How to Articulate Business Value Effectively

Let’s understand ‘value’.

Following is a survey summary of what a focus group understand as value:

• Meaningful and increasing potential
• Upward change or growth
• Highest perception of something
• What is gained at the end of a deal
• Different for different context — varying perceptions
• Its ability to operate individually and its impact on the whole
• A sustained property

It seems like there are two levels of evaluation being done on an entity to determine it’s value.

1. Its innate constant
2. Its ability to adapt

How to start articulating value?

Context of the audience:

1. Identify the audience
2. Identify their knowledge base
3. Understand their biases
4. Know their aspirations

Idea positioning wrt the context:

1. Map how far your idea is from the audience context
2. Identify the motivations of the audience that aligns and doesn’t align with your idea

Storytelling

1. Show the the audience how your idea might work for them
2. Use tools and techniques creatively to tell a story that hits the core psyche

Value articulation is essentially a conversation tool between to parties where they are trying to sync into each others’ value system and making key decisions in a collaborative manner.

Figure 1: Nature of value articulation.

The nature of the articulation may vary from ‘abstract’ at one end to ‘literal’ on the other. Some examples of abstract value articulation is branding, digital currency and social level badges. While, evaluation reports, mass and soil quality are some examples of literal value markers, as seen in Figure 1. Usually, abstraction, when done rightly, helps in making the conversation more universal and inclusive while the literal articulation often limits the conversation points to unique and specific context.

How to choose a style?

Firstly, understand what kind of narrator’s role you have. The style of articulation would vary with the personal context of the narrator apart from the factor of who the audience is. The style would have to vary as one’s role changes from a consultant, to a teacher, to a parent, to a spouse. Imagine explaining to your football-fanatic spouse the cost benefit analysis of watching a game in another timezone versus actually playing at the local football ground.

How to collaborate and gather insights?

For consultants, there are various ideation templates available on Mural and Miro that can be customised for collaborative sessions. The idea is to be mindful of the current situation and context and what changes a solution can bring forth once it’s introduced into the context.

Figure 2: Collaborating on a board to gather insights for value articulation.

Figure 2 shows a template that I have often found useful to understand what value the end users and internal stakeholders are looking for in a solution. The left section is to understand the current scenarios and problems. The middle section is for solutions that may help and the right section is to capture the users’ desirable change. Most of the stakeholders will not be able to articulate the last ‘outcome’ section where one needs to capture what can the persona finally do now, what can they avoid doing and what has changed positively or negatively in their environment. As a moderator or a key insights person in the project one needs to keep listening for these pointers and filling the stickies organically as it’s not that easy to articulate the value of a solution. It also takes time to contemplate upon the real change that an idea or solution can bring about.

How to present the solutions and their impact?

In an agile delivery environment, one can start by collating all the stories and features that are yet to be or have already been delivered. The key features can be extracted from this exhaustive list to articulate what really is being implemented to bring forth change. The order of presenting these features also illustrates the key user journey in a more structured manner. These key features can be given a broader theme or domain for easy recall and reference.

Figure 3: Value articulation of solution approach for National Library Board (Singapore).

Figure 4: Business value articulation of user journey for Jugalbandi, an AI based public document organiser

In Figure 3, for the National Library Board of Singapore, this is labelled as ‘key services’ and in Figure 4, for Jugalbandi, it’s called ‘key actions’ in context of the specific project. The last section is where the business value and impact is articulated in a succinct, meaningful way. There are many aspects to what can be mentioned under impact (created or projected), it could range from increase is revenue, adoption etc. to change in product perception and ease of use.

Organisation design

While planning programs to bring forth positive change and a more holistic employee experience, one can detail out the key touch points for each milestone, and then thoughtfully articulate the user’s experience goals after those touchpoint interactions.

Figure 5: Blueprint framework for planning org programs and articulating their experience goals.

Experience goal is the desirable after-thought (thinking) that the persona should leave with after going through the program. This can also become the metrics for measuring the qualitative goals of the program as shown in the Figure 5 blueprint framework.

Figure 6: Key touchpoints and thinking for cultivation program.

For example, as shown in Figure 6, while planning for cultivation as a program, one of the key touchpoint is the employee’s interaction as a performance partner to enable another fellow employee in various capacities and help them grow. At the end of this interaction whether its a single one or over a period of time, the performance partner should feel that they were able to remove the blockers for a fellow Thoughtworker to help them move ahead in their journey. If through surveys and analysis, its found that the performance partners don’t think that that’s happening, then appropriate steps can be taken by the program owners at the backend office to improve that experience.

Impact of value articulation

1. Aligns everyone to a common goal.
2. The narrative can run through as a design principle at early stages of product ideation and can continue right upto the marketing strategy to communicate the value to end customers.

Fig. 7: Initial storyline

Fig. 8: Public promotional story

Alt Z, a feature that I had created while working in the Samsung UX Lab, is an example of value articulation trickling down from initial internal story (Figure 7) and finally landing up as the marketing story (Figure 8). The target segment was mid-tier mobile users in India and their need to use mobile phones as a shared device was being catered to. The key problem being solved was the dual need of a personal device to be used publicly sometimes, a typical Indian scenario. The narrative to explain the problem and the solution value was internally called ‘surprise-guest-mode’.

It went like this — imagine you are chilling in your messy home and suddenly a guest arrives; wouldn’t it be nice if your home was smart enough to get that and magically re-arrange itself to make it more guest-friendly, without them knowing it? Now with our artificial intelligence capability, imagine that a possibility on your phone.

The scenario, the problem, the solution, the impact, everything got conveyed all at once. This illustrates how effective storytelling can enable easy alignment of the key insight to internal stakeholders and how the same narrative can reach out to the customers to make the solution more meaningful and relevant to them, as seen in the video in Figure 8, where the feature had been renamed as ‘quick switch’ for popular appeal. Here are two more stories with the same narrative, appealing to different audiences — the omnipresent boss and the ever-loving bae.

#business value articulation #value chain