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Fact Finding Techniques
Posted Date: 15 Nov 2007 Resource Type: Articles/Knowledge Sharing Category: Computer & Technology
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Posted By: Ali Abbas Member Level: Silver
Rating:  Points: 5
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Fact-finding is an important activity in system investigation. In this stage, the functioning of the system is to be understood by the system analyst to design the proposed system. Various methods are used for this and these are known as fact-finding techniques. The analyst needs to fully understand the current system.
The analyst needs data about the requirements and demands of the project undertaken and the techniques employed to gather this data are known as fact-finding techniques.
Various kinds of techniques are used and the most popular among them are interviews, questionnaires, record reviews, case tools and also the personal observations made by the analyst himself. Each of these techniques is further dealt in next pages
Two people can go into the same area to gather facts and experience entirely different results. One spends weeks and gets incomplete and misleading data. The other is finished in a few hours and has complete and solid facts. This session outlines some of the things a person can do to achieve the latter. It covers:
• Getting user cooperation
• Choosing the facts to gather
• Initiating fact gathering
• Common sense protocol
• Recording technique
• Keeping the data organized
Getting Cooperation
The cooperation of operating people is crucial to fact gathering. However, if the operating people believe that the purpose of the fact gathering is to make changes in the work with the object of reducing staff, it is naïve to expect them to help. The key to obtaining cooperation is two-way loyalty and trust. We get this by commitment to developing improvements that simultaneously serve the interests of employees while they serve the interests of owners, managers and customers.
Process improvement projects should be undertaken with the object of making the company as good as it can be, not reducing staff. Of course process improvements will change the work, often eliminating tasks. This is obvious. Not quite so obvious is the fact that eliminating tasks does not have to mean reducing staff. It can mean having resources available at no additional cost to do any number of things needed by the organization, not the least of which could be further improvement work. And, no one is in a better position to improve the work than the people who know it first hand. When organizations are truly commited to their people and their people know this, their people can relax and enthusiastically commit themselves to continuous improvement.
This article is written for companies that want to capture the enormous potential of enthusiastic employees embracing new technology. They cannot accomplish this with lip service. The employees of an organization are its most valuable resource. When executives say this sort of thing publicly but then treat their people as expenses to be gotten rid of at the first opportunity, that is lip service. Resources should be maintained and utilized, not dumped. When they are dumped, trust dissolves.
Meanwhile the people and their society have changed significantly in the last few decades. The popularization of computers stands high among the factors that have contributed to recent social change. Young people are being exposed to computers early in their education. A sizeable portion of the work force is comfortable working with computers. This was certainly not so a generation ago.
Another social change that is very important to process improvement is the increasing acceptance of involving operating level employees in the improvement process. It has become rather commonplace to form teams of operating people. Along with the increasing acceptance of employee involvement has come a dramatic change in the role of the internal consultant who is learning new skills for working with teams. This article addresses the role of the facilitator who gathers facts about work processes to use with an improvement team. The facilitator follows a work process as it passes through departmental boundaries and prepares an As-is Chart. Then an improvement team made up of people from the departments involved in the process studies the As-is Chart and develops a To-be Chart. Facilitators learn how to study work processes. Facilitators are a great help as they gather and organizing the facts of work processes and guide the study of those facts by improvement teams.
What Facts to Gather
Knowing what facts you want to gather is crucial to effective fact gathering. When a people do not know what they are looking for but attempt to learn everything they can, in effect “to gather all of the facts”, they embark on endless and often fruitless effort. Knowing what facts not to gather is just as important as knowing the facts that are needed.
There is a pattern to fact gathering that is particularly helpful during process improvement. It makes use of the standard journalism questions: what, where, when, why, who and how. This pattern focuses on the information that is relevant for process improvement and avoids that which is not. How it accomplishes this is not completely obvious. It goes like this.
Distinguishing Between Facts and Skill
No matter how carefully facts are gathered, they will never match the understandings of people who have experienced the work first hand for years. Those people possess the organizational memory. They have accumulated detailed knowledge that is available to them alone. They access this knowledge intuitively, as they need it, in a fashion that has the feel of common sense. But, they cannot simply explain it to someone else.
For instance, we could ask an experienced medical doctor what he does when he visits a patient and expect a general answer like, “I examine the patient and enter a diagnosis on the patient record form.” However, if we then asked “How do you do that? How do you know what to write as the diagnosis?”, we would be asking for detail that took years to accumulate. During those years this detail has been transformed from myriads of individual facts to intuitively available skill. We simply cannot gather it.
The information that the doctor and for that matter all employees can readily provide answers the question, “What?”. The information that cannot be provided because it resides in the realm of skill answers the question, “How?”. Rather than attempt to gather the skill and settling for simplistic/superficial data we acknowledge that that information is not accessible to the fact gatherer.
However, this information is critical to effective improvement. In order to get at it, we must invite the people who have it to join in the improvement development activity. This is the fundamental strength of employee teams. They provide the organizational memory.
And, don’t think for a moment that medical doctors have skill but clerks don’t. In all lines of work there are differences of skill levels. Our object in process improvement should be to incorporate into our changes the finest skills available. So we use teams of the best experienced employees we have. To do otherwise invites superficiality.
Using the Description Pattern
The description pattern provides facts, not skills. We organize these facts on charts as effective reminders of the steps in a process. When these charts are used by people who are skilled at performing those steps, we have the knowledge we need for improvement. Therefore:
What – Answer this question at every step. This tells us what the step is and provides the necessary reminder for the team.
Where – This question deals specifically with location. Answer it for the very first step of the process and then every time the location changes and you will always know location.
When – When dealing with processes, this question generally means how long. Ask it throughout the fact gathering, making note of all delays and particularly time-consuming steps.
Who – This question deals specifically with who is performing each step. The easiest way to collect and display this information is to note every time a new person takes over.
How – This question is important but it changes the fact gathering to skill gathering. We should rarely get into it. Instead we leave this information to be provided by the team, as needed.
Why – This question is different. It is evaluative rather than descriptive. It becomes most important when we study the process for improvement but while we are fact gathering, it is premature. Just gather facts. Later as a team we will question the why of each of them.
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