Facets of Discovery
In our quest to make our clients the heroes of the story, we work hard to understand the challenge or opportunity they bring to us. Often this includes discovery sessions near the beginning of the project. These are semi-structured conversations where we know generally the topic of interest and an ultimate goal, but we truly don’t know what we’ll find out along the way.
So, we bring a set of starter questions, initial analysis on topics we expect to uncover, and lots of curiosity.
But what does a discovery session really include? Here are some of the key elements:
Discussing how things are today
Imagining how we’d like things to be going forward
Reviewing artifacts
Shadowing key steps
This might sound simple, but the magic is in how they come together!
Discussing how things are today
We ask questions about the processes, technologies, teams, etc. involved in the topic at hand. If our client is seeking to replace a piece of software, we ask how it’s used today and, more importantly, why. We’re not just interested in mechanics, though those are important. We’re aiming to understand the value provided by the tool when it’s working as expected.
We ask about strengths of the current state: what do we need to make sure we maintain going forward? what is the secret sauce of how things are today?
We also ask about pain points: what slows you down, has to be redone, takes too many people/steps/hours to accomplish?
As much as possible we bridge from the technology being discussed to the business goals that it enables.
Imagining how we’d like things to be going forward
Often the group shifts from discussing current state into what they'd like going forward without any prompting. But if we haven’t fully covered the ground, we ask: if you had a magic wand, what would you like a solution like this to accomplish/provide/support? Not constrained by tools or processes, how would we accomplish these goals in an ideal world?
We work to capture the things we’re seeking to improve on without dwelling on what’s wrong for too long. And we’re not looking to assign blame here: we trust that the current solution was the best option at the time and that team members have stewarded it well. We’re simply taking seriously this opportunity to expand our thinking, so we present the best set of go-forward options.
Reviewing artifacts
It’s helpful for us to review artifacts as a part of the discovery process, too. This may be policies, procedures, process flows, entity-relationship diagrams, all sorts of things! Oftentimes, documentation and reality have some daylight in between them, so we don’t rely on either the discussion or the artifact to be the absolute source of truth. We’re constantly triangulating the best understanding of how things are and how they could be through discovery sessions.
And whenever clients can share artifacts before the discovery session, it makes a big difference. We often don’t capture all of the nuance in a pre-read, but it levels up the conversation for us to anticipate key topics, acronyms, etc. And then, when we review the artifacts after a discovery session, they make a ton more sense!
Shadowing key steps
You’ve heard us talk about gemba walks before. We are huge fans of seeing how a process and/or technology actually works in real life.
It’s one thing to hear about the steps a store associate needs to take to create a new customer account. It’s a totally different thing to experience laggy software and manual steps with the store associate and the customer they’re aiming to build (and keep!) rapport with. Five minutes can sound so brief around a conference room; it’s a lifetime when someone is ready to move on to their next errand!
Whenever possible, we love shadowing at least the key steps of the topic at hand during discovery. Sometimes we’re talking about processes that only happen quarterly, and we didn’t line up discovery for that precise day, so we get to be creative: maybe we have training materials to go through, or we can shadow in a test environment. We simply get as close as we can to the real thing and learn as we go!
Ultimately, we leave these discovery session with hypotheses that we go on to test, better questions than we walked in with, and a shared understanding between the client and FlexPoint teams of what we're after. Time well spent, if you ask us!
