From the course: Agile Requirements Foundations

Outcome-focused

From the course: Agile Requirements Foundations

Outcome-focused

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- In the past working on requirements, you may have focused on getting the requirements document complete, or making sure the technology works right. Or even, perhaps, focused on defining process details. As an agile business analyst, the focus changes. It changes to be outcome focused over anything else. Agile teams work fiercely on valuable outcomes over everything else. It's no easy task, as pressure on speed and features and quality rule most of the team's dialogue. Without a focus on outcomes, teams produce lots of features, but these features may not produce actual business outcomes. This creates waste and doesn't spend the organization's money well. Agile BAs are front and center when the team needs to understand outcomes of the big picture and the detailed levels. BAs facilitate team thinking in terms of design trade-offs, options, and alternatives. They help the team think about valuable outcomes of every option. For each iteration, release, and feature, the team should be striving for an outcome rather than how many requirements they've met, or how many tasks they complete. Too many teams are far too focused on staying busy and being busy, rather than producing outcomes. Ideally, outcomes are defined at the strategic portfolio and product level, the road map level, the release level, and the iteration level. Let's look at an example of what's meant by a focus on outcomes. Back to our online coffee store example and their payments functionality. The team that's building the app would like to increase the usage of the app, the frequency of usage, the number of users and convert more product views to purchases. If this team is implementing a notifications feature, it's easy to see that some notifications will help these goals more than others. As an agile BA, the focus is on working with the team to slice the notification feature into smaller increments of value and help the product owner prioritize each piece based on the outcomes. This is done by analyzing and facilitating dialogue with the team about which notifications are aligned to the outcomes. It's also a best practice for teams to organize their releases and iterations to outcomes. Agile BAs can break large outcomes into smaller goals for each iteration. An iteration goal that would align to these larger ones would be something like, implement the notification of an item left in the cart for more than 24 hours. This goal is aligned to a higher level product outcome of getting users to visit the site more often. So the focus is value and value comes from outcome thinking. Helping the team understand how outcome thinking leads to delighted users. This inspires an outcome based approach to requirements.

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