When was the last time your process consultant sat down with the little people on the front line? They should be spending more time down in the trenches than in the boardroom with you!

While I was contracted to a Major Australian Financial Services Organisation, an unrelated change happened: they introduced The Big New Application for the customer service droids taking inbound calls. It has just been completed, and the first team leaders were being trained.

In the very first session, one of the team leaders asked, “The most common call we get is about X and how it relates to Y. How do we deal with that?”

A long silence followed.

Yes, that’s right, no-one had bothered asking end users what actually happened in their job. And no-one had involved them in testing. Everything had been created from an idealised workflow — which simply didn’t exist in the real world.

[P.S. No, you don't need to stay current with your acronyms. You should only mention then sarcastically and expose them for the BS that they are.]