Photo taken from Sean Stayte’s photostream under Creative Commons.

Its Purpose?
Big Vision Business Problem helps team members form a common understanding of the problem they are trying to solve. It introduces them to a number of high level domain concepts and puts the work they will do into an overall context. The Big Vision Business Problem must be driven by a real Business Need.

How Did We Execute It?
The entire team sat down at the start of the project, and using a whiteboard, we started drawing people (represented as stick figures), systems (as boxes) and talked through a number of workflows. We incorporated both technical and non technical systems as we talked about the needs of the users, how the system satisfies or doesn’t satisfy those needs and how they interact. We kept mainly to the main “happy flow” or the “common walkflow” through the system because it is such a big system.

Techniques Found Useful For Running It

• Personas – We leverage personas a great deal during requirements gathering, and found this same technique helps new people grasp with the system for many of the same reasons. Giving a name to a person playing a role in the overall business problem is much easier to understand than simply labelling them with that role.
• Physical Diagrams – Talking over a set of boxes at a high level and seeing the users interact with each box helps give context to what is really going on.
• Whiteboard – Nice big diagrams are great, but simple lo-fi diagrams that you can edit in response to people’s questions and around discussions is much easier

Why Is It Important?
Putting people’s work into context is important for me, and by talking over the business problem as a team, helps people understand what it is they are contributing to. Technical solutions may seem strange and may appear clearer if people understand the business constraints. It also allows people to offer alternative solutions that might be more practical and less costly. I can imagine that if you are having difficulty expressing the business problem, perhaps there is no problem, or it needs to be simplified or clarified as people focus their energies on work that may not contribute to solving the same overall problem.

Next Time I Might Try:

• Taking and Showing Photos – Could be quite useful for showing people using the system
• Drawing a Timeline – Doing a simple walkthrough over a well spaced out timeline to discuss stages of an older system, and what the business would like to achieve in the future.

In the last month and a bit, I’ve been heads down starting with a new team on another release of an old project I worked on last year. Onboarding new members to a team or to a project is important to me – namely because I’ve been in positions where if it’s not done right makes people a less effective team member. Tight schedules and the overall lack of domain knowledge in new team members meant that successful or unsuccessful onboarding a huge influence on overall project success.

Perhaps it’s my emphasis on coaching, learning and sharing that means that my interest naturally gravitates towards onboarding activities. Just like well-run company inductions help new employees in their overall position, I feel project onboarding is important for setting the scene, establishing the role and efforts of new members. The last thing I wanted was for a bunch of really enthusiastic people to be pulling in separate directions. After talking with some people at the pub, I realised that the techniques I applied aren’t naturally that apparent to people, so I thought I’d write up about them, how we used them, how unsuccessful or unsuccessful they were and then what I’d change about them. In a way, these patterns are a combination of learning/teaching patterns that might be useful to someone (if so, I’d really like to know and please leave a comment!)

I’ll continue to categorise/tag each of these as “Onboarding Strategy” so it’s easy to find. Read on for the first one here.