From the course: Agile Requirements Foundations

Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA)

From the course: Agile Requirements Foundations

Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA)

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[Woman] "We are living in a VUCA world." Have you heard this before? If not, no alarm. VUCA is a term being used today to address the increasingly dynamic landscape of today's business and technology environment. VUCA is an acronym that stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. It's a VUCA world that makes agile and attractive approach for many organizations and initiatives. Let's look at each piece and how it impacts our work with requirements. Let's start with Volatility. Requirements are changing quicker than we can define and discover them let alone build solutions that meet them. So how do we know that what we're building won't be outdated by the time we're done? Well this is a very relevant concern. Some of this churn is due to market volatility. When industry conditions change frequently, like commodity prices or regulatory policies. This volatility can create significant disruption to priorities and requirements. As agile BAs we need to be ready for changing requirements. Next is Uncertainty. With industries changing so quickly it's a very uncertain world for us to work in. We don't know what we don't know. And in most cases, we don't know when our customers needs will change and what will be important to them in the future. Our competitors reactions to markets are unknown too. So how do we build products to meet customer needs in such an uncertain landscape? The key is just-in-time requirements based on real data and real-time data. Using data insights to determine and understand what's next helps us pivot to address changes quickly. Okay, let's look at Complexity. You would not be mistaken to think that organizations, products, and customers are becoming more complex. There are so many interconnected parts and variables, and this requires us to understand how to define, build, and deliver in layers. This way we can adjust the complexity as we go. For agile BAs it's all about delivering and learning at the same time. When BAs define the smallest layer required to add value the team can deploy or experiment and learn quickly, also known as MVP. As a BA, you contribute to the definition of what to build and how to define small pieces, broad or deep layers. So then the team can learn to explore and simplify complexity. It's easy to get overwhelmed by complexity and critical that we understand which details matter and which don't. And last Ambiguity. New products, new markets, new customers, mergers, acquisitions, and many other unknowns make requirements quite ambiguous, yet teams are expected to deliver faster. Under high amounts of ambiguity the best approach is to quickly hypothesize and experiment. Then learn from the experiments and keep moving forward. This requires agile BAs to have analysis skills to define hypotheses and experiments with a goal of learning what's valuable to customers. The goal is to cut through ambiguity quickly. We do this by taking a product idea and looking at the context to develop a hypothesis related to the desired design. Then we outline the conditions we believe need to be present to create value. Next define the experiment to test out the hypothesis and conditions. These are quick experiments with action and learnings that quickly turn into more experiments or usable product. VUCA; Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity push us to work, co-create, and learn in nimble ways. With an appreciation of VUCA and it's relationship to requirements in business analysis you can bring more agility to your work.

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