Engaging with people to build your outcomes
People are the subject matter experts in their business regardless of what business they are in. As consultants, a.k.a. the outsiders, we can understand the business functions but without undertaking the day-to-day activities, we can’t know all the intricacies and nuances of the workplace.
Recently we were lucky enough to undertake a requirement gathering process for Parliamentary Workplace Support Service (PWSS), a newly established government organisation, to inform the procurement of a new IT solution. The IT will support and streamline their staff’s daily business activities.
As the organisation was stood up in a very short timeframe, business support tools were hastily identified and implemented, and while the tools available did the job, there was little consistency across the teams with the tools and the way people interacted with them.
In our experience, if people get to have a say in the development of the solution, they are more likely to engage with and take ownership of the solution, contributing to successful implementation and acceptance.
When it comes to requirements gathering, it is easy to engage people in a discussion about the issues and blockers they encounter in doing their jobs. Our approach was to encourage some discussion around this as a controlled vent of sorts, then use these outcomes to inform a more positive discussion around each team’s wish list.
Our main objective was to extract the ideas around what a functional tool might look like and what it might do. We prompted the thought process and posed questions to encourage broad thinking – the ‘what ifs’ and ‘how would it bes?’ about how the issues raised might be eliminated or at least reduced to a point where they don’t present as blockers to the business and its people doing their jobs.
Given the client’s team works together closely on a day-to-day basis, as well as the nature of their business, each member felt visibly comfortable participating in the requirements gathering process and trusted their colleagues to support them in talking about their ideas.
For us, it was a fantastic opportunity to both learn about the core business activities of this organisation, and to see their people being so engaged and professional throughout the process. They were also enthusiastic and patient about talking to us generally and answering our (many) questions about the organisation’s business activities. We are grateful to have had this opportunity.
