I was recently thinking about work to improve team efficiency. We have a few slow processes, bits of technical debt and content proliferation problems that slow us down. I’d like to address them all, and on the face of it, they seem like “business-sided” issues.
It’s easy to look at these problems and envisage a business analyst type role coming to support our process improvement or mechanism to cut down our content by restricting use of our content management system. They’re roles which are necessary, but it’s not the first thing I would like us to think of.
To go back to basics for a sec, when I talk about the “user” I mean the person or group of people who start and end a user journey with us on any service we provide. Say, an undergrad student finding entry requirements or a member of staff trying to find a different team’s email address.
Although the issues I raised at the start of this post don’t initially feel like “user” issues, I’d like to start with considering users to give us the appropriate steer.
For example, let’s look at technical debt. We have code that runs some apps which is using very old, non-supported technology which could present a number of business risks. Clearly this is a priority to address. We could approach fixing this problem by saying we’ll replace like-for like with a new set of tech… but is this service still meeting a user need? Do we need to replace it at all? Is there now a better way to deliver this service to users since it was built? Do we even know how users interact with it? Without these sorts of questions being answered, we don’t know the direction of travel.
How about content proliferation? Yes, that’s hard to manage and a drain on our team’s resources – but what’s the real issue here? A lot of content is a red flag… but not necessarily a real problem. If all that content has a user need, is findable and maintained that’s good, not bad! Ever increasing content that is not managed is a problem, because it slowly begins to veer away from meeting user needs. The issues we have as a team in trying to control it is driven entirely by making it better content for the people reading it. So, why would we start looking at this as a business problem? We need to understand what our users are looking for, so we can address the problems effectively.
I’m often challenged with this approach by people saying “That level of research will take us a while to get to, so maybe we’d best jump right in” – but frankly that’s just wrong. Long-term costs of delivering the wrong thing far outweigh researching the right approach.
There are two key elements that go alongside this:
- No guessing. We are not our users and, while we have insight and empathy, we don’t know until we have real evidence directly from those who do use the service we provide.
- Outcomes over outputs. If success to the business is something like “the delivery a new solution to replace that old one, measured by the existence of a new solution”, we will not address the true issues which can be hidden when you base success on an outcome like “success is the users of the service finding and performing their tasks quickly and easily, as measured by {insert appropriate success metrics here, like speed of task completion increases} “.
I realise there is a level of pragmatism when it comes to many tasks we need to undertake, with inevitable shortcuts for some things, but we’ll never succeed in delivering better digital services without always pushing for user-first approaches, even when it looks like it’s not needed.
John Bourne 