From the course: Effectively Leading Digital Transformation

Not understanding the need

From the course: Effectively Leading Digital Transformation

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Not understanding the need

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- [Instructor] Generally understanding your current landscape is important, but the most important part is defining where the gaps and pain points lie. And this brings us to the importance of doing your homework around requirements gathering. This is a crucial step in any project that intends to succeed because it will start defining your desired solution and give you something concrete to work towards. Every business is going to be a little bit different, but I think we can safely say there will be two main classes of people you need to work with as you start gathering your research. We can think of the first group as consumers. These are the people who are the end users of your system, whatever it is. They may be business people who are looking to extract information from your system to help them make decisions, or they may be customers who are using your system to purchase or otherwise obtain something, or they could be both. Whatever the case, you need to be talking to these people to find out what they like and don't like about the system. Now, what's easy to use? What's not? What do they wish they could do that they can't, and what can they do that they don't value? Gather your information from feedback forums, help tickets, forums, surveys, focus groups, as many different channels as you can. Don't forget to check out informal networks like chat groups or social media if they exist. These are important sources of unfiltered and unbiased information. The second class of people you need to work with are the users, the ones who are working with the system every day to help meet the needs of the customer. Now, I would argue that these folks are even more important than the consumers, although they are unfortunately all too often neglected during requirements-gathering. The users are the ones who know exactly where the system is flawed, because they knock their heads against it every day. You need to be talking to them, finding out their pain points, and listening very closely for suggestions. Many times, needed improvements aren't even technical issues. They're matters of tweaking the process so that it works with the existing tools. If that's the case, you can fix it fast and move on to concentrating your energies on something else, but you will never know if you don't ask and listen.

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