Digging for Treasure
The Digging
Once a basic understanding of the business was obtained, the details were ready to be
flushed out. Before beginning to collect the details, the objectives and questions needed
to be defined. The project team wanted to keep the big picture in scope and hence limited
their analysis to any activity or piece of information that has to do with a distributed asset
(pipes, valves…). The project team also had the following goals in mind:
- document all business processes that use spatial data
- create a data dictionary of the desired state
- perform a CRUD analysis at the entity level
- identify opportunities for optimizing existing processes
- document required functionality for anything associated with distribution assets
More specifically questions like the following also needed to be answered:
- What information is required to describe the distribution assets?
- What business functions are associated with distribution assets?
- What people are involved in the above mentioned business functions?
- What information do they need to do the above mentioned business functions?
- What existing computer systems support the business functions?
- Etc.
The specific questions helped the team understand what pockets of information (people,
information (data), business functions, existing computer systems, etc.,) needed to be
gathered and what types of relationships between those pockets of information needed to
be gathered (i.e. activities linked to people).
In order to collect the information, the project team initiated user workshops based on the
business processes and invited cross-functional groups to attend. Twenty-seven
workshops were completed to gather information on business functions, people, and
information required by certain people to perform a certain task. The information
gathered in the workshops was then placed in a database tool to help with organization
and analysis.
Due to the cross-functional groups that attended the workshops, communication was
improved. Not only did participants learn what others were doing, but also they began to
understand why they were required to do certain things, i.e. data gathering. This
improved communication continued into the workplace, and the different groups have
begun to work together as a team.
Through the workshops, other “quick wins” were also found and implemented. These
ranged from providing better data access to users to consolidating data sources.
The Dusting
Upon completion of the workshops, the post processing began. The information gathered
in the workshops had to be consolidated and organized. Throughout the workshops,
participants would use different terms for the same item and would describe their tasks in
different ways. These all had to be consolidated so as to avoid duplicates. During this
process some assumptions were made which will need to be validated with the original
participants. Other information had to be gathered outside of the workshops. This
included information such as existing computer systems, data sources, etc. Also, some of
the information had to be created, i.e. automated functions, logical data model entities.
These also will be validated with the users.
To speed up the data gathering during the workshops, the project team allowed for
references to forms, drawings, and maps instead of the information directly. During the
post-processing phase, interviews were held with users as to what the exact information
on the form, drawing or map was being created, used, reviewed or maintained by the
user. If this information had been gathered during the workshops, they would have likely
taken a whole workday each, instead of the average 3-hour session.
At this time, the project team is still in the middle of this post processing. Some of the
information still needs to be consolidated and organized. The next step is to validate the
results with the users.
