OBO specializes in digitizing sales, marketing, customer service, and operations for clients. We’re a team of Technology Management Consultants, Project Leaders, Business Analysts, Marketers, and Developers. We work with our clients to optimize, migrate, implement, integrate, or manage services to support their sales, marketing, service, or operational needs.
We’ve written this article because you play a pivotal role in the success of your company and we want to hear from you in order to suggest, implement, or optimize your existing technology stack and process. We hope that this helps you understand what we do, and how we help organizations like yours.
People, Process, Technology
We’ve built a methodology to help companies like yours achieve your perfect optimized tech stack while streamlining your team’s business processes. Your company may be interested in a new tech stack or improving upon its existing tech stack in order to give you the tools to help you get more done in less time. It might also include improving upon your customer experience, increasing revenue, or operational efficiency.
We’ve already met with your Project Leaders who have shared with us, from a high level, the current state of your technology stack, processes, departmental structure, and the outcome they hope to achieve from this engagement.
The most important step in any engagement like this is getting to know you, your business process, and how work gets done. Your project leader will generally coordinate a call with you and our Client Engagement team.
The Client Engagement team’s job is to unpack all of the requirements of the organization, conduct a full needs analysis and identify areas within your technology stack for improvement. Whether you have no tech stack, are looking to optimize your existing tech stack, migrating to a new stack, or are evaluating new technology options, the requirement gathering phase is critical to the project’s success.
And because you’re the expert in what you do, you have a vital role. You’re the one on the front lines, doing the workday in and day out — and we need to hear from you about how you work, what’s working, what’s not working, and what you hope to see in the future. It’s all about people first, process, then technology.
It’s our job to compile all of those requirements into user stories that we use to determine the right course of action in regards to moving your tech stack forward. During these calls, which are generally attended by as few as 1-2 people, and no more than 5-6 people at most, it’s a free-flowing conversation and a safe space for you to provide all the ins and outs of your process — especially the parts that need some support.
It generally starts off with us asking you about your particular job function and what your day-to-day looks like. Please note, this is not the meeting to debate with your colleagues about the right or wrong way to do things, instead, we’re more interested in simply understanding how everyone works and discussing what they believe may be opportunities for improvement.
Sometimes just saying out loud what you’ve been thinking is enough to capture the requirements we need. Even if you don’t know the right answer, it’s our job to fill in the gaps of what you mean. You don’t necessarily have to prepare anything in advance, these discussions lend really well to themselves when the conversation isn’t scripted. That said, sometimes you may have already built a list of items you want to address or capabilities you wish you had, and that’s OK, feel free to bring them to the call.
The calls range from 30 minutes to an hour, they’re recorded so that we can go back, transcribe our notes, and draft all of the user stories associated with what we gleaned from our conversations. Once we complete all of the interviews/workshops with the various teams, we compile everything into our user requirements board which holistically organizes everything the technology stack will be required to handle.
From there we work with your Project Lead team to prioritize all of the requirements so we can move into Phase Two, known as Solution Engineering. This is when our team will begin solving the requirements and building a project plan. This could include optimization, implementation, managed support services, or integrations, depending on the scope of the engagement.
It’s worth mentioning, again, that — we want to hear from you. You’re the one who will be using the system in the future and this is your opportunity to be part of the development process. You provide the requirements that will drive the solution. We’re extremely excited to have the opportunity to work with you, these are easy conversations and (we hope!) will be the fun part of your day, where your insights help build the future of your organization.
