Last week, one of my clients asked me a question about the meaning of analysing customer requirements. I explained to him that the client’s requirements analysis is one of the important steps in starting and even managing a business that most entrepreneurs or business owners do not spend enough time on.
It does not matter what types of clients you have. You may provide services and products for people or other businesses. In all these scenarios, we should understand the client and their requirements (if the client is a human, we should consider both needs and wants) and propose solutions that enable them to truly meet their goals and objectives.
It looks simple, but it is one of the most important elements that we have when we run or want to run a business. Business analysis is a skill that you as an entrepreneur should learn and use properly.
To most professionals and entrepreneurs, “Proposing a solution” is obviously the main objective of business analysis, but there is a key issue that should be considered. To be successful in analysing businesses, proposing a solution should be accompanied by two important qualities: Suitability and Possibility.
Suitability refers to the fact that the solution must properly fulfil clients’ needs and helps them meet their goals and objectives. Possibility refers to the potential of the client to implement the solution based on their capabilities. Suitability and Possibility are both key concepts for proposing a successful solution. However, a delicate point that should be noted here is which one of these should be considered first, i.e. propose a Possible and Suitable solution or propose a Suitable and Possible solution.
Perhaps both concepts are equally important, but in my experience, proposing a “Possible and Suitable” solution is more useful in practice as each client (especially when our clients are other businesses) has its own strengths and limitations. As such, the solution should be able to correctly meet their needs but must be initially tailored for a client’s circumstances so that it can be implemented.
Unfortunately, oftentimes entrepreneurs and business owners (or even professionals who work for employers) are obsessed with ideal solutions. For most of them “proposing a suitable solution” is more important, but quite often in the implementation stage, they find that some parts of a solution are not feasible to implement due to restrictions of a client’s capabilities (for example, lack of confidence or budget when our clients are people or complexity in their policies and procedures when our clients are businesses). Thus, they need to go back to the drawing board, make changes or take out some part of the solution, which often has a knock-on effect on the bigger picture and may result in inconsistency.
To avoid this, I recommend looking at some useful activities including Assess Proposed Solutions, Assess Client Readiness, and Define Constraints and Assumptions. These activities can help make a better decision during proposing and identifying a solution and its components for a given client.
I personally try to propose “possible and suitable solutions” in my work and luckily, it works for me most of the time.
Hope you all find it useful. Please share your experience in this regard with me.
I hope you found this article useful.
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