Declan’s proposition is to save your organisation money. It’s as simple as that.
But how?
Problem: Your organisation wastes millions on software that users say does not meet their needs, or requires significant refactoring after mere months in production. Read more…
Just as an AI will give you results based only on how good your prompt is, software developers will only give you software based on how well, or badly, you articulate your business needs.
Billions are lost annually by organisations like yours because they develop software that is based on unclear, unstructured needs. According to NASA the cost of discovering a defect in production that could have been clarified in the business design can be as much as 1,000 times as expensive as getting the business design right up front.
But NASA did that study in 2004 and you are Agile now, right?
In fact, Agile and iterative approaches to software development assume the business needs are mature and well-thought-out. In my experience, this is rarely the case, with business people assuming they can just do a brain dump into a user story template and that will magically make everything clear.
While an Agile and iterative approach might find business design defects within, or after, each iteration, unless your organisation invests in good business design in the first place, you will run into defect after defect, iteration after iteration, and the costs will mount up anyway.
What’s more, as flaws hit production release after release, user dissatisfaction mounts up. We have all seen millions being spent on software that gets canned after a short time in production because users don’t want to use it.
It’s even worse if the users are your own customers.
How much money has your organisation lost on software that does not fit the business need?
Root Cause: The fact that someone is expert at doing their job does not mean they are expert at explaining it. Read more…
To quote the poet John Ciardi: “The language of experience is not the language of classification.”
What’s more, their business knowledge is usually spread across disconnected slide decks, PDFs, websites, even Post-it notes! And, often, trapped inside their heads.
Requirements they give to software development teams are often incomplete, inconsistent, incoherent and sometimes even at odds with your organisation’s strategy.
This does not diminish their expertise as doers, but doing and explaining what you do in a structured way are different skills.
Solution: As a freelance business architect with decades of experience working on behalf companies like Capgemini, Accenture, Sapiens, Virtusa, Pegasystems and Tata Consulting for clients such as Orange Business Services, General Electric, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, Royal Bank of Scotland, American Express, UBS Group, National Australia Group, Declan can save your software development projects money by helping you articulate your business needs. Read more…
· Aligning tactical business needs with strategic enterprise goals.
· Producing a glossary of business terms to ensure a consistent vocabulary across business areas and between business and IT.
· Building a catalogue of prioritised business scenarios that can be used to build testable models and, later, perform reality-based acceptance testing against any software project.
· Producing a repository of models to covers those business scenarios, such as (but not limited to):
-> Concept modelling
-> Process modelling (BPMN)
-> Decision modelling (DMN)
-> Drafting procedural artefacts and user guides for training purposes
-> Using these above to identify and define epics, features and stories.
· Teaching and coaching your subject matter experts to do all the above for themselves.
Why build models at all? Software is expensive to build, so it makes no sense for the first representation of your business to be the software itself. Read more…
Producing and maintaining business models outside of the constraints of a specific software project has several advantages:
· They are technology-agnostic, so your business needs drive your software, instead of being led by it.
· They can underpin several software systems, thus ensuring consistency, particularly when it comes to data and decision-making.
· They are testable, so you can run business scenarios against the models either to ensure the models truly represent your business or to try out “What if…?” scenarios.
· They are relatively cheap to build and test, so you invest a little more at the front end but save thousands, even millions by discovering requirements defects early.
· Models can be used to identify the features, epics and stories that will bring value to your organisation.
· They can be made directly by your business subject matter experts, thus directly capturing their operational knowledge (assuming you investing in training them).
Hiring Declan to help you articulate your organisation’s business needs and ensure you get the right software is an investment, not a cost.
But don’t take Declan’s word for it. See what his clients say about him.