Project Learning – II

In this post, I would try to sum up the learning of the project so far.


1. Requirements Gathering
In my understanding of the Project and in my view as a Business Analyst, the business processes have to understood completely and documented correctly. Starting from the creation of case to recording important events in the case to billing and to closure of the case. Just like after sales service for automobiles, an effective way should be documented for referring back to all cases which have been closed. Only after then a solution either for designing a workflow or updating present workflow can be accomplished in a smooth manner.
As the firm is a Law Firm, input from the developer was limited. Also, there was a lot of reluctance among the various stakeholder, especially business users, to participate in initial meetings. These led to the implementation of CRs at a later stage when the business users actually started using the workflow and gave suggestions to improve. Therefore, efforts should be put to bring all the stakeholders to the table during initial meetings. Even if they are not able to visualize a workflow, at the least they would bring what process they follow.


2. Database Designing
Not in the purview of Business Analyst, nevertheless, working on various issues and designing reports, I came across the database. Working in tandem with Database Administrator, I understood that a lot of thinking has to been given while designing the database. All data must not be stored in single table. Similarly, dependency on multiple tables should be avoided.


3. Report Designing
A lot of thought has been put in designing reports and a lot more effort in testing those reports. The present reports are bit complex as they provide a detailed report of current work and percentage of work completed. These reports are used for tracking work assigned and monitoring performance of all user. However, some simple reports could be also be designed. These simple reports serve two purposes. Firstly, these reports will help monitoring the implementation of the system. Secondly, these reports will be used by users to track their work without much hassle. Also, over a period of time, different reports are required for different purposes due to increase in business. For example, report can be designed to find out how many clients give maximum work and how many client few but complicated work. A facility should be provided to take such reports as and when required without the need for custom developing such report by development team. This is further dependent on database designing and requirement gathering, where such a requirement should be anticipated.
Further, over a period of time, data increases in the database. This increases the time taken by procedures which fetch data for generating reports. Planning on this issue and a corresponding solution should be taken into consideration at initial stages.


4. Work flow Designing and User Interface
A CR was implemented giving various options of workflow ranging from 2 steps to 8 steps. May be this could have been not thought earlier, but this choice provided in the earlier would have made users at the least to allocate the work and system could have been well received.
A workflow should be as simple as possible for use.


5. Document Retrieval
In a Law Firm, all that matters in the end are the documents. Proper means should be designed at the beginning itself to address this aspect.
In all, for designing a workflow that also includes document management, the following should be designed at the beginning. These points are the experienced by the users and decide the fate of the system
1. Easy workflow
2. Simple Reports and ability to design reports as required
3. Easy document retrieval.
4. Easy to place and remove access restrictions