task analysis workshop

Carnegie Mellon Qatar ©2011 - 2012 Robert T. Monroe Course 70-446

Task Analysis Workshop

Robert MonroeInnovative Product Development

February 15, 2011

Carnegie Mellon Qatar ©2011- 2012 Robert T. Monroe Course 70-446

By The End Of Class Today, You Should:

• Be able to conduct a basic task analysis to look for ways to improve how a customer completes a JTBD

• Have practiced the art of observation (a light form of Ethnography) to refine your task analysis for a specific JTBD

• Have revised and improved your task analysis through active observation, role playing, and hands-on experimentation with your customers’ tasks


Phase 2 Overview: Understanding The Opportunity

Phase 2Gate1

Gate2

Phase 1 outputs:• POG statement• JTBD’s• SET Factors• Scenario(s)• Value analysis

(graphs, attributes)

Phase 2 activities:• Look, listen, learn• Stakeholder analysis• Ethnography: - Interviews - Field observations • Story and scenario

generation• Task analysis• Detailed secondary

research• Detailed data

analysis

Phase 2 outputs:• Prioritized value

opportunities• Detailed

scenarios• Prioritized

product attributes

• Prioritized stakeholder list


Task Analysis

• Break the job down into a series of tasks required to complete a JTBD – small, detailed steps

• Try to understand each step, what happens during the step, why it is being done, what it accomplishes, who does it, how long it takes, etc.

• Look for steps in the process that can be improved, eliminated, or otherwise changed for the better

• Task analyses can guide your ethnography studies


Task Analysis Example – Drink A Cup of Coffee

1. Decide “I would like a cup of coffee”2. Gather what I need to make the coffee3. Make the coffee in coffee machine4. Once coffee is brewed, pour into cup5. Add milk and sugar to taste (optional)6. Enjoy the cup of coffee7. Warm the coffee in microwave if it gets cold (or add

more coffee from the coffee maker)8. Drink slowly until the coffee is gone, enjoy9. Clean up the mess


Task Analysis Example – Drink A Cup of Coffee

1. Decide “I would like a cup of coffee”– Decide: should I make coffee or go out to get it?– Decide what kind of coffee – instant or brewed?

2. Gather what I need to make the coffee– ground coffee, coffee maker/pot, coffee mug, water (required)– milk and sugar (optional)

3. Make the coffee in coffee machine– Prepare the coffee machine

• plug it in and let it warm up• add water• add coffee (grind coffee if necessary – whole other task)• put coffee pot into coffee machine• Press ‘brew’• Wait for brewing to complete, watch patiently (optional)

– Once coffee is brewed, pour into cup– Add milk and sugar to taste (optional)

4. …


Example For Discussion:

• JTBD: – Record images from vacations to share with friends

• Refined as a POG statement:– Help young families traveling on vacation record images from

their vacation that they can share with their friends and family back home with as little hassle and disruption to their enjoyment of the vacation and their activities during the vacation as possible.


Scenario For Discussion

“Maha is a twenty eight year old woman living in Qatar. She has two young children – a seven year old son and a five year old daughter. She works as an elementary school teacher at a school in Doha, Qatar. Maha’s husband owns and runs a construction company. Between family and work commitments, they are very busy people.

One of Maha and her family’s favorite things to do is to travel. Sometimes they go to exciting new places, other times they return to familiar places they have visited and enjoyed before. She likes to take a lot of pictures on these trips, both to remember the fun times that they’ve had and also to keep a history of her children growing up. When they are on a trip, Maha always seems to have a lot to carry and she would love to be able to carry fewer things when they are touring around a new place. Although she enjoys taking pictures she is often frustrated by the quality of those pictures, both because the camera in her phone does not take very high quality photos but also because she often takes so long to find the phone, load the camera app, and get ready to take a picture that the moment she was trying to capture has passed her by.

Maha greatly enjoys sharing her pictures with her friends and family. When she gets home from a trip, she has prints made that she sends to her mother back home (who does not use a computer), shares the best pictures on Facebook and Flickr with her friends, and often just enjoys looking at the pictures she has taken directly on her smartphone. On a long trip, she would like to be able to share her pictures more quickly but not if doing so is a hassle. Her husband and kids get tired of posing and waiting for Maha to take so many pictures but they put up with her requests because they like to look at the pictures also.”


Exercise: Complete A Task Analysis For Maha

• You will play the roles of Maha, her family members, and an ethnographic observer as she and her family tour the Louvre and use their camera to record their visit.

• You will need to:– Prepare for the visit – make sure you have all you need– Go to the Paris (or at least the CMU-Q approximation of it) with your family, kids,

vacation equipment, tourbooks, etc.– Get pictures of your family members in front of:

• The main courtyard of the Louvre and the glass pyramid• Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa • A sidewalk café, where you can stop for lunch and cappucino• The Eiffel Tower

– Get one picture of the family without Maha, and another where you try to get the whole family in the picture, in front of each landmark

– Figure out how to share those pictures with friends and family back in Qatar– Figure out how to share the picture with Maha’s mother in Lebanon, who doesn’t use a

computer


Task Analysis Workshop

• Work as a group to create a quick, hypothesis of the task analysis

• Go out as a group (a pretend “family”) to visit the CMU-Q Louvre to get the required pictures

• Take turns playing different roles at each picture – parents, children, observer

• The observer at each point needs to note all of the tasks that need to be done to complete the step, identify any tasks that you are missing in your analysis, and record any pertinent observations

• Come back to the classroom after you have the eight pictures to debrief, complete a revised tasks analysis, and discuss with your group what you observed


Collecting Observations Artifacts


Challenge Problem 3: Due In Class Next Wednesday

• Collect a set of artifacts that tell a story about your customers for for the vacation images example we used in class today

• Come to class on Wednesday prepared to put up a collage of the artifacts you have collected on the wall, or on the tables, and talk through what you have found for the class.

• The goal of this exercise is to see how resourceful you can be in collecting observations about your customers and using those observations to tell a compelling story about what they are trying to do, how they currently do it, and where they have challenges doing their JTBD, and/or where the products and services that they are currently using fall short of their expectations.


Planning Your Ethnography Study

• What are we trying to learn? – What questions should we be answering with the study?

• Who should we observe? How many observations?• When should we do the observations?

– What, specifically, are we trying to see?• How will we conduct the observations?

– Discretely or as a participant?– Staged events or “in the wild”?

• How will we record what we observe? – Do we need participant permissions?

• Where will we do our observations?

Source: [SSD09] pp 21-26


References

[CE09] Robert G. Cooper and Scott Edgett, Successful Product Innovation, Product Development Institute, 2009, ISBN: 978-1-4392-4918-5.

[KL01] Tom Kelly with Jonathan Littman, The Art of Innovation, Doubleday, 2001 ISBN: 0-385-49984-1.

[SSD09] David Silverstein, Philip Samuel, Neil DeCarlo, The Innovator’s Toolkit, John Wiley and Sons, 2009, ISBN: 978-0-470-34535-1.

task analysis workshop

Documents

coffee grind coffee

coffee machineonce coffee

coffee mug

coffee makerpot

coffee machineplug

coffee machineprepare

coffeeground coffee

coffee makerdrink