How Process Analysts Succeed on Massive Digital Transformation Projects
Big programs have a way of swallowing people. There’s a program board, five or six workstreams, a systems integrator, two vendors, a change team, and somewhere in the middle of it all sits you. Your job, on paper, is to map the current state and help design the future one. In practice, your job is […]
Getting Time With SMEs Who Genuinely Don’t Have Any
Every knowledge base project runs into the same wall eventually. The person who knows the most has 40 meetings a week, an incident to manage, plus 3 other projects asking for their time. Your request sits in their inbox, unread, for a fortnight. This isn’t a motivation problem on their end. It’s a design problem […]
Leading a Team of Process Analysts Through Customer Journey Work
There’s always someone arguing the customer journey map can be built in a workshop. Get the right people in a room for a day, sketch the stages, agree the pain points, done. It produces something. It just produces the version the organisation already believes about itself, which is the one thing a journey map shouldn’t […]
Four People Described the Same Process, All Four Were Right
Ask 4 people to describe a process they work on daily. You’ll get 4 different answers. The instinct is to treat that as a problem, something to resolve quickly so you can get on with the map. It isn’t a problem. It’s the most valuable thing you’ll find on the whole engagement. Those differences are […]
Anyone Can Learn Confluence, Getting the Content Out of People Is the Real Job
You can teach someone the mechanics of a knowledge base in an afternoon. Spaces, page templates, permissions, a sensible folder structure. Within a few weeks, a capable person can build something that looks organised, professional, ready to fill. That’s the easy 20%. The other 80% is getting the actual content out of engineers, SMEs, business […]
Anyone Can Learn BPMN 2.0, Not Everyone Can Lead the Team Using It
You can teach BPMN 2.0 to a competent graduate in a fortnight. Tasks, gateways, events, pools, lanes. Give them 3 months on a real program, they’ll be modelling processes as well as anyone. The notation was never the scarce skill. What’s scarce is someone who can take a group of analysts with that same notation, […]
The Requirements Are in the Conversation, Not the Document
Ask most people what a business analyst does and you’ll get an answer about documentation. Writing specs, keeping the traceability matrix current, running things through a change control process. That’s the visible part. The part that actually determines whether a program lands is much less visible, which is sitting with people until you understand their […]
Technical Writers Are Paid to Notice What’s Missing
There’s a moment in most documentation jobs where an engineer explains something clearly, completely, in a way that makes total sense. You take notes, you thank them, you go to write it up. Then halfway through the third step you stop. What happens if the user doesn’t have that permission? Nothing in the notes covers […]
Running BPMN 2.0 Workshops That Actually Produce a Map
Process mapping workshops have a reputation for being long, tiring, then producing something nobody uses. Usually that’s not a notation problem. BPMN 2.0 is well designed, widely understood, precise enough for developers while still readable by the business. The problem is what happens in the room. Someone puts a blank wall in front of 12 […]