Initial business discovery

After some initial preparation, you will begin the business discovery with a series of interviews with relevant lines of business leaders. In this section, we'll focus on proper preparation and then uncover critical success factors, their potential impact on the business, and the KPIs that are needed to measure success in meeting business goals. We'll also gather the monetary value in revenue to be gained, or the cost of, savings in solving the problem that they identified.

We typically jot down a lot of free form notes during this process. We will guide the conversation in the direction of the information that we need to fully understand the problem. We will then summarize what we found interviewing key stakeholders in each line of business (LOB) using the following template:

Each line of business interview with a key stakeholder can usually be conducted in 90 minutes to 2 hours. Later, we will go back and validate what we found with them and capture additional information that we might have missed.

Prioritization usually takes place after we've validated what we've found. We will then better understand the requirements and potential stages of the project, as well as the potential business benefits and risk.

Next, we'll cover the process in more detail and take you through an example.