Category Archives: Analysis

Helping A Great Team Think & Act Differently

Total Clothing wanted to involve people from right across the team to streamline their processes, to prepare in advance for another year of major growth. They asked Critical Action to help with building vision, identifying changes and putting a plan into action.

“We worked with many of our team, led by Keith, to identify bottlenecks in our processes and by voting on the most urgent issues, gave everyone a sense of inclusion and buy-in.

It has brought the team so much closer in terms of working towards common goals and also in the way they communicate with each other on an ongoing basis.

We are really thinking differently as a team about the way we operate and this is translating into actions and profitability.

Keith’s no nonsense, practical way of facilitating, managing and ensuring that tasks were completed by all has really helped us overcome some challenging issues and we are moving forward with some exciting times ahead.”

Jan Richardson
Managing Director, Total Clothing Ltd

https://www.totalclothing.co.uk

Analyse data for GDPR

I’ve been asked recently to present on my experiences in business analysis, and how they might help businesses and IT teams work together as they prepare for GDPR.

The talk, with its examples and stories from the trenches, has gone down well with the audience, so I decided to record it as an on-demand webinar.

You can find the webinar at https://youtu.be/eJBXUajwK_U or watch it here.

You can also access the 7-question diagnostic I mention in the webinar to get your own personalised ideas directly at https://mydiagnostic.online/diagnostic.php?diagid=10

Role Based Access – CIO White Paper

We’ve been doing a fair bit of work recently around roles and role-based access.

These projects have been around things like Active Directory, new ERP/CRM systems implementations, changes to responsibilities and working processes, and data migrations.

If this sounds like something you’re about to embark upon, and you’d like some assistance with the analysis and logical design, to feed into your technical design, you might find our short role-based permission white-paper gives you some food for thought.

Download the paper here.

Over a few pages, we share a summary of our thinking, observations and ideas for why role-based access is good, what sort of questions to ask, and how to map roles to groups to permissions.

We’d be delighted to talk you through our approach in more detail if you’d like to contact us.

Value: Why, How, What and Beyond

We’ve been working through Value Propositions this week; a very useful exercise that looks trivial until you try it and really challenge one another as to “so what does that actually mean…?”.

These work best in a group situation, but can be done on your own if you are willing to challenge your thinking and iterate.

You’ll need a whiteboard or a load of Post-Its…

There are several common approaches to value propositions, here are some of our favourites:

Start With Why

Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why?” on youtube.

The principle is that products that really matter to people start with “why” they exist, and “why” we as a business do what we do. The video is well worth watching, and explains more about starting with “why”, moving through “how” and finishing with “what” – the product and features.

Jobs To Be Done

The Innovators Toolkit. Again, the full article is worth reading. What Human need are you delivering against? Think of your (short) proposition in three parts:

Action verb – Object – Context

For example:

Create – a company strategy – in small chunks in your spare time

Value Positioning Statement

In his seminal book Crossing The Chasm Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers, Geoffrey Moore describes the Value Positioning Statement, the main parts of which are:

  • For <customers>
  • With <need/problem/dissatisfaction>
  • Our Product is <product, category>
  • Provides <benefits>.
  • Unlike <competitor categories>
  • We do <differentiators>.

 

Hope you find these useful in communicating the value of what it is you are doing.