Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

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,

User  story  mapping  is  a  technique  that  allows  you  to  add  a  second  dimension  to  your backlog. The  visualization  enables  you  to  see  the  big  picture  of  the  Product  Backlog. I references a lot of material from Jeff Patton's website here:   http://jpattonassociates.com/the-new-backlog/

Proto-typing is the next step after doing your user journeys. A lot of us put in a lot of effort in port typing. However, remember that this is not a creative exercise. The goal is to increase the flow of information and reduce uncertainty. Hence the concept of lo-fi prototyping A lot of the content on this video is from: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/10/the-skeptics-guide-to-low-fidelity-prototyping/  

User Journey is an activity that we do right after detailing user personas. It is primarily used for: Understanding user behaviour Identify high level functionality Demonstrate vision of the project How do you go about creating a user Journey Your user’s goals Their motivations Their current pain points Their overall character The main tasks they want to achieve Courtesy:  http://theuxreview.co.uk/user-journeys-beginners-guide/

It is recently that I have consciously started practicing Inquiry. Let me explain. I am a consultant who constantly looks at the situation and comes up and implements the solution to progress from there. While I do that, I constantly use Inquiry as a means to progress - one of the key facilitation technique specifically in multiple stakeholder situations.

This is a quick experience report on User Personas - Where it has worked well, where I had challenges and why I had those challenges.

User Personas are a very good tool for the product owners, business analysts or product managers to be able to co-create with designers. It is predominantly a product of the user research and should not be an amalgamation of demographic data. It is the best way for us to list all scenarios that a persona would take when they want to attain a goal. It is predominantly used to build empathy with user, focus the team and build consensus in a large diverse stakeholder group. The website I referred to is here:  https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/08/a-closer-look-at-personas-part-1/

What started as a simple thought has now taken the shape of an idea in my mind now. Instead of just trying to keep it hidden, I want to understand what do people think of this idea and would it make sense. If it does make sense, what are the factors that are good in this idea? Are there any ideas that can be used to extend this concept further. More details on the concept here: Product Barter Marketplace from Prashanth Madhavan Narasimhan

Have you ever noticed how terrible the parking signs are in any major US city. When you need to park your car in any major US city, it takes 5 minutes to decipher the information in the parking sign to understand if it is ok to park in that spot. Nikki Sylianteng , a designer , turned this problem into an opportunity and posted her designs nearby some of these parking signs. The new designs evoked good response. You can read all bout that here at Priceonomics .