Feature

posted 15 Jun 2005 in Volume 2 Issue 1

Understanding real user needs

The concluding part of a two-part series, this article highlights the benefits of working with groups. By Richard Miller.

In the first part of this article I talked about the need to align knowledge-management (KM) programmes with the strategic needs of the organisation and the needs of users.

I also described some of the methods for using one-to-one interviews to unlock a user’s own understanding about what services, facilities and knowledge would add most value. This second part will explore some tried and tested methods for working with groups.

Tools for groups

There are myriad benefits of working with groups of users. Most notably, you can cover much more ground with groups. By working with selected groups of people you can sample the needs of the organisation much more effectively. In Vigorat, our preference is to work with a ‘diagonal slice’ of the organisation, covering different functions and different levels. Rather than talk to people from a department together, we prefer to mix them up. We find that discussing key issues with people from other functions encourages greater clarity about exactly what the problem is and what sorts of knowledge assets would help.

A second benefit comes from group members building on what others have said. Issues trigger issues and ideas trigger ideas. People find it much easier to be creative in a group setting. You get a complete set of answers from a group and you generally get a lot more depth of information than in a one-to-one interview. The only exception is where there is a single, dominant personality or a lot of strong and competitive personalities. Then you may have to split the group apart.

But group discussions are not the same as focus groups. The purpose of a focus group is to reveal people’s perceptions or feelings about a defined topic of interest. What we are trying to do here is to engage people’s expertise and creativity to uncover real needs and to imagine a future with these needs met.

There are four methods for working with groups that we have used regularly and which will always engage a group and generate useful information.

Cover stories

Cover stories are a great way to get a group to think about the future they want for themselves and their organisation.

The group task is simple – on a flipchart, draw the front cover of a magazine where the cover story is celebrating and commenting on the success of their organisation. It can be Time or Business Week, or something specifically appropriate to their industry. The cover should have a headline that encapsulates their story, a powerful image that communicates their success and some key sub-headings or quotes to fill out the story.

Then on a second sheet, briefly write the story. Where did they start from? What was their vision? How did they reach their goals? What was the journey like?

The important thing is to keep the focus on the future. What will success look and feel like? While some groups will inevitably get bogged down in specific solutions to perceived problems, try and keep them focused on what was achieved rather than how it was achieved. The how you can deal with later.

Although it might seem daunting, my experience is that a group of 8-12 people can complete this exercise within a couple of hours. Some gentle facilitation may be required to get them started, and some more at the end of the exercise to get them to stop.

I used this approach with a corporate library team and some of their key users. As they started to work, the library team wanted to go straight to solutions for what they thought the needs of the users were. We slowed things down and gave space for the users to begin to shape their story of future success and the contribution of all kinds of knowledge and information services. Gradually, the library team began to see that the user definition of success was different to the one they had been working with. A new, shared model of a successful future emerged, which resulted in the library team completely revising their strategy and work plan. A couple of years later a whole new range of services had been launched and the library team were now a valued part of the business.

Personas

Personas are a really good tool for developing a practical list of user requirements. They were developed by Alan Cooper for user interface design and other industrial design tasks1. Now they are very widely used for web and intranet development.

When you collect user requirements you typically end up with a long list of often contradictory needs. There is no real ranking of the requirements, nor are they grouped together in any logical way. They need to be re-connected with specific users trying to carry out specific tasks. Personas solve the problem.

A persona is an imaginary user who represents a larger group of users. However, a persona is not an average user. They have a specific personality and set of needs.

When you are creating a persona, the first step is to make them as concrete as possible. Who are they? What is their name and their job in the organisation? Who do they report to and at what location? How long have they been there, and what was their training and previous experience? Are they married, do they have children and what are their hobbies. Pick a photograph to represent them. Encourage the group to feel that they can get right into the mind of the persona.

Then ask the question, what are their goals? What are their responsibilities, what problems do they face? What would they like to achieve?

Finally, ask what the KM programme you are working on could do to help this user? What facilities and services would be most useful, and how should they best be delivered?

By focusing the group on the specific needs of a specific user (even an imaginary one), you get a much better insight into what capabilities will make a real difference. You also avoid the problem of requirements blurring into an amorphous mess that can’t be delivered and satisfy nobody.

A group from a pharmaceutical company choose a sales professional working out of a home office as a persona. The obvious knowledge and information needs emerged and were dealt with, but it gradually became apparent that she was lonely in her job and out of the loop. With only the occasional visit to the main office, and only the occasional sales conference to meet her peers, she felt ignored and frustrated. The group responded by designing social links into their intranet to support the field sales force. As well as providing key knowledge resources the group recommended providing plenty of two way interaction; collecting and sharing stories from the field, using the sales team for business intelligence and providing lots of who’s who information with photographs and personal stories.

In another company the group chose someone in a very small branch office as the persona. As they worked through his goals and needs, it emerged that the key unsolved problem was that new products were being developed in the centre and he would be expected to launch them, but he never exactly what the product was or when it would be delivered. He was staggering from crisis to crisis and was unable to work effectively. The group designed a simple pipeline tool that helped everyone understand where projects were in their development cycle and to adjust to the inevitable changes to specification and timescale.

In both cases these needs that would make a real difference to key user groups did not come out of the conventional requirements analysis, but from thinking about the needs of the real user represented by the persona.

As with the cover stories, creating and working with personas is a lot of fun for a group as well as providing a new way of thinking about needs that will give additional information.

Open Space Technology

Open Space Technology was developed by Harrison Owen in the 1980’s2 as a method for bringing the excitement and energy of a good coffee break to a large planning meeting or workshop. It is particularly useful when you have a large group of people, 50-100 is no problem at all, and is scarily simple.

An Open Space meeting is not a structured workshop with syndicates, break-out rooms and rapporteurs. Instead it is an entirely emergent process where the important issues are tackled by groups that self-assemble and evolve through time. As such, it has been known to scare more controlling personalities witless. They cannot believe that anything with so little structure can succeed, but it does. Time after time.

The first feature of an Open Space meeting is that it has to be a topic that matters to the organisation and that people are passionate about. If it is not an important topic, don’t use this method.

Having got your topic and a good selection of passionate people into a large room the process is:

State the problem, issue or theme that the group is going to work on. This can be done by a facilitator, or more effectively by the problem owner. Questions for clarification are encouraged, but don’t move into problem solving.
Get everyone into a large circle with a stack of paper in the centre and some pens.
Tell them that if anyone has an idea that they really want to work on, or a part of the problem they want to discuss further they should take a piece of paper, write what they want to do on the paper, read it out to the group and then stick it on the wall.
Once the ideas have dried up, the group can move the ideas and issues around, group them, merge them or abandon them. The only requirement is that nobody makes a decision about somebody else’s idea. The owner is the only person who can decide.
A group of interested people forms around each idea or cluster, takes it away and works on it.
Once each group reaches a natural end, they should write up the conclusions, recommendations, action plan or whatever is appropriate, and stop.

The process is based on four principles and one law. The principles are:

Whoever comes are the right people – don’t worry about getting the right number or the ‘right’ people. The people who care will turn up.
Whatever happens is the only thing that could have – you can’t predict what is going to happen, and if you could why would you bother with the meeting?
Whenever it starts is the right time – this is a creative process and the context and mood need to be right. It won’t necessarily start when everyone is in the room. It will start when the time is right.
When it’s over, it’s over – the participants will know when they have got as much as they can out of the meeting and there is no need to continue just because you have the room booked.

And the one law is:
The law of two feet – if you are no longer learning or contributing in the group you are part of; move on.

It sounds as if you would never get started. Who will contribute the first idea and how will the groups form? With every group I have worked with there is a brief pause after the request for ideas and issues, never more than 30 seconds, and then you risk being trampled in the rush.

What about ideas that don’t get picked up? Isn’t there a problem with owners feeling snubbed? No it’s a marketplace, and plenty of idea contributors will happily abandon them if they see a better one.

All I can say is that I have never known this method to fail. I have seen 120 people generate six well thought through KM themes for a strategy; complete with phase 1 action plans. I have seen a group of 20 develop some new ideas for organisational learning whilst on a boat trip up the Thames, and I have seen 60 people brought together in a new organisation decide how best to use their various skills and knowledge to create some new capabilities for their company.

Read Owen’s book 2 to find out how you really run an Open Space event, and give it a try. You will be astonished.

Five magic buttons

The last tool is much less exhilarating, but also a lot less scary. It’s a simple idea that works well for a small group when you are thinking about an intranet, portal or other electronic resource.

Draw a large rectangle on a flip chart with five small rectangles is a line along the bottom edge. Tell the group that this is their intranet or portal home page, and that the small rectangles are five magic buttons. When you press these buttons they will do anything you want. Anything at all; there are no limits. Then you ask them what the magic buttons do?

When you get a suggestion, ask why they would like a button to do that. Use the old TQ method of asking why five times to see what comes out. Even for the most frivolous starting suggestion you will often find a real need lurking somewhere behind the humour.

For example, in one group the conversation went like this:

Group Member 1:

I’d like a button that gives me two weeks holiday!

Group Member 2:

No! Gives my boss two weeks holiday!

Facilitator:

Why would you do that?

GM 2:

Because at the end of each quarter I have to prepare these reports for him and I hate it!

Facilitator:

What’s wrong with the reports?

GM 2:

Well. All the information is scattered around a number of systems and I end up cutting and pasting stuff for hours. It’s a nightmare!

Facilitator:

If you had an automatic report writing tool that did all that manual stuff would it help?

From a humourous comment to a real need in three steps.

There are lots of other tools that you can use, but these are my personal favourites. They will help get the best out of a group discussion, and get below the surface issues to some real user needs that will connect your KM programmes with the engine room of your organisation.

References

The Inmates are Running the Asylum, A Cooper, SAMS, Indianapolis, 1999
Open SpaceTechnology: a user’s guide H Owen, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, 1997

Dr. Richard Miller is co-founder and director of intranet and knowledge management consultancy, Vigorat.