We are all familiar with the phrase “The customer is always right”, but well all know that the customer is sometimes wrong. It is likely, therefore, that at some point in your professional career you will find yourself in a situation where you need to disagree with your customer. So when do you say “No”?

I would argue it boils down to just a few key principles. You believe saying “Yes” would be:

• Bad for your customer’s business
• Bad for your own business
• Unethical
• Illegal

In the first case, as a business analyst, your job is to understand your customer’s strategic and immediate needs. It’s not good enough to know that the customer wants solution X in place by the end of quarter three. You have to understand the driving business need behind that requirement. Every demand from your customer has to be weighed against their own stated, documented, strategic, business goals. Any demands that do not support those goals are candidates for a “No”. Any demands that blatantly go against those goals should provoke a firm “No”.

Wait a second!

Surely the customer would not demand something that was not in line with their own strategic goals! Well, the fact is your customer will rarely be a single person. Your customer will be an organisation, within which there will be competing departments, led by human beings with competing ambitions and desires. The reality is that not everyone in an organisation pulls in the same direction. Unfortunately, saying “No” in these circumstances might mean you are thwarting someone’s personal ambitions, even though you are acting to protect and support the organisation’s strategy. Tread carefully.

But even all your customers were pulling in the same direction, customers are not always immediately aware of the repercussions of their demands. This is particularly the case in organisations where departments act  as “silos”. One department might want to implement some tactical goals, without realising that they are confounding the strategic goals of another department. It might simply be that one worker in a department does not want a certain task to be part of their role in the “To Be” business model, even though it is in the interests of the department. Doing your stakeholder analysis will help mitigate these issues.

Having decided to say “No”, the next step would be to gather evidence and prepare a justification. The customer is entitled to know why you think their request is bad for their business. In some scenarios, I would almost prepare a business case for saying “No”. I would also seek the support of my peers and my manager. If you are thwarting an individual’s personal ambitions, then the response is likely to be challenging, so you should be prepared for the response to be emotional.

If your customer’s request is bad for your business, saying “No” is almost a no-brainer. Even so, your customer is entitled to a structured explanation. This is not just a question of courtesy; you may have to cease doing business with your customer for the moment, but who knows what mutually beneficial business opportunities may arise in the future? Parting should be amicable and professional.

There may be cases where your customer asks you to do something unethical or illegal. This is also a no-brainer, assuming you know the law. Chances are that saying “No” to such requests are likely to end your relationship with that customer, so you may be tempted to say “Yes”. If you are tempted to say “Yes”, remember Enron and then make your choice.

To re-cap, in order to say “No” to your customer you need to know the following:

• your customer’s strategic goals
• your own company’s strategic goals
• the law

You also need:

• a structured justification (whether written or oral)
• to be right
• to have a backbone

Good luck!

In part, I suspect it has to do with wanting to spend as little as possible and still end up with something that earns them revenue.

But I think it is mostly because customers fail to grasp what proof of concept really means. It could also be that a vendor, desperate to get some work, rushes into a POC without fully explaining the limitations.

There is a simple analogy you can use to understand or explain the difference between a proof of concept, a pilot and a production-ready system. Let’s imagine your customer wants  a parachute system capable of being steered and performing acrobatics.

A proof of concept would be that you can build a parachute at all. An example of a parachute POC would be the Action Man Red Devil figure from the 1970s. I had one when I was a boy and if dropped from a second story window, it worked beautifully, in that it deployed every time and got the 30cm action figure to the ground safely. But you wouldn’t strap an Action Man parachute to your back and jump out of an aeroplane, would you? Yet customers actually think they can deploy a POC into their production environment!

The next step might be a pilot solution. A pilot would have the key features of the target solution, but by no means all. In our parachute example, having proved that we can build a functioning toy parachute, we would then build a human-sized equivalent. In this case, a basic WWII-type parachute that deploys and gets the parachutist to the ground safely would suffice as a pilot. It would not do all the fancy things that our ideal parachute would to, but it would work. Still, you wouldn’t enter a parachuting competition with a pilot parachute when all your competitors have full-blown acrobatic kit, would you? And yet, customers do put pilot systems into production and then wonder why they cannot compete!

The next evolution would be the production-ready solution. Now we are talking about the full kit, full functionality, full agility. With this system in place, you are ready to take on the competition and win.

Action Man proves the concept

It works at full size too

Ready for production!

Takeaways:

• Vendors, don’t be so desperate to win business that you dive into a proof of concept without explaining the implications.
• Customers, don’t delude yourselves into thinking that you can put a POC or a pilot into production and still compete.

Kind regards,

Declan Chellar

She basically says what I said in “Reality check“, but with more eloquence and concrete examples. I dislike her already. Applause to the cartoonist also.

Thanks to my friend Rowan Manahan for pointing out this video.

• “The environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest.” Unless you live in Louisiana or Florida, that is.
• “I want my life back.” So do the families of the eleven people who died on the Deepwater Horizon rig.
• “The Gulf is a big ocean.” A big ocean with a big coastline that was not designed to have millions of barrels of oil a day pumped into it.

Have you seen this man?

Everyone in America, it seems, hates BP and insists on spelling out that it means “BRITISH petroleum”. I’m Irish, so I don’t care what the Americans think of the British, but it seems that from the fisherman all the way up to President Obama, they all want to point the finger across the Atlantic.

In RACI terms, BP is certainly “Accountable”. After all, the drilling being carried out by the Deepwater Horizon was being done on BP’s behalf and BP own the oil.

But hang on, BP itself wasn’t doing the drilling, nor did it own the equipment that failed. So who is actually “Responsible”?

Well, that would be a company called Transocean. This company was responsible for the drilling. It was Transocean’s rig that went on fire. The blow-out preventer (BOP), designed to cap the well in the event of disaster, belonged to Transocean. That would be the BOP that failed.

Yet have you seen Transocean CEO, Steven L. Newman, in the news? I haven’t. Then again, I imagine he does not want his family to receive death threats.

Indeed, on the Transocean website, the Deepwater Horizon disaster has not featured on the news page since 26th April. What is more, the profile of the Deepwater Horizon rig speaks in the present tense, as if the rig were still in operation.

I thought I would familiarise you with some titbits of information that are current on the Transocean website at the time of posting:

• “Our safety vision is: Our operations will be conducted in an incident-free workplace – all the time, everywhere” (source). Apparently not.
• “Safety: Personal safety and employee health is our greatest responsibility, followed by the protection of our environment and company property” (source). Erm…
• “Transocean works side by side with clients, host governments, regulators, vendors, scientists and the public on environmental initiatives” (source). That would explain Transocean’s high media profile over the last couple of months.
• “Our use of the most up-to-date systems and procedures will ensure environmental protection and continued good stewardship” (source). That word “ensure” – I do not think it means what you think it means.
• “At Transocean… we are never out of our depth” (source). Seriously, chaps, this is getting embarrassing. At least update your website so it doesn’t look like you think you live on a different planet to the rest of us!

According to a report in The Telegraph, Transocean has tried to use a 19th century law to limit its economic liability, whereas BP have said they will not seek to cap its liability.

Although founded in the USA, Transocean is now registered in Switzerland, so the USA cannot even say that Transocean is contributing to the clean-up through its payment of corporation taxes.

Transocean. Where are you?

It seems they were getting tired of the scales being tipped strongly in favour of work.

The CEO’s response?

“You should take up Tai Chi, it has done wonders for me.”

Erm, boss, I think you have to have a life in order to be able to take stuff up, especially when it is slow-moving stuff.

This stuff takes time, you know. Even to do it as badly as this!

]]> http://www.chellar.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=1176 0 http://www.chellar.com/blog/?p=1176 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DeclanChellar/~3/TZ2Aa_b1tmc/ http://www.chellar.com/blog/?p=1148#comments Sat, 01 May 2010 08:25:42 +0000 Declan Chellar http://www.chellar.com/blog/?p=1148 Yesterday I had an online chat with a friend and the subject quickly turned to work stress and bullying. My friend gave me permission to reproduce the chat on my blog, so here it is, abridged, with some further comments inserted by me afterwards for your benefit.

Such comments appear in green (See what I did there?).

To understand all of this conversation, it would be useful for you to know that I am a qualified martial arts instructor and that my friend was a student of mine some years ago.

Friend
There’s a lot going on with work. I’m completely and utterly fed up of my job and still looking for something else. It’s all been stressing me out for ages to be honest!

Me
I can relate to that. I have had bouts of work stress in the past.

Friend
I think when it comes to a point where you end up not being able to sleep and having regular migraines/chest pains/shortness of breath due to being permanently wound up something is definitely amiss.

Me
Absolutely! Perhaps you should set aside ten minutes a day for meditation. I know that sounds a bit odd, considering time is one of your pressures.

Friend
I’ve thought about trying something like that, I just find it so difficult to switch my brain off.

Me
Hence the meditation. That’s where it would help. First step in learning to switch off is to allow yourself a few minutes at the same time each day to do so. And basically all you have to do is sit on the edge of a chair, back straight, hands on your knees, breathe deeply and think of nothing.

Meditation is just one tool, not a panacea, and in the context of this conversation I recommended it as a way of helping to switch the brain off, of allowing oneself to have quiet moments. Meditation could simply consist of allowing yourself ten minutes in the morning to stroke your cat, or ten minutes in the evening to watch the sun go down. They key is to allow your mind to take a break from the daily stress.

Another key to dealing with stress is to care less about certain things. We can get stressed when we lend things more importance than they deserve.

Friend
Yeah that’s what [another friend] says.

Me
We also get stressed when we let people make their problems become our problems and in doing so, we take on board more than we can handle.

Friend
That’s true.

Me
People often deal with stress by passing it on. Managers are particularly good at doing that to their staff. When in fact their job is to protect their staff from it, so that the staff stay focused on the job.

Friend
Managers have mostly been the cause of stress in my recent experience!

Me
You have to manage your manager. And it does require skill. You start by recognising that managing your manager is part of your job, even though it is not part of your job description.

Friend
She’s a difficult one.

Me
They often are.

Friend
The thing that irks me the most is people rarely get praised for the good work they do, but if they make one little mistake they are shot down.

If you want to know more about motivating people, I strongly recommend ‘Bringing Out the Best in People: How to Enjoy Helping Others Excel‘.

Me
Yes, that is common. You start dealing with the stress of that by simply accepting it as a fact of where you work. If you expect praise, you will suffer. I don’t simply mean resigning yourself to the fact that you will not be praised. In that case, underneath you are still longing for praise. I mean genuinely not needing it.

Friend
I don’t expect praise. This has long been the case!

Me
If you want to manage your manager, you have to take some time to think about what motivates her and what her fears are. If you can understand both of those things, you are on the right path.

Friend
She’s a David Brent style manager – wants to look good in front of others.

Me
Then think about what you can do to make her look good, then decide whether you are willing to do it.

Friend
Well the work I do does make her look good – I think the issue is more that she wants to project this image of being a wonderful, caring manager who nurtures young talent, etc. (which to some extent she is) yet she is also a control freak and tends to micro-manage. If we’re too self-sufficient she doesn’t like it and I think this is because she enjoys taking the credit for us. Or at least likes feeling like our good output is due to her good management.

Me
Is the credit important to you?

Friend
I just do what I do. I don’t want a big song and dance would just like to feel more appreciated.

Me
So how exactly does she stress you out?

Friend
Well she is very unpredictable in terms of her emotions and temper. Recently there have been a series of bust-ups between people at work and she is at the centre of it all.

Me
Think of her emotions and temper the way you would those of someone who is trying to goad you into a fight.

Friend
We’re talking full on yelling and unreasonable behaviour. I felt reasonably okay before all that kicked off – was only concerned about stagnating in a job with little professional development opportunity then!

Me
How do you think I would react if someone in a pub screamed “Baldy!”, “Paddy!” and “Paki!” at me all in one sentence?

Ethnically, I am half Irish and half Sri Lankan but bullies don’t tend to enquire as to someone’s exact ethic origins when they shout “Oi! Paki!”

Friend
Not rise to it.

Me
Exactly. In fairness, at work it is different, you usually cannot simply walk away to another job or go home, especially with the economy the way it is. At work I would take the person aside and look them in the eye and inform them that the behaviour is completely unacceptable, keeping my voice calm and firm the whole time.

I would also inform them that I will walk out of any future meetings if shouting starts.

Friend
But when she is so emotional literally nothing you say will help. You have to wait until she gets it out of her system.

Me
I would start turning on my heel and walking away from tantrums. Even if she screams: “Get back here!”
Especially if she screams: “Get back here!”

Friend
I would have done but she stormed off first. I couldn’t even slam the damn door in response because it was a fire door!

Me
Well, I wouldn’t recommend storming off or slamming doors. Just walking away calmly.

Of course, I also have the backup of being able to say to someone: “I take shouting as a sign of aggression and intimidation and a precursor to physical violence, which I cannot tolerate. Please remember that I am trained to kill, so I do not recommend you give me the impression that you are about to get violent.”

I love Tom Conti’s line in ‘Friends‘, when he mumbles under his breath at Ross’s dad: “I can kill you with my thumb, you know.”

I really can kill you with my thumb.

Friend
Ha-ha!

Me
Seriously. I have said more or less that to someone at work before, but in that case the person was border-line violent. Of course, you need to be able to say it without any emotion whatsoever. Like Chili Palmer.

Friend
Well, she and I are actually getting on reasonably well at the moment. We’re having a meeting on Tuesday to talk about various issues.

Me
You would be surprised at how well you can get on with a bully once you have a frank chat. The chat should also include something along the lines of: “I understand your pressures, but passing them on to me makes me work less efficiently, so help me to help you.”

Of course, only some bullies are basically decent people who are scared, stressed and with poor leadership skills, others are just psychopaths. Psychos are harder to deal with and, unfortunately, do not explode when sunlight hits them – no matter how crazy they are.

Friend
That was the odd thing, we’ve always been able to discuss any issues before, and other people talked about her temper but this is the first time she lost it at me like that. A colleague has told me she has been psychologically bullied by her for some time now – there is now an official grievance procedure in motion. Unfortunately, my colleague almost exploded at her in response to one particular tirade and may lose her job.

Me
Next time it happens, wait until she is calm, take her aside and ask her what is wrong and how you can help her. Once she realises you are on her side, have the “unacceptable” chat.

Friend
I already know what’s wrong – we’ve been turned down for some major funding bids so the company is under huge financial pressure. But she has always been like this.

Me
Sounds like a frank chat of some sort is needed.

Friend
It’s a big issue – have been reading a lot about the main problems that come up in the workplace, bullying bosses, etc., and there’s so much of it going on. A friend gave me a book called ‘21 Dirty Tricks at Work’, very interesting!

Me
Bullies are fearful people who prey on those who do not, or cannot, stand up to them. Simply ranting back is the wrong approach, as your colleague has found out, but rolling over and taking it is the wrong approach too.

If your boss is bullying you, you have to decide whether the behaviour is normal or abnormal for that person. If it is abnormal, then you might be able to reach a resolution through talking and finding out what is triggering the behaviour. If your boss is a habitual bully, then I would still recommend the frank, calm chat but it is more likely that you will have to change jobs to escape the behaviour. You might find at best that your boss stops bullying you, but continues to bully your colleagues.

If your boss is a psychopath, then by definition there will be no empathy whatsoever and your only real solution will be to change jobs. I am not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, so I my words on the subject of psychopaths are not authoritative. However, my understanding is that a psychopath would engage in very subtle, manipulative and deceitful behaviour, rather than the kind of “schoolyard” bullying that my friend is talking about.

Regardless of whether you can or want to help your boss, he or she has to accept that you will not tolerate being bullied. Unfortunately, you sometimes have to communicate this by resigning. Walking out is an extreme course of action, but you have to decide whether no job is better than a job that is damaging your health.

Friend
Yeah. I’m now at the point where, for the most part it’s all blown over, but what’s stressing me now is the awful atmosphere it’s created… divisions between staff and management and to some extent between staff themselves.

Me
You can try to resolve that by acting as peacekeeper. Or you can stop giving a damn.

Friend
Ha-ha!

Me
The latter is simple and works very well. Of course, I don’t mean not give a damn in the sense that you start doing your job badly. I mean not giving a damn about the feelings and emotions of toxic people.

Friend
I’ve never been very good at not giving a damn. It’s a strength and a weakness.

Me
You have to ask yourself whether giving a damn is worth the stress.

Friend
I know it isn’t, but it’s hard to switch off.

Me
That’s true. And so we circle back to meditation.

Friend
One of my friends (another work colleague) meditates and also does Tai Chi. He’s offered to show me some relaxation techniques.

Me
You already know some. Unless you were paying NO attention at all during my classes.

But listen to what he has to say. It should resonate with stuff you already know.

You just need to decide to allow yourself the time to do it.

Friend
Yeah, things aren’t so bad I can’t spare a few minutes – one thing that at been stressing me out was also having time to relax/be social, so would definitely be up for it.

Me
Early morning is a good time. Helps set you up for the day.
But another session after work helps you switch off.

Friend
I think a bad habit I’ve got into is getting home from work and getting straight onto the computer again, usually to do freelance work, answer more emails, etc.

Me
I suspect you need to sit down and assess your priorities. You sound like you are allowing yourself to drift with the tide. Time to start rowing.

Friend
Yeah, definitely too much drifting going on.

I shall finish with some worthy words on the subject of stress:

“We live longer than our forefathers; but we suffer more from a thousand artificial anxieties and cares.  They fatigued only the muscles, we exhaust the finer strength of the nerves.”  ~Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”  ~Bertrand Russell

“Stress is an ignorant state.  It believes that everything is an emergency.”  ~Natalie Goldberg

“There is more to life than increasing its speed.”  ~Mohandas K. Gandhi

]]> http://www.chellar.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=1148 9 http://www.chellar.com/blog/?p=1148 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DeclanChellar/~3/qRKqXqGjygs/ http://www.chellar.com/blog/?p=1144#comments Fri, 30 Apr 2010 16:22:39 +0000 Declan Chellar http://www.chellar.com/blog/?p=1144 In Light Use Cases: Part 2, I promised I would talk about documenting business rules and data items relevant to a use case. Here I am, fulfilling that promise.

Imagine a holiday company requires a system that allows it to, among other things, take bookings for holidays. I have modelled a “Take Booking” use case in activity diagram form.

You will notice that I while I have made references to data and business rules, the specifics do not appear within the diagram. Those details are held in a spreadsheet. The reason for this is maintainability and reusability of the rules and data items and to facilitate logical data modelling.

If you look at the diagram and the spreadsheet, you will see that the diagram and the business rules make reference to each other using a combination of use case step numbers and rule ids. You will also see that the spreadsheet can be filtered to see which use cases use which rules and data items.

By documenting the rules and data items in this way, you have a central repository for both. This allows analysts to check for existing rules and data items before adding them to a new use case.

It also allows us to maintain rules and data easily, since the details are held in one place.

The price you pay for this approach is that you cannot understand the full detail of the use case without opening the spreadsheet. Some reviewers will not like that, because it means a little more work for them when reviewing the use case. But I believe that the advantages outweigh this one drawback and so I make it my business to sell the idea to the reviewers.

By the way, the purpose of this post is not to show a perfect “Take Booking” use case, so no suggestions on how to improve the use case itself, please.

Benefits:

• Business rules, data items, notifications, SLAs, etc, are easily maintainable (saves time in the long run).
• Business rules, data items, etc, are easily identified for re-use (saves time and effort in the long run).
• Facilitates logical data modelling, which is essential to good physical data modelling (poor physical data modelling causes worsening system performance over time).
• No voluminous use case specifications

Drawbacks:

• Some extra effort is required in reviewing a use case.

Related posts:

• Light Use Cases: Part 1
• Light Use Cases: Part 2
• Light Use Cases: Part 3

Kind regards,

Declan Chellar

I find the textual specifications result in the kind of weighty documents that everyone hates reviewing and I continue to be amazed that so many analysts start documenting a SUC by writing out a textual specification instead of modelling visually.

Indeed, there are still some analysts who don’t bother to produce a visual model of the SUCs at all!

People relate better to pictures than they do to text, that is why the Rational Unified Process tells us to model visually.

Those who are not familiar with SUCs do need to be taught how to read an Activity Diagram, but take a look at this SUC specification and then at the corresponding Activity Diagram and tell me which you think is easier to follow. Now imagine a much more complex use case.

My approach is to dispose of the textual version altogether (except for the “Characteristic Information” section), since it says nothing that is not said more concisely and more clearly in the diagram. The result is a set of SUCs that are easier and quicker to review.

You will notice that in neither the specification nor the diagram do I provide details of the business rules or data requirements. I will explain why in a later post.

Kind regards,

Declan Chellar

Related Posts

• Light Use Cases: Part 1
• Light Use Cases: Part 3

There are two questions you might be asking.

1. What’s wrong with that?
2. How does it come about?

What’s wrong with that?
The purpose of the SUC is to understand the Actor/System interaction at a logical level and to tease out and make clear the primary path and all alternate and exception paths. A well crafted SUC also makes it clear where business rules are needed. SUCs don’t care about button clicks because they distract from the logic of the scenario.

Screen flows are not about the underlying logic, they are about showing all the possible routes through the screens, depending on which buttons you click.

It’s a problem when you focus on the button clicks, because you risk missing out on some of that underlying logic. You risk missing out on alternate and exception flows and you risk overlooking business rules. Iterative development is supposed to mitigate risk, not increase it.

What is more, a screen flow is more easily read if it is visual, so cramming it into a SUC specification template does not make it easy to follow at all. In fact, I encourage people not to write SUC specifications at all, on the basis that they are hard for the customer to read, but that’s for another post.

If you document screen flows and call them SUCs, you may get approval from all parties (except the Software Architect, who, I imagine, would not be happy), but I am pretty certain not all parties will have the same understanding of the requirements. As a result, misunderstandings will not become apparent until User Acceptance Testing.

How does it come about?
Lack of experience. Analysts need to be strong-willed as well as flexible. While it is important to produce analysis artefacts that meet the needs of the intended readers, the analyst cannot simply be at the whim of those readers. If the intended consumers of the SUC are not themselves familiar with how to document a SUC, they will try to influence how it is documented and they will get it wrong. The analyst must be firm, explaining how things should be done, while being sensitive to the needs of the consumer.

Caveat
While screen flows should follow SUCs, don’t spend so much time producing “perfect” SUCs that you leave yourself with no time to produce screen flows.

Takeways:

• SUCs and screen flows are not the same thing
• Do SUCs first, then screen flows
• Model both visually