In your company, every team member has been hired through a meticulous process. Building teams requires great attention to writing out a detailed job description, screening and interviewing candidates to find the people whose experience and skills best fit the job responsibilities, and providing onboarding and training that enable each incoming employee to succeed.
Why don’t we invest that much attention into giving them the software tools they need to do their job efficiently and with excellence? Or is it that we are investing the attention in the wrong things?
Some of the most frequent challenges we hear about from enterprise IT departments is a lack of adoption of the tools on which they’ve spent significant amounts of time, energy, and money. In some cases, the team may have built custom software or personalized dashboards based on requirements that didn’t take team members’ goals into consideration, so the products end up with low adoption simply because they aren’t useful. In other cases, the software that IT teams purchase may check all the boxes, but the list of requirements is incomplete, leaving users to figure out ways around their roadblocks through manual record keeping, spreadsheets, or other tools, leading to a lack of visibility into these processes.
The key to effective digital transformation is understanding the needs of each department of your business through the workflows that team members operate within on a daily basis. Our adapted Jobs To Be Done framework is a simple way to understand enterprise processes at depth in order to design highly usable software.
At its core, a job is something that a user is trying to accomplish. It’s really that simple. In the workplace context, it can be as straightforward as a responsibility in a job description or a step in a larger team process, but it can also be something less tangible, like trying to position oneself for a promotion or reducing risk if something goes wrong. For the purposes of enterprise software, we want to make positive contributions and success in employees’ roles as easy and empowered as possible.
Each job has five key attributes:
Context
This first attribute seeks to define who the user is that is trying to accomplish a job and the setting of this user’s workflow.
Sample questions:
- Is the user a manager or an individual contributor?
- What are the user’s job title and responsibilities?
- What are some limitations that the user experiences?
- Does this workflow take place in one location, multiple locations, or in transit?
- Is work performed in a noisy environment? A dark environment? In a location with high sun exposure that could cause screen glare?
Motivations
Next we seek to understand what is motivating the user to complete the task, especially internally. This is an attempt to answer the question “why?”
Sample questions:
- What is the primary motivation of the user (completion of a defined job responsibility, desire for more time spent towards enjoyable strategic work instead of repetitive tasks)?
- Are there incentives to efficiency (bonuses, commissions, pay based on production quantity)?
- Are there risks the user is attempting to avoid (safety risks for crew members, losing time, having to stay late to complete a job)?
Behaviors
In this area, we seek to understand how team members are currently operating.
Sample questions:
- What is the current process as described in standard operating procedures?
- Does the user’s process align with the standard operating procedures? In what ways does it vary?
- What workarounds has the user developed to complete the task?
- What tools (software or non-software) is the employee currently using to complete the task?
- Who else does the user interact with in completing the task?
Pain Points
These are key. There would be no need for a solution without something currently getting in the way of your team completing their tasks in the best way possible.
Sample questions:
- What’s frustrating about the current process?
- What’s causing the need for workarounds?
- What are users unable to do with the current steps, lines of communication, and software tools?
- Where are the bottlenecks?
- What information is missing for team members to make informed decisions or move forward in their job?
Definition of Success
Finally, every job should have a desired outcome, so we need to discover what that ideal is. Another key concept is that most of the time in process transformation, not everything is broken, so we want to understand what is working well currently.
Sample questions:
- What does success look like in this task?
- What is the user’s ideal outcome for this job?
- Are there specific KPIs the team member is trying to achieve?
- What does the user like about the current process?
- What’s currently serving the employee’s goals (of efficiency, available information, functionality for complex situations)?
- What does the user not want to lose in moving to the new solution?
With any of these questions, I highly recommend leaving space to ask follow up questions, to dig deeper in research, and to uncover the whys behind the initial answers. This leads to deeper discovery and can help identify which details are truly important and which can be disposed of to complete the task in a better way.
Defining what’s truly needed for digital transformation can be a time-consuming process, but it’s well worth the effort so you can maximize your investment with high adoption and data that will drive business strategy and innovation for years to come. At Trailmerge, our background in user experience and product strategy uniquely equips us to carry out discovery and definition on your behalf, so you can go into new projects with a better understanding of true needs and costs. That’s why we’re now offering different levels of discovery services, tailored to your enterprise’s current moment in your transformation lifecycle. We’d love to help!
