Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

A part of my responsibility as a Business Principal also involves facilitating conversations on end user feedback and how it maps to business goals. There are several tools to map end user feedback to business goals. However, the intent is to understand how users perceive a business goal.  We designed a more engaging exercise that can lead to more detailed inquiry on how the business goal impacts the end users. This post is a quick experience report on facilitating an exercise Appreciative Inquiry that helped us in this intent.

I have had my regular dose of information, knowledge and awareness on events around me for more than 25 years now from the newspapers. The form has changed now - earlier it used to be newsprint and now it is digital.

For the last 25 years, IT systems - be it COTS (Commercial Off the shelf) or custom built - are started with trying to understand how they can accomplish a business process. However, it ends up with business stake-holders having to make compromises to the business process to use an IT system. For some time now, the focus has shifted on the users - finding their pain points and trying to design with the users in mind. This change has done a lot of good. However, that is not enough