I like to use everyday analogies for looking at business scenarios.
In a recent workshop with a client, we were talking about RFPs & Bids and the process around responding to them and where there is a chance optimise it.
I used the comparison of baking a cake:
Ingredients: The information you need from the client/sales team to actually do anything.
Recipe: The steps you need to follow to put a great bid response together.
Baking: The act of putting the bid together
Cake: The finished product, ready to ship to the client.
Whether it’s a bid response, a new website, or in fact any project, the foundational stuff, i.e. the essential ingredients (data, customer insights, problems, jobs to be done) will, for me, always be the most critical to understand and get right as early on as possible.
Sometimes you can get away with not having all of them at the start (e.g. you can ice the cake after it’s been baked) but others not so much.
