Proposal
All wedding planners are business analysts, and maybe all business analysts could become wedding planners. I might be blowing my own trumpet here being a BA and planning my wedding, but I've probably used more direct BA skills in the last 6 months than I have in any other non-work activity over the last 10 years. Just like a software delivery project we've gone through a discovery phase, vendor selection, set expectations on budget, quality and timeframes, prioritised tasks, included key milestones and (my personal favourite) have a Kanban board to keep track of progress.
If we break down some of the top-level components there are huge similarities between what we would do as BA's forming a project, and how we started planning for the big day:
Project Area | Wedding Context |
|---|---|
Stakeholders | Vendor selection, guests & family members |
Approach | Church, registry office, elope, destination wedding? |
Target Date | When do we want it to be, and what do we think is realistic time wise? |
Budget | How much, and where to prioritise? |
Risks | Any immediate risks, appetite for risk when making decisions for the day? |
Quality | Where do we want to validate quality (food?) and where are we less concerned about quality level? |
Current State | What do we know, what do we think we know, what do we have no idea about? |
Constraints | What legal requirements do we need to adhere to? |
Biscuit break: what we've essentially done here is form a project initiation document (PID, one-pager, high-level scope - whatever name you want to use). Your involvement in high-level scoping activities may differ depending on your organizational structure, seniority and experience level and how your team are approaching projects - but as a BA you'll naturally pick up potential risks or nuggets of business process knowledge that should be factored into these types of documents. The earlier requirements, risks and potential break-points for a project are discovered the quicker they can be reviewed and resolved by stakeholders and/or the delivery team.
The Bridal Backlog
So we've built our initial set of requirements, a rough budget and looked at where we need to learn more. Now we move into a planning phase to understand what we can start, want to start and needs to start given our target date. Without knowing it or actually documenting it, I'd suggested a dependency mapping exercise to help us with our prioritization. In reality we could have started with any element and made things work, but to help with our vendor selections (catering, band, photographer etc.) and being able to send our first stakeholder communications ("Save the Date" cards) it was clear we had a dependency on the venue - priority item #1.
Similar to projects where a system integrator, consultancy firm or software provider need to be selected we built our own mini "Pugh Matrix" (and she still wants to marry me!). For those unfamiliar with the approach, we look at the characteristics of a venue then rank them in importance:
Criteria | Importance |
|---|---|
Location | 1 |
Cost | 2 |
Accommodation Options | 5 |
Size/Capacity | 4 |
Look & Feel | 3 |
After viewing each venue we score the criteria from 1-5 and in theory we should end up with a score indicating which is the best fit for us. Choosing a venue is obviously an emotionally charged decision so we knew this approach would be used as a guide and if we saw the 'right' place for us we could potentially flex on other elements.
Biscuit break: when we have stakeholders on a project that want everything with bells and whistles using a prioritisation approach to find out what is perceived as the most important will help both them and the project delivery team understand where to focus efforts. This is particularly useful within an agile environment where delivering value and delivering it as a priority are more commonplace compared to traditional waterfall or 'big bang' implementation approaches.
The remaining high-level requirements which are dependent on the venue decision start to become prioritised based on schedule and complexity. At this point our spreadsheet morphed from high-level requirements into a tracker for each of our requirement areas - potential suppliers, associated costs, additional requirements we're picking up along the way. Nearly everyone we spoke to about the wedding in the first couple of months would remind us of something that wasn't on our list yet!
From "To-Do" to "I Do"
Our backlog was growing, flicking between excel tabs became cumbersome and a loss of version control when one of us shared the file as an attachment rather than the live document link was a sign we needed to up the ante here. To address this, our wedding kanban board was born! Now we can see each task, what state it is in, any due dates, any sub-tasks and (assuming we keep comments up to date) what the latest action on that task was. Using the board it's easy for us to do a "state of play" review whenever we need, make sure tasks are in the appropriate columns and make sure the tickets queued up are in the right order we need. A few times we've re-prioritised off the back of a board review and brought something forward because we've found that it needs more urgent attention than other tasks.
Biscuit break: Kanban boards help to visualise work to be done, in-progress and how it is flowing through end to end. Simple boards can show to-do, doing, and done, more complex can include full workflow steps including anything that's blocked and needs immediate attention. Although more commonly found in agile project management approaches, Kanban boards can help track work at a high-level when executing projects with a defined scope and end-date to make sure the throughput is aligning with the required schedule.
Like every project there are changes in requirements, unforeseen risks to evaluate and scheduling conflicts to navigate - wedding planning appears to be no different. However, using some business analysis 'tricks of the trade' we can do exactly what we do for our projects - scope appropriately, communicate regularly, highlight risks and dependencies, and keep priority items at the forefront of the plan.
As we enter the final few months before the wedding we'll start to see how well our plan has worked and where any last minute requirements drop in!