"How Hard Can It Be?": Musings of Underestimation

Life and all of it's requisite activity looks so easy and straightforward from afar. 

Even the Earth, when viewed from a distance from the vantage point of outer space, looks like a smooth round ball.

A person's life-cycle progresses through predictable phases of conception, pre-birth, birth, infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, mid-life, mature adulthood, and death.

It's all so smooth and uncomplicated. Right?

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So, What's the Problem?

"How hard can it be?", is the phrase often mused by product managers and organizational leaders who drive solution design on an accelerated timetable. This utterance disavows the realities of the difficulties of rapidly designing a future state that must deliver value in order to succeed.

Designers, architects and team facilitators react to this utterance by shaking their collective heads.

Ask any business analyst. This kind of underestimation happens every day in institutions, large and small. Really.

The reality is that life, at the ground-level of personal experience, is fraught with challenges and problems even in the absence of a deadline. The institutional problem space is likewise compounded by the complexities of politics, operational climate and culture.

"The demand for accelerated change is pervasive. Responding to it requires an effective, efficient means of defining the problem space so that solution designers can create a future state solution that delivers value by actually solving the problems people are experiencing.

This is the context in which the spirit of agile design thrives."

​When organizational leadership mandates transformational change from on high at an accelerated pace, it often does so without respecting the complexities required to describe the problem space and design the solution. The resulting underestimation of effort creates a pressure cooker atmosphere for those tasked with designing and creating the future state in a hurry.

The resulting solution design efforts are staffed and funded with fewer resources with a shorter window of opportunity to define and describe the ideal future-state process design.

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What's In Your Agile Designer Toolkit?

As business analysts and solutions designers and marketers, we aspire to rise above the tangled realities of trying to enact change. We do this in a context where the realities are complex and interdependent and where tolerance for taking a lot of time to figure things out is in short supply.

So, what's it like in your world? ​What's in your agile designer toolbox? How do you approach this?

The demand for accelerated change is pervasive. Responding to it requires an effective, efficient means of defining the problem space so that solution designers can create a future state solution that delivers value by actually solving the problems people are experiencing. 

​This is the context in which the spirit of agile design thrives.

As a business analyst or solutions designer operating in this space, it requires an approach where defining the problem and designing the solution need to be done with a minimalist's acumen.

Developing an agile design perspective and related set of techniques, rituals and practices really helps in this future-state design wheelhouse.

So, I'm reaching out to my fellow practitioners. What's it like in your world? ​What's in your agile designer toolbox? How's it working for you? 

​I look forward to hearing from you.

- Chuck

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