BR Chapter 7: Understanding the real problem
The Brown Cow Model:
The Brown Cow Model provides four views of the work, each of which provides the business analyst with information that is useful at different stages of the investigation
The
way of thinking
discussed here follows
from understanding the
abstracted essence. This section is relevant to
all requirements analysts, regardless of the size
or nature of
the project. It
is equally applicable
to iterative and
traditional development methods.
The problem the team should be
looking at is finding a way for customers to generate secure passwords that
they are very unlikely to forget (it can be done). Of course, if you read what
we said about essence earlier, you will now be saying, “Hold it! Passwords are a
technology for doing something; they are not the essence of the problem.”
Passwords are not part of the business
problem, but rather the bank’s
chosen technology.
Moving into the Future:
art thinking about the Future-What,
ask your owner a simple question, “What business do you want to
be doing in the future?” While this is a simple question, sometimes it is
not so simple to find the answer. At other times, however, it is almost
obvious. For example, for many years Amazon was the largest online seller of
books printed on paper. Amazon understood that the future of bookselling could
be different, so it developed its Kindle reader. This path led Amazon to
selling downloadable e-books to be read on the Kindle (or iPad or any of the
many other readers that have sprung up), a
change that proved to be
successful—Amazon now sells more e-books than it does printed books. This change
in direction is Amazon’s answer to the question, “What business do you want
to be doing in the future ?
How to be Innovative:
Today’s business analyst should always be looking for
ways to improve his client’s work, and these improvements almost always come
about through innovation. Most people do not think of themselves as innovative,
but there are some reasonably simple things you can do to encourage yourself to
have more and better ideas. Keep in mind that innovation is simply “fresh
thinking,” and innovation is not the same as invention.
There are many things you can do to make your products
and solutions more convenient. Such an effort requires not much more than a little
time and a little thought. To be successful, however, you have to look at the
product through the eyes of the customer, or the person who is to use whatever
it is you plan to build. Seeing things through the customer’s eyes is not
always easy, but the cardinal rule is to disregard what you think, and instead
come at it from the customer’s side. Later in this chapter we discuss personas
as a way of understanding things from your customer’s way of thinking.
Systematic Thinking:
Systemic thinking, depicted as a series of
interlocking cogs, is appropriate at requirements time. The basic idea of
systemic thinking is to regard the business as a system—that is, a set of
connected parts that produces something none of the parts can do alone. So
let’s not look at the parts but at the aggregation of the parts 
Typically speaking, the Brown Cow model is a way of reducing the complexity of systems modelling by dividing the model’s viewpoints. For example, the business analyst needs to separate the current view of the system from the future. Additionally, the BA must be able to demonstrate a technological view of the system, along with the technologically-agnostic essential view.
ReplyDeleteThe top-left quadrant focuses on what we do now, independent from how it is done now or how it might be done in the future. This view uncovers the essence of the problem: the business rules and the business data that has to be there independent of any solution. Above the line, the business analyst exposes the real business requirements by stripping away all solution-oriented aspects and thereby coming up with a policy-only statement of what the business is really doing. The top-right quadrant of the model is where the business innovation happens. It is here that the business analyst can make suggestions about improving business rules or using existing business data to be able to make better business decisions.
Above the horizontal line that separates the “how” from the “what.” Here’s where you see the real business—that which we refer to as the essence of the business. Up here the air is rarified and you do not need to deal with the mundane, real-world issues of people and technology; instead, you take an abstract view and discover what the business is really doing. Once you see that, you move to what you would like to be doing in the future.The reason for spending time above the line is to discover the real problem and avoid what happens in many organizations where people waste
ReplyDeletetheir entire 60 minutes building solutions to the wrong problems.
Abstraction
ReplyDeleteAt this stage, it may be useful to speak a little about deliberation. Reflection and getting to the substance are basically something very similar, however conceivably deliberation is the more characteristic approach to consider this idea. The word has Latin roots—abs, which "signifies away from," and trahere, which implies "to draw." Thus reflection, as we utilize the term here, is drawing ceaselessly or expelling physical execution in order to diminish it to its fundamental qualities. As it were, a deliberation is the ticket, not the usage. For instance of reflection, you most likely have a few of the accompanying media: CD, vinyl record, tape, iPod, web based gushing help, radio,MTV, DVD, etc. Each of these is a usage; their reflection is music. Music is still music regardless of how you recreate it