This is the first of a two-part blog highlighting application owner interviews, the benefits and the importance of conducting them without relying purely upon technical tools for the discovery.
Why do we perform interviews?
There are many benefits of performing interviews as part of any discovery excercise, but they are particularly beneficial when performing a Cloud Application Assessment from the offering within the risual portfolio and creating an Application Passport (Application Passports – What are they? – risual). Many of these benefits relate to human interaction, getting the right information from the right people and extracting tacit and, otherwise unknown, knowledge. It may be surprising to understand that organisations do not always have a central source of knowledge regards all of the applications currently on their estate. If the knowledge does exist, it has not been maintained to fullest and subsequently is outdated. Being able to collate all the findings from the discovery into a single catalogue can ultimately provide a client with a broad spectrum of information, providing a realistic summary of their estate at a certain point in time. We can build this central source of knowledge for them, whether from scratch or upon pre-existing documentation. Any pre-existing information is a great starter for ten, not only for the deliverable but it can also provide a great insight of an application, allowing for assumptions to be clarified and confirmed during the interview.
To those being interviewed, it can come across as a complex and somewhat daunting excercise, given the range of technical and non-technical responses we seek versus the levels of technical and business knowledge amongst interviewees. However, it can be boiled down to a very simple reference; Rudyard Kipling’s poem “I Keep Six Honest Serving Men” (below).
“I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.”
To put this reference into context for an interview, we seek responses for some very common questions such as;
- What, is the application?
- Why, do you use it?
- When, do you use it?
- How, do you access it?
- Where, do you access it from?
- Who, uses it?
Why do we not rely on interviews alone?
Using tools and technology are great methods to assess a client environment and highlight the current applications stored across different servers. The outputs of which can be used to compliment and cross reference evidence during the discovery however there is no substitute to extracting tacit knowledge from individuals by having a conversation. We still need to maintain the human element of discovery and communicate with those who have the relevant domain knowledge and experience with the application. This also aids business relationships and encourages trust with individuals who could be impacted by change in the future.
By having the conversation we can begin to understand things such as;
- “…we only really use this application March through to May for the financial year.”
- “…this system is no longer in use, we migrated the data to a new solution.”
- “…we never successfully implemented this after we procured it and reverted back to our old process.”
We can then begin to dig deeper on the things which we have understood, being inquisitive;
- “…how often is this application used during other times of the year?”
- “…you mentioned it was no longer in use, why is that?”
- “…so the application was procured but never used, what was the decision making process behind this?”
By gaining answers to the examples above, we are able to establish a detailed overview of how the application is used (or not in some cases) and enable realistic operational decisions to be made for the application, whether this is replacing the system altogether, migrating it to a new server or upgrading to a SaaS solution. For example, it wouldn’t be a wise decision to migrate an application during the time of year when it requires frequent access.
Additionally, we can use these conversations to further understand client needs, the voice of customer, their pain points and where ultimately we might be to assist and advise them in wider areas. For example;
- “…the supplier has a cloud solution, but we are unsure if this is right for us.”
- “…we’ve been using this system for years with no support, the people in the business who knew the most about it have since left.”
- “…it meets our needs but it is a very manual and time consuming process.”
Combining all of the above can result in some great insights and knowledge gained to feed back to a client at the end of the discovery. These are just some examples focusing on the positive outcomes but it also worth highlighting the challenges which can often be encountered when conducting this excercise. For more detail on the approach and the challenges faced, please look out for the second part of this blog.
