Doculabs

 
I spend about 95 percent of my professional life at Doculabs working on strategic ECM projects, and a significant chunk of that time is spent conducting interviews with the stakeholders at the client organization The output of an effectively conducted series of interviews is usually a clear specification of where the client is with respect to ECM (the Current State), where they should go (the Future State), and explicit instructions on how to get there (the Road Map).

Many of the interviews are deliberately all over the map – figuratively and literally – but a large fraction of them are pretty well scripted and boil down to the eleven questions below.

1. Key Objectives and Business Priorities: What are the major business goals or priorities for your functional area?
2. Processes and Document Types: What are the major business processes in your functional area? What are the major document types involved in each application? What are the major information sources that you interact with – e.g. line-of-business systems, databases, etc.? What is the general level of complexity for the major work processes – e.g. number of documents, systems or people involved, approval processes, etc.?
3. Document Volumes: What is the current volume of your work product? What is the expected growth (or decline) in volume? Are there peaks and valleys in volumes? Is it challenging to handle peaks and valleys?
4. Work Styles: What is the nature of your functional area’s typical work style – e.g. solitary process, chain of approval, group collaboration, etc.?
5. Document Creation and Authoring: What is the general process for document creation or authoring? How many people in your group are involved in this process? What is your role in this process? How do you track changes made to documents? What is your role in this process? Have you ever experienced problems with tracking document versions?
6. Document Review and Approval: What is the general process for document review and approval? How many people in your group are involved in this process? What is your role in this process?
7. Tools: What are the primary tools that your group currently uses for these tasks (authoring, review, approval)? Is there any workflow automation that is currently used to streamline your document creation, modification, and approval processes?
8. Document Sharing: What are the major distribution channels for your work product – e.g. print, e-mail, web, etc.? Who needs access to your work product – e.g. others in your group, other groups in your organization, external parties, etc.?
9. Document Archive and Retention: Is there a need to archive documents after they have been created and delivered? How is this content currently archived? What are the retrieval requirements for these documents? What are the security requirements for your documents? What are the retention periods for your documents? Are you aware of any policies or procedures for document retention and disposition?
10. Major Challenges: Overall, what are the major issues or challenges you face in your current processes?
11. Ideal State: What are the big things you would like to see changed in your current processes? Are there things you would like to do in your current processes, but that are not possible in the current state?

So those are the eleven questions we ask. One note: This list is skewed toward “knowledge worker” organizations (i.e. organizations without transactional processes or production imaging and workflow). For “process worker” situations, we primarily modify questions 5 and 6 to get at the interviewee’s specific work processes.