Start From Your End Point!

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Many organizations have a knack for considering or better yet not considering analytics till their solutions have been implemented. The problem is that most organizations are stuck in a world of management information and descriptive statistics. What do I mean? The majority of organizations have not evolved in their thinking as they look to explain the past and then use that information to set an organizational strategy. In most cases, this information is from only one dimension and does not present to decision-makers with a holistic view. This is not because the analytical teams or business teams do not recognize that there are other variables to consider, it is generally because data is held in silos in the organization and would require a significant amount of manual transformation to bring the data together and make it usable. I am not saying that the data is never brought together, in some cases it is. Some organizations go through a world of pain to manually transform data on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Some employ people just to carry out this laborious activity because they realize that they cannot function without this information and any means of getting hold of it is better than not having it at all.

As with all things in business you fundamentally have 3 variables you can play with:

  • Time
  • Cost
  • Quality
No matter which one you chose to tweak, you cannot guarantee that the end result will give you what you are looking for. So how do we avoid this problem?
Its a little something at Yellow Eight we refer to as ‘Functional Design’.  
Yellow Eight - Functional Design
With an understanding that every process requires evaluation and optimization, we start right at the end. If it is a sales process we know that the ultimate objective is to increase or stablize the sales volumes through a channel or number of channels. So, what information do we need to help our client achieve this? What are the internal and external environmental factors that impact and influence the success of a sales channel and therefore the overall sales process. Based on this understanding we re-engineer the process to ensure the data is collected and fed in at the right points in the process to inform and influence decision making throughout the sales process. So we have established what we want to report, how we intend on using the report and how it fits with the business process but this doesn’t guarantee that we will get the information that we need. So how do we ensure that we consistently get the information that we need? We have to look at all the data collection points within the process and address the user experience at this point. We must look at the business process through the lens of the customer, the internal business user and any function that supports the process. At each collection point we must ensure that the experience is pitched at a level that encourages the customer to willingly provide the information needed, encourages the customer service agent or business user to collect and record all the information provided by the customer. Each step of the customer journey is mapped out and the flow of information is documented to ensure it is catured in the most logical and value driven way. Our functional design approach considers all the important aspects for decision making in the modern business landscape; User experience, business process and customer journey.

To find out more about our functional design service contact David on 07957439858 or  book an appointment!

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