Gain clarity in your organization

We are often asked what we do. Here, it is in all its glorious and gory detail, perhaps enough to bring tears to your eyes. Tears of joy, we assume.

TL;DR: We involve everyone in a project from the start, clearly outline existing processes, conduct user research to understand needs, and then create and test new ways of organizing information to improve how things work.

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Ask what others in your organization need from this work. You never know until you ask. At the start of a project, we outline who the stakeholders are (or who needs to be consulted). We outline whether we’ll do interviews or a stakeholder alignment workshop. Again, we set the purpose, outcome, and goal of these activities.

We give clear instructions for who should be invited and how; what technology to use; when it will happen; how long it will take. We write up our findings and can present a summary back to those interviews. It says, “We heard you!”

Asking others what they need from our project helps generate new ideas. At the very least, it’s a great way to engage in change management activities. Tell people what’s happening, ask them what they need, then reflect back to them what they said.

Learn how we do stakeholder engagement.

Often we hear, “We want to make the process better, we just don’t know how.” The secret to business process improvement isn’t (just) inviting in an expert who will magically change things. The secret is to know what your process are now so that you can change them.

In our business process modeling, we work with stakeholders to uncover what the current tasks in the process are, who is doing the tasks, when the hand-offs occur, and what the result is. Collaborating with stakeholders is a great way to get input from everyone and highlight inconsistencies.

Our collaboration process involves one-on-one interviews as well as stakeholder workshops. At the end of the modeling process, you’ll know what the process is, what is not working for you, and ways you can address these issues.

Read about our process for business process modeling.

Domain modeling, or conceptual data modeling, helps clarify what things are important to your organization and what you want to track about the things that are important. However, language is contentious. One of the most contentious meetings we ever had was around a label for a field!

With domain modeling, you get clarity around what is important to you and other stakeholders. You also define what these things mean, and what you want to know about them. We take you through that process.

The process for domain modeling is very similar to process for business process modeling. Instead of focusing on activities, we focus on the “things” in those activities.

User research is not to be neglected on our projects. We talk to users to ask them what they need to do and what they’re having trouble doing. We can do surveys, user interviews, workshops, and consolidate this all into findings, personas, and user journeys.

When we go through this with you, we create an overarching user research plan. You know what we plan to do, based on your available time and budget. For each activity, we outline the purpose, outcome, and goals. We discuss who should be invited and how; what technology to use; when it will happen; how long it will take.

Read more on our approach to user research.

How do you get from here to there? How do you consolidate all the research into a cohesive whole?

Once we finish all the research, we methodically go through the findings to identify findings, whether positive or negative. We want to keep doing those positive things. How do we address the negatives? The things that aren’t work? We collaborate to create opportunities to solve these problems, then report out on these opportunities.

We’ll create a strategy statement for what you want to accomplish in your information management solutions. Insofar as possible, we’ll identify tasks to achieve these solutions and place them on a roadmap.

With all the user research in hand, we can create a detailed persona and user journey for your information landscape.

We take the tasks, the challenges, and topics that people want to know about and consolidate them into one area. We then review it as a team and with the larger organization to get feedback.

This is where the rubber hits the road. Based on all the research we’ve done, we create a new information structure, metadata model, and the supporting taxonomies.

What we call these things depends on the kind of information we’re working with. If we are trying to redesign a large website, we would create a site map, content models with the metadata needed, and the taxonomy.

If we’re working in a different kind of information repository or content repository, we would create a conceptual data model that illustrates how all the “things” are related and what we want to know about those things. These are often referred to as entity relationship diagrams, although our work doesn’t go into as much depth as an ERD does.

We test our work with users and stakeholders, revise, and ensure you know how these information structures work so you can revise them in the future.

Read more about information architecture. We also have articles on content audits, information architecture deliverables, and card sorting.

We thought by now things would be clear as mud! It’s a lot to take in. Don’t worry, we can talk about the process, and you can ask questions as we go through the work. Why? Because it’s important for you to understand what is happening, how it’s happening, and the long term value.