This week I’d like to tackle the dreaded “what’s the ROI of this analysis” question.
With the focus on iterative solution building and fast results, organizations are becoming less and less accepting of anything other than direct value-add activities. Delivering a solution clearly helps realize efficiencies. But did the analysis beforehand enable those benefits, or would we have gotten a similar result without “wasting” our time with design prep?
As best-in-class process improvement practitioners, we know that there IS a real value in analyzing a problem and designing a proper solution BEFORE creating something. The difficulty however, is in communicating that value to senior leadership while they impatiently ask us if we’re done yet.
So with that, I’ll cover some points around why this question is so hard to answer, why leadership needs an answer, and how we can better answer it.
A Difficult Question
As discussed in our previous blogs, the result of analysis should be to help your organization make a decision. And for situations where that decision cannot be made, leadership is usually supportive of doing some investigation before building a solution. Happy days.
Things get more complicated when leadership already “knows” the decision that needs to be made, and is eager to start right away on realizing some estimated benefit. As part of the project team, you might feel like everyone has a general sense of what needs to be done but something is missing. In order to really deliver that benefit, a deeper dive into current state pain points might be required. That way you can understand exactly which pain points are worth solving and how best to solve them.
But leadership already knows how to solve this at a high level! Slap on that latest tech tool and we’re good to go! Why do we need to analyze this further?
So ultimately you are greeted with the question of “what’s the benefit of doing more analysis.” Are we getting more efficiencies or better client experience? Can you prove it?
Please Believe Me?
This is a naturally tough question because leadership is technically right in asking this. We don’t want to do more analysis than is required, so if the uncertainty isn’t there, we might be better off with solutionizing sooner.
But more often than not, a knee-jerk reaction to a problem is in danger of not delivering the desired benefit and resolving the real issue.
- We may not know the real root cause of an issue and focus on fixing something else
- The benefit may be over-estimated or the effort may be under-estimated
- We may not be ready to build due to very high-level requirement sets
- We may have missed a better solution that could be used instead | Buy vs Build anyone?
So how do we prove that these concerns are valid for your particular project? Well we really can’t unfortunately. Without actually doing the analysis, we won’t know what exactly may or may not be the issue. Of course, the real issue is the fact that these unknowns still exist while starting a solution build.
And when leadership asks what the benefit of your analysis will be, they usually have assumed these unknowns away. Dead end right?
Possible Answers
For those facing this difficult question, I’ve put together a few options for how to approach showing the benefits of analysis.
In an ideal world though, the first option would be to not answer it! Creating a culture where this type of work is appreciated is very important. But if you’re not there yet, these few tips will help others see the promised land eventually.
1. Be Detailed
Carefully document what requirements are known before you do more analysis and what is found afterwards. Showcase how much the solution has changed (for the better) with your additional efforts. Get your management to have an “Ah-Ha” moment by seeing must-have features that they would have missed.
2. Quantify Time to Market
Leadership wants the solution as fast as possible, and additional analysis may very well enable that. Investigate whether all requirements are necessary and scope down a faster build with almost the same benefit potential. Or showcase how extensive re-work and testing may be required if we just go ahead and build something now. Management will be more understanding of doing a bit more prep work in the beginning if they can see a quicker solution at the end.
3. Its Different This Time
Your organization may very well be scarred by long term analyses that never resulted in anything. Show leadership that your ask is different by planning out your analytical objectives, what they can expect to receive, and time box the entire effort.
4. Use Examples
Have you had any recent major fails in your team or more broadly? Did that project just go ahead and build something without doing any prep? Use examples of other failures (or successes) to ensure that your team doesn’t fall into the same trap as others did.
5. Retrospective
If all else fails, move ahead with the solution. Closely record how long development takes, where there were major issues and whether the solution actually delivered the benefit. Use your findings in the next project conversation to steer the group to a better approach for the next time.
Final Thoughts
As hinted above, we should all be trying to drive a culture where analysis and proper design is celebrated as much as the solution itself. Arguments about whether we should credit the prep phase with some of the eventual ROI misses the point. Try to avoid these types of conversations as its difficult to prove your case if leadership already has this mindset. Instead, focus on the small tips above to slowly condition your organization to value analysis as a first class activity.
Measure twice, cut once right?
Happy Prepping!