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.

Context The current typical model of starting a large program is to have a discovery workshop for the program followed by detailed project inceptions. The project inceptions are spaced and detailed. There are not a lot of discovery workshops we do that is mutual discovery. It is more of sense making of an earlier discovery process. The Pitfalls and some thoughts With the discovery process feeding into the project Inceptions was great. it gave direction. However, validation of the direction based on feedback from projects seems to be missing. The reason the feedback is missing is 2-fold: #1 - The discovery workshops don't seem to have a cadence with the project Inceptions #2 - The team that does discovery workshops is to involved with the project inceptions and vice versa,