Understanding the Project Objective
This is a very common issue which everyone have faced at-least once in their career as a Business Analyst or a Product Owner. This also may have caused the responsible people for a project be really embarrassed and cost more than the project budget and caused extended timelines. So, how can we successfully identify a business or a project objective? Prior to answering that, we will see how it can go wrong.
Let’s say you are assigned to a new project and you get the project details from the sales team or the management of the company which you are working for. Now this will typically be an email or a phone call which can be summarized as below.
“Company ABC wants a new system with these features and they want it completed by this date.”
Then as a Business Analyst, you will be getting some more details from the sales team, then immediately start setting up meetings with the stakeholders, interviewing different users, understanding project scope, gathering and defining requirements and documenting them.
You will be working back and fourth with users and the development team to make sure you have captured all the requirements and to work on the design.
Once everything is finalized and accepted, the development will get started. However, depending on the Software Development Life Cycle methodology which you are practicing within the company, you may have intermediate deliveries, demos and whatnot.
Now you’re ready to complete the project. Let’s say you are doing a demo to the stakeholders and going through the features and what your team has developed.
During the demo, the stakeholders will go through the system with you. They will probably be impressed with what you have done. However, towards the end, you will get a question like “Everything looks good. But, how does the system address this certain issue we have for years now?” from a key stakeholder.
Immediately you will know that this is a new requirement and your response will probably be that this was not in the requirements which you have identified earlier. Then the stakeholder will say,
“Well, that was the main reason why we needed this system, to solve this certain issue”.
You now know this isn’t going to end well.
Because of this, you will not be able to complete the project then and all the time and effort you and the development team put on the project might be a waste. This will have many consequences.
So, what do you need to do? Before going right in to the requirements, you need to understand the objective of the project or why there is even a project like this. Once you understand that, your life will be much easier. This needs to be done at the very beginning.
To do that, you need to know about the following of the project.
- The purpose
- The objectives
- The method of determining the success
The purpose
You need to know the purpose of the project. To get to know the purpose, you need to go back to the project details you got at the beginning.
“Company ABC wants a new system with these features and they want it completed by this date.”
You must ask WHY and understand why they need such a system before exploring the features. The firsthand information from the client will certainly help. An example can be as follows.
Company ABC is a small local business that provides printing solutions to the nearby area. They have been in the business for last two years and have a marginally profitable business going on. They are catering to about 25 customers daily. They noticed that the customers usually wait inside the shop premises for a prolonged periods of time to get the job done due to a limitation presented in the internal system, which allows only one computer to perform a specific function, and this is leading to customer dissatisfaction.
The objectives
Now need to understand the objectives of the project. You must break-down the utmost critical issues/ components which are trying to be solved here. Let’s see an example.
The implemented system must reduce the time that a customer spends inside the shop premises. By doing this, it is expected to see an increase in customer satisfaction, the number of daily customers and profit.
The method of determining the success
You must know how the success is seen after implementing the system. If not, you don’t know what you are looking for. Increase in number of daily customers can be any number.
Once the system is implemented, Company ABC must accommodate 50 customers daily, doubling the amount which can be accommodated now.
Above statement clearly defines how the increment in number should be. If you don’t know how it is determined, you can’t design, plan and implement a system effectively and it will ultimately leads to failure.
Knowing the answers to these questions will prevent time and money from going to waste, while probably saving you from embarrassment. Make sure you know and understand the project objective before you start gathering requirements. There will probably be lots of other requirements attached to the project but your priority should be to solve the issue that the project is supposed to solve.
Hope this helps you and good luck as a Business Analyst or a Product Owner!
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