Keeping It Simple

I keep forgetting to keep things simple, which is a fundamental discipline of business analysis. Before we dive into a process, we need to ask ourselves, what are we trying to achieve, what is the value added, and does the user experience make sense.
We were going through an exercise of migrating users from an existing online application to another portal. A clean cut over can't be performed, so both websites need to be available, and the process we need would make users jump through hoops and bend our elbows backwards to support it. Both business users and technical people seemed determined to charge ahead with the plan despite of many loopholes that made me scratch my head. Our usability expert finally said something that everyone was contenmplating subconciously. What is the point of migrating if we are not ready to live with the consequences.
The moral of the story is we shouldn't define a process just for the sake of have a process, we need to think whether it provides efficiency, value and whether it is done in a simplistic way that makes sense for the users.
I have to say I feel guilty of not thinking out side of the box today. I am grateful for this lesson.

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