Engaging Analysts - Agile’s Next Step In Requirements: Jobs to be Done

Agile’s approach to requirements has been based on discovering the wants and needs of customers.  The fact that this approach is notoriously not very innovative, while often resulting in hard-to-use software, has been ignored for years. 

The challenges with “wants and needs” is that they are about solving problems you see. 

You often ask if that’s really the problem you want to solve. 

Good business analysts know that you don’t look to your software system to see how to improve it. Instead, you look at the customers’ workflow, what’s called the “customer journey.”  This not only shifts your thinking to the customer but enables you to focus on what the customer is trying to do, not just his current problem. This gives you the opportunity to discover better, unnoticed solutions.  

This is what the “jobs to be done framework” is about. 

The Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) perspective begins with a simple but powerful idea: people do not buy products for their features, they “hire” them to make progress in their lives. Seen this way, design and development are about understanding the jobs people face, the situations that trigger them, and the outcomes they care about. JTBD offers a broad and relatively stable map of demand — the enduring reasons why people turn to solutions. 

This event will be an introduction to the JTBD framework, specifically for business analysts. It will be highly interactive and start by looking at what the jobs to be done by a business analyst are.  It will also discuss how business analysts can use it to shift their perspective from the system they are building to the customers they are trying to help. 

Bio

Al Shalloway is the founder and CEO of Success Engineering and the lead designer of Amplio. He had been a thought leader in the Agile space before the Agile Manifesto and was asked to attend its 10-year anniversary because of his work with XP, design patterns, Scrum, Lean, and Kanban. As a former gold sponsor, SPCT, and contributor to SAFe, Mr. Shalloway is familiar with the most popular Agile methods. He is also the main creator of PMI’s Disciplined Agile Value Stream Consultant workshop.