The ZAAZ Blended Agenda Matrix

By Aaron Louie | 0 Comments | Posted in in User Experience | Permalink

At the 2008 IA Summit in Miami this last weekend, user experience practitioners showcased their work on the first annual Wall of Deliverables. Conference attendees then voted on the entries they felt were most innovative and effective. The deliverable ZAAZ submitted, the Blended Agenda Matrix, won 2nd place.

At ZAAZ, the Blended Agenda Matrix helps us visualize how business objectives, user objectives, and strategic actions might affect each other. With this insight, we are able to address competing priorities among stakeholders, identify opportunities for mutual value between the business and customers, and highlight risks needing mitigation.

The "BAM", as it is affectionately called (perhaps for its effect on clients when they first see it), has proven to be an excellent conversation tool at ZAAZ. Clients and their stakeholders love it for its attention to detail and comprehensive scope. Executives love it for its "wow" factor. And UX teams love it for the traceability and self-evident recommendations that bubble out of it. It's also a documentation tool, helping us tie high-level goals and key performance indicators to individual requirements and communicate the rigor behind our strategic recommendations.

Within ZAAZ, the BAM has been described as "a subway map to an unfamiliar city". However, to our clients, the city is not unfamiliar. They usually know their businesses and their customers far better than we consultants do. The BAM provides them with a map to their hometown and allows them to gain insight into the opportunities and risks they may face in navigating that city.

History of the ZAAZ BAM
The Blended Agenda Matrix evolved out of a series of other user research and user experience strategy deliverables: goal prioritization spreadsheets, keep-kill lists, strategy briefs, personas, and others. Over the past few years, Pam Shales (ZAAZ Director of UX) and Ryan Turner (Associate Director of UX) began combining elements of these documents into a single diagram. They encountered the QFD House of Quality approach, which correlated customer desires with product features in a house-shaped diagram. ZAAZ's innovation was to instead correlate business objectives with user objectives, and also business objectives with business objectives and user objectives with user objectives. Future iterations added columns for strategies, tactics, and success measures, tying each objective to a series of actionable and measurable recommendations. The diagram can be expanded to compare multiple audiences and multiple lines of business. Over time, the ZAAZ Blended Agenda Matrix has been refined to make it a powerful tool for visualizing user and business goals in relation to each other and to the strategic approach we recommend.

Components of the Blended Agenda Matrix
The BAM requires some guidance to read. The amount of information that goes into a BAM poster is daunting, but it connects high-level business and user goals down to low-level tactics and metrics in a visual and digestible format. It exposes the patterns that emerge from the apparent chaos of competing business and user objectives and provides a guide to accomplishing those objectives in the most strategic manner. Here are the key components of the Blended Agenda Matrix:

• There are at least three bands: business objectives, user objectives, and strategies, arranged as shown in the diagram below. The diagram may be expanded to add multiple user and business bands.
  
• The Business band is folded over on itself, and the overlapping triangle it creates is where business objectives are compared to other business objectives.The User band is also folded over on itself, creating another area of overlap. Where the Business and User bands overlap, business objectives are compared to user objectives.
  
• Each objective row is supplemented with desired outcomes and example success measures.
• Crossing the other two bands is a column of recommended strategies, which break out into individual tactics.
  

Creating a Blended Agenda Matrix
The Blended Agenda Matrix is one of those deliverables that just can't be created overnight. Everything in the BAM is dependent on doing an adequate amount of business requirements gathering, strategic planning, and user research. The diagram itself is merely the culmination of a comprehensive process.
Over the following weeks, we'll provide examples, a template, and guides to creating your own BAM, including:

• Affinity mapping of stakeholder and user requirements
• Identifying strategies and tactics
• Tying goals to measurement
• Correlating user and business objectives

Stay tuned!