more challenging discourse) got me thinking. It is so easy for "innovation" to become "trial and error" or "change for change's sake".

Phil McKinney has been doing Killer Innovations for quite some time now (though I have only really followed it for the last year or so, since a colleague recommended it to me). What I like about the cast is McKinney's enthusiasm and his passionate belief in what he is saying; I don't always agree with everything he says, but it is consistently thought-provoking! Give him a try!

Tom Peters & blogs

The other day, I finally got around to cleaning out my "filing cabinet" (others might refer to it as a cardboard box, but I prefer to think of it as a filing cabinet) and came across an essay assignment I wrote in my final undergraduate year at university.

The lecturer was fantastic and the material interesting - Organisational Change & Design with Ian Colville. In retrospect, it was in fact, one of just three courses that were of any lasting value from my final undergraduate year, but that is something for another post.

The essay task was to write an imaginary obituary for the Economist on Tom Peters (management guru and co-author of In Search Of Excellence - and a good deal more since). The trick was that we had to be innovative. My innovation was to write the obituary as a first draft by the writer that had subsequently been edited (lots of redpen) by a feature editor with a quite different opinion of Peters.

This rediscovery resulted in two things; firstly I was reminded why I didn't go into journalism (so apologies for this blog once again!) and secondly I got interested in Tom Peters again.

If I am quite honest, I don't think he ever really matched In Search of Excellence with any of his consequent books (and if you are really interested in some of the underlying thinking, you are in fact better of going for the more substantial writings of Weick - see also my books list at Amazon), but he remains a fantastic speaker and has - unsurprisingly - become a prolific blogger.

His own blog, http://www.tompeters.com/, is average, but he has a whole range of interesting links to further resources and other bloggers, and it is this resource that I would recommend; he knows everyone it seems and I spent ages browsing blogs that he links to.

His presentations are almost certainly the nastiest, most unclear powerpoints I have ever seen, but if you can get beyond the colours and to a certain extent the hubris, there are some interesting points on the need to constantly challenge oneself and the organisation.

One of his most recent posting caught my eye - Peters participated in a podium discussion with Seth Godin (I have a posting on him planned already) sponsored by American Express. It can still be viewed online here. He has some good things to say about the world at large (politics, entrepreneurship, the internet), but I was particularly taken by the pair's discussion of blogs, according to Peters the single most important and transformational tool he has used in his own professional life in the last 15 years. That said, I must confess that I am not 100% convinced just yet. Indeed, Seth Godin's view of the blog seemed more plausible to me - it doesn't matter if people are not reading the blog, it is the act of putting your thoughts down in writing that provides the value.

I hope he is right, looking at my reader statistics ;-).

Manager-Tools podcast

Following on from last week's post on @Google videocasts at YouTube as a source of training materials (with a bit of inspiration thrown in for free), here is another installment on free online progessional learning resources; www.manager-tools.com.

Manager tools is a weekly podcast, accompanied with handouts and additional resources to practice.

Now, in the same way that I don't like the title "The effective executive" (see post), I don't like the name "manager-tools". Many of the podcasts provided at this site (and there are several hundred!) are of value to anybody working in a professional environment and the name detracts from this and puts many people off.

What I like about manager-tools is that it is conversational in tone (the two co-presenters are always very well prepared, but do the podcasts in a 1-2-1 informal kind of manner) and this makes it easy to take in.

And what I really like about manager-tools is that they focus on providing actionable behaviour-driven advice. They try to answer the how as well as the what (and to a lesser extent the why) of being effective.

Over the last year or so the number of really interesting podcasts from manager-tools has significantly decreased, but this does not detract from the core casts that they produced. In particular I would recommend the following sets (easily found at www.manager-tools.com):

• The original series on "The effective meeting protocol (EMP)" - nothing you haven't heard before, but nicely packaged and let's face it, practically every meeting we attend is ineffective in some way (and I say that in the knowledge that I am as poor as the next person on this front).
• The introductory set on "The management trinity" - their basic framework (1-2-1s, feedback, coaching and delegation), this resonates with me and fits in very well with my own organisation's approach to performance management.
• The DISC series - five podcasts focusing on the use of behavioural stereotyping to improve personal communications.

The website itself is a disappointment, so don't let that put you off the actual podcasts! And one final note of caution; manager-tools is in the best tradition of US professionalism and the presenters have a background with the US-military. Don't let their style prevent you from hearing the interesting messages they have!

Visual problem solving on the "back of the napkin"

I am just back from a weekend in London. I left the office really early on Friday (around 12:30) because I had hoped to get to the opening of a friend's new office in Notting Hill in the evening.

Unfortunately, the airlines conspired against me once again (see also my earlier posting on reading a Peter Drucker classic whilst struggling to get to Scotland a couple of weekends ago). I ended up flying to London Heathrow, rather than City from Duesseldorf via Stuttgart.. not the most direct route one can imagine! I arrived at the restaurant around 21:00. I suspect this will also not be the last time that I start a posting this way.

But there is a bright side. As with my trip to Scotland, the delay was not a complete loss as it gave me the opportunity to read another book from my backlog; "The Back of the Napkin - Solving problems and selling ideas with pictures" by Dan Roam. Given all the hype surrounding the book, I had high expectations that were only partially fulfilled.

Don't get me wrong. The book is well constructed and provides lost of thought-provoking examples of using visualisation to identify, frame, explain and sell ideas (much as the subtitle promises) and - even better - it provides a conceptual framework for structuring the analysis and visualisation of problems. However, it did not blow me away with its insight as I had been hoping.

Either way, it is well worth reading. For those not inclined to invest the 2-3 hours, Mr Roam has kindly produced a cheat-sheet for the key ideas and provides it for free on his website. And being the master presenter that he is, there are also a couple of presentations of his ideas on youtube (here is the 5 minute primer and here is an hour long presentation for Authors@Google.

Peter Drucker & Agile

I just spent a delightful weekend in Scotland. Having travelled via Heathrow, I was, of course, delayed by several hours. This gave me a chance to revisit one of my favourite books of all time - "The Effective Executive" by Peter Drucker.

I have to admit, I don't like the title - most people are put off, thinking that it is only a book for wannabe CEOs when in reality it is about how to work effectively at all levels (Drucker himself defines the executive as pretty much every knowledge worker). But that is the only criticism I have of this book.

What is his key advice?

• Focus on one (maximum two) things at a time.
• Prioritise the item you are working on based on the impact it will have on the company (i.e. business value).
• Know what you spend your time on and manage your time agressively.
• Focus on opportunities and on the impact that you can and others make to the organisation.

The book was first published in 1967 and reads in many ways like an agile approach; it is refreshing to reflect on the fact that all of this agile stuff really is just a continuation of management practices that have been recommended for years. It is simply the IT discipline that is finally maturing and catching up with other disciplines.

If you haven't read it already, then go out and buy it - it is a book you can read in a few hours. There probably won't be any real new ideas if you have read anything about effectiveness (or indeed agile and/or lean management), but Drucker puts it together really well (there is a reason why he is the grandfather of modern management!).