You know something is broken. Too many processes are manual, siloed away in Excel spreadsheets, or difficult to complete in your company’s current software solutions. You notice your team is wasting precious time, mistakes and miscommunication abound, and inventory and opportunities are lost. On top of that, you understand there’s an opportunity for better data to make more clearly informed decisions, and you have a hunch that some sort of AI insights could help you manage your department better.
In short, you’ve identified a need for digital transformation. But while this phrase can incite enthusiastic investment, it is decidedly all-encompassing and vague. Something is indeed broken. Something can be dramatically improved to support your team’s success and increase profitability. But what?
Let’s walk through some steps that can help you move from general awareness of a need to having a well-defined project that you can advocate for internally and budget time and money towards.
Frame the problem space
Yes, there’s a need for improvement, for transformation at your company, but you won’t be able to change everything overnight. More importantly, it’s difficult to change what you don’t understand, and to begin to understand, you need to put parameters around the project. Here are some questions to help you put limits on the discovery process:
- In which areas of the business do there appear to be the most inefficiencies, waste, or opportunity to increase profitability?
- Which parts of our operation have the largest impact on the company’s bottom line?
- Where is there a lot of repetitive work, manual processes, or inefficient (but expensive) software?
- Which departments currently have the budget for a transformation project?
- Which processes, if not done accurately or on time, have the greatest negative impact on the business or pose the greatest risk?
- Where is there the least amount of visibility that’s necessary for management-level decisions?
- What is preventing key strategic growth initiatives now?
When you have answers to questions like these, you can confidently pursue your problem space. It could represent a quick project or a multi-year strategic initiative, but either way it should provide clarity in what problems to investigate further:
- Our ERP is difficult to use and expensive. It doesn’t support our team’s unique processes, and it’s difficult to integrate with our key departments’ workflows.
- Our export team keeps manual records of its main activities, making it difficult to keep track of orders, shipment dates, and materials.
- Inconsistent tracking makes it difficult to stay up to date with maintenance for expensive machinery that keeps our production lines operational.
- We have low visibility into our distributed workforce’s quality of task completion, and need to be more aware of their performance.
- Our understanding of competitors’ positioning is limited, making it challenging to differentiate our brand with customers and negotiate with distributors.
Understand the current situation in detail
Once you have identified an area of your operations to focus on, the next step is to deepen your knowledge of the space as it currently exists. It is nearly impossible to solve a problem that is not well-understood. Contextual inquiry, or asking questions of and observing employees in their related workflows, is an excellent way to gather this information. Dig deep into questions like this, (informed by the jobs to be done methodology):
- Which departments and stakeholders are affected by this problem space, directly and indirectly?
- Who is involved in the current process? What are their roles, and current processes?
- What resources are currently available (knowledge, tools, software)?
- What works well now, and what’s getting in the way (pain points)?
- What workarounds have employees had to create to do their job? Why? How effective are these?
Follow these initial inquiries with clarifying questions and curiosity to discover additional layers of the problem space.
Prioritize and define the ideal
Great job! In the first two steps, you’ve narrowed down the general problem to solve, and you’ve taken the time to understand the details of the space. Now, it’s time to prioritize and start to detail out what’s needed to solve the problem. When prioritizing, you can think about questions like:
- Are there any dependencies? Is there any part of the problem that needs to be solved first before anything else can happen?
- What portion of the project is likely to have the greatest ROI? What will reduce the most cost or optimize for the most opportunity?
- Are there any constraints that will require parts of the solution to be implemented later than others?
- Where are users stuck today? What is the minimum solution needed for them to be unstuck?
Prioritization and definition can happen in parallel, complementing each other to lead you to increasing levels of detail and clarity, and should ultimately be expressed as clear feature requirements with an order of priority attached. However, learning doesn’t stop here. As the project continues, it’s important to maintain curiosity and intentionality around discovery and flexibility to adapt definitions and priorities, as we do in our Agile process, but these three steps are a great start, intended to enable you to seek out vendors with a specific list of requirements.
We have spoken with several companies who know they need to better automate their processes, who want to take advantage of AI-driven analyses and recommendations, and who want to simplify their existing software stack with more usable software for their teams, but find themselves in a similar position of not knowing where to start or how to define what to ask software vendors for. We’ve recently developed our discovery services to help companies take the first step towards understanding their problem space and defining requirements through disciplined user research. Reach out today; we’d love to help you in your journey!
