Relationship Building Through Process Interviews
When trust is high, the dividend you receive is like a performance multiplier, elevating and improving every dimension of your organization and your life.... In a company, high trust materially improves communication, collaboration, execution, innovation, strategy, engagement, partnering, and relationships with all stakeholders. - Stephen Covey
Doing initial interviews and discovery calls is one of my favorite phases when capturing a process. It helps me put the pieces of the puzzle together to understand the big picture of why something happens and who is connected across the board 🧩🤔. This keeps the details alive and shows how the process happens. What’s a better way to do that through endless hours of stakeholder interviews and direct observations 😝
Why are interviews and direct observations important? Relationship building 🤝 These methods are a great way to a) Introduce yourself 👋, b) learn about the stakeholders work style for smoother interactions in the future 🤓, and c) build trust 💃🕺.
Some prefer having a few people on a call. However I prefer speaking with each person per role to tap into diverse expertise and different perspectives, yielding multiple benefits 📚:
👩💻I get more out of it: Different people will share different information with you. In a few discovery sessions I had recently while capturing a process with an operations team, I asked 3 people the same questions in different instances. Each one gave me a baseline of an answer with a few very critical differences. One expressed work that creates lag time, another touched on sales needed to send more information as a bottleneck, and the last one explained that they don’t do the process at all as how the baseline is currently structured. Not to go too far into it, but if I had all 3 stakeholders in the same room, I think the answers and the conversations would’ve been very different. Now that I have my answers, it is a matter of streamlining across the board and hopefully automating some of it!
👍Buy-in: Because sometimes there’s a lot of differences on how stakeholders think about a process, it is easier to slowly have 1:1 interviews at the beginning of capturing a process, so the stakeholders have a sense of ownership. In turn it is easier to drive collaboration once more interviews happen with more people.
🤩Clarity: IMO interviewing people at different times shows how they do the same task in either very different ways or slightly different ways. By having one interview session with all stakeholders, it is most likely that people will share general information and it will get harder to go into the details of how each person does. In addition, sometimes one or 2 people participate more than others, which makes it difficult to really grasp different perspectives
👩🏫Organization: It keeps you and everyone else organized! Oftentimes people start deviating from the AS-IS process and start dreaming into what a future state a process could be. This then creates a whole discussion of future design. Of course, in these cases, there is a parking lot for questions and stakeholders need to be railed back to the main conversation. IMO, when having a 1:1 it is easier to hold future enhancement designs and to keep moving the conversation with the current state process.
In a nutshell, Stephen Covey couldn’t have said it better - When trust is high, the dividend you receive is like a performance multiplier, elevating and improving every dimension of your organization and your life.... In a company, high trust materially improves communication, collaboration, execution, innovation, strategy, engagement, partnering, and relationships with all stakeholders. - Stephen Covey
