Box to Box "L'Architetto"

Emerging Business Need

Pursuing a digital transformation journey toward construction intelligence, firms try to digitize their business processes to align with their strategies and experiences in doing business. During these digitization endeavors, they are confronted with two bitter choices; whether to adopt entire digital systems that approach general practices, although they may be proven to follow the best practices, they still don't align with the organization's experiences and force the firm to adjust their strategies and adapt approaches to be able to use those digital systems resulting in ruin their strengths, resilience, and identity. Or to start customizing and revamping the digital systems processes to suit their approaches; indeed, if firms lack the required understanding throughout this adjusting journey will only distort the outcomes and wind up somewhere else, get lost, and be deformed.

Luckily, those two bitter choices gave rise to emerging box-to-box players with stretched capabilities leading the transformation journey and revealing the third and optimal option. With the comprehensive ability to strategize and architect the digital system processes properly to take advantage of the firm's distinguished experiences in doing business alongside the new capabilities and best practices adopted with the latest digital systems that eventually deliver the right fit that nurtures the construction intelligence.

What is Box to Box all About

A box-to-box term is an adopted term from football sport; it describes players who can serve various roles, span over, and run a lot up and down the pitch from one box to the other; similarly, in the construction intelligence and digital transformation pitch. They orchestrate the transformation process, empower agile mindsets and methodologies, foster analytic thinking, answer complex business questions, adopt a data-driven decision culture and pave the road for it with various tools. Once the need for a change is triggered, whether a new methodology is to be adopted to achieve a particular vision or a business gap is determined, they now have the ball, and a time for Tike-Taka should take place. The rest of this article should illustrate how to become a box-to-box player. By flying over the roles once you have received the ball from one box to another.

First Things First, Cope Ahead "Do your Business Analysis Homework."

With a thorough revisiting of the current business processes, identify the pains and needs, and determine how it ruins the business and what should take place to reach the optimum solution and deliver a higher value so that you build your business case and process that are ready to be approached with other business stakeholders to be tested, adjusted and got matured.

Building up by Engaging "Users, Involved Departments Representatives, and Experts."

?With paramount importance, comes this step, as you are not building a solution for yourself; it is organizational processes that affect most users in one way or another. A thorough understanding of your customers and their needs is always the start; it is not about building a product and promoting it; conversely, it is about understanding your customers and building a product that fits them, in addition to that psychological effect that fosters their commitment later once the solution is published and adopted. To further stretch the field, engage the quality assurance to start reaching the processes' articulation that each one now should adopt.

It's your Winger's Turn Now "Develop User Stories and Design the User Journeys."

One of the vital crafts that distinguish the box-to-box player is the ability to convert what is running inside the business users' heads to the developers behind the scene. A bilingual tongue and mind that converts complicated processes into detailed user stories that the developers can deal with. As well as that, design the user journey that facilitates the user experience inside the solution; don't waste the cook for a spoon of salt. Trust me, users' experience is more than a spoon, "not a friendly user experience" comes on the top of the list of reasons for failed solutions regardless of how much value they provide.

Get tired! Not yet! In a box-to-box style, it's all about stamina! The best is yet to come, and here is one of the exciting roles, The Agile Part.

The Product Owner and False Number 9 Striker "Scrum Master."

On paper, you should play only one role, "a product owner," which alone, is a hell of stuff. First, you will get this shock by the competing methodologies "Waterfall and Agile" as those minds raised in the construction industry have this built-in motherboard of waterfall understanding for the management that dominates every managerial knowledge and perspective, but this is not going to work in this industry. With this fast-paced, ambiguous, and always-changing industry, you have to install the new motherboard of agile, and congrats, you have now become a hybrid one. Because you still shouldn't get rid of the waterfall to keep this understanding for the construction industry and its management approach, as this is your investment foundation, while adopting the agile one to learn how to incrementally deliver value with what is known as sprints. It is not your responsibility; however, you still have to play the scrum master role. Whether un-officially, that's why I called a "false number 9" striker as such involvement with the developers will not only get your hands dirty with the code but also develop a better understanding of their minds, how they conceive things and the logic behind, and most importantly, to be equipped with a quantified realizing of how they can develop in one sprint which called sprint points, knowing your partners well will make you a better product manager and vice-versa. And don't forget o train your bilingual tongue.

Mr. Tester and Implementer

Based on construction experience, business analysis, and agile understanding, you should by now have managed to develop the right solution and look forward to starting the next phase. Starting by testing the deliverables by setting the appropriate test scenarios that should cover all possible scenarios that the application might go through. Concurrent scenarios should be considered as well as other complex scenarios that ensure you have received the solution you designed for.

Ready for go life! Let's go, then. Prepare the solution' manual, responsibility assignment matrix (RAM), and presentation materials that should be attractive. It's your child, and is taking his first steps to life, and all the hard times should now pay off as long as you prepared it well.

Intelligence Box Playmaker

Asking the right business questions that need to be answered and architecting the data sets to have schemas that resiliently provide all your business questions' required data that reveal the answers is an amazing art and the start. Followed by extracting the data from its sources, transforming it to suit their purposes, and eventually loading them to the BI tools to empower this fox waiting in the box.

Fox-in-The Box

As in football, all team effort is jeopardized to failure if it doesn't find this kind of striker who translates the efforts in building up into goals. This is not the football norm; it is the universe's nature. Similarly, the effect of dashboards supplements all the exerted efforts and gives them meaning. Provided with extensive knowledge and understanding of what businesses are all about and what it takes to determine the right decision, and fueled with data-driven-decision making rationales and approaches, our fox starts to answer the business questions with state-of-art visuals that provide the convoluted questions' answers from the first glance. It depicts the holistic summaries all the way, drilled down to the lowest details that are architected wisely and smartly to keep the focus and rhythm. Boom! Goal! You win!

Oops! VAR check-in, and here is the reason: foxes know that although glamourous dashboards alone might be good, it is not enough! It needs to be accompanied by KPIs and, ultimately, thresholds associated with a preset of corrective and proactive actions that strategize decision-makers ways. They just pull the trigger! Here is the value proposition.

After this epic, foxes continue their data analysis to get their insights, sharpen their swords on the industry trends, and reflect those gains by revisiting the organization's norms.

Last but not least, keep your ears open effectively for users' feedback all the way running from Box to Box. It is always the customer-centric that pays off.

#Architecting_Construction_Intelligence #Digital_Transformation #Business_Intelligence #The_Journey #Box_to_Box

This mini article highlighted the business need and the vital roles the box-to-box players play in achieving transformation successes and obtaining fruitful construction intelligence.

To know more about The Journey, and Where Do you Stand to Gain The Biggest Bang for the Buck?