Before Asking the “Five Whys,” Ask these “Five Whats”
Why Ask the “Five Whats?”
Asking “five whys” has become a popular technique for business analysts to discover assumptions, business rules, or implicit requirements. It’s essential for understanding requirements, a key business analysis tenet.
Sometimes the “five whys” reveal a requirement based on irrelevant or obsolete business needs. What can business analysts do to create requirements focused on the right needs? They can ask these five “what” questions:
What is the business goal?
What does the organization need from a solution to achieve that goal?
What should the solution retain from an incumbent solution?
What benefits will the solution bring to the organization?
What business outcomes does the org expect from the solution?
Let’s explore each of these in more detail.
What is The Business Goal?
Organizations set goals to meet ongoing demands for improvement. Their goals and values provide the foundation for business analysis. For example, Salesforce wants to “bring companies and customers together” with trust and customer success as its highest values. Its solutions enable organizations to improve relationships with their customers or donors around the world. These solutions must be highly available everywhere while keeping customers’ data private to build and sustain trust, their highest value. A business analyst working for Salesforce should challenge any requirement that puts trust at risk.
What Does the Organization Need?
Specifically, what does the organization need from a solution to achieve a business goal? For example, a company wants to improve its products and services through customer feedback. In the past, it has randomly received feedback, relying on social media and stories from the sales team. The company wants to provide an online forum for customers to share what they need from its products and services. Customers can see each other’s feedback and rate it, like Salesforce’s IdeaExchange. The ratings provide a measure of each feedback item’s value.
The organization needs a solution for customers to easily submit feedback, browse other customers’ feedback, and rate it as simply as possible. The organization expects product managers to respond to the feedback within a specified time. If a feedback item does not get a response, the solution will escalate it to management. The organization also wants to track feedback rating trends.
These needs pertain to the solution’s role in improving products and services through customer feedback.
What Incumbent Needs Should the Solution Fulfill?
When an organization gets excited about a new solution, its stakeholders can overlook needs filled by their incumbent (existing) solution. If they do not discover these needs, the new solution will have a functional gap that could render it unusable. The business analyst should research every need and dependency met by the incumbent solution, determine if the new solution should fill those needs, and create requirements from them.
The new solution may use capabilities from the incumbent solution. For instance, the customer feedback solution could use existing customer registration and authentication for access. Doing so gives registered customers access to the feedback forum as soon as it launches.
Fulfilling incumbent needs and dependencies contributes to complete requirements, avoiding functional gaps and user disappointment.
What Benefits Will the Solution Provide?
The answer to this question expresses the solution's value. It resists the temptation to build speculative features detached from business benefits. For example, the customer feedback solution will provide the organization with high-quality firsthand feedback, enabling management to gauge demand for new products and features. It will also make sure they stay on top of customer feedback by escalating neglected feedback items.
What Outcomes Does the Organization Expect?
Specifically, what business outcomes does the organization expect from the solution? The answers help the business analyst curate needs into requirements. The expected outcomes contributing to the business goal become requirements.
For instance, the organization expects these outcomes from the customer feedback solution:
Straightforward feedback forum registration and access
Encourage browsing other customers’ feedback
Elicit ratings and comments
Minimize feedback duplication
Provide real-time reporting of feedback trends
Escalate feedback items without a response after a specified time
If discovery surfaces other outcomes, the business analyst captures and defers them to other projects.
What’s the Bottom Line?
Answering the “five what” questions yields requirements well-grounded in business value. The answers clarify:
Which business outcomes should become requirements
The requirements’ value to the organization
Incumbent needs that casual discovery could have missed
The needs a solution should fulfill to achieve a goal
The business goal focusing the requirements
Asking the “five what” questions provides a business value context for asking the “five whys.”