Hi there!
Questetra creates the software named Questetra BPM Suite, which is a cloud service that visualizes the flow of business in a company. In order to help people appreciate a service such as Questetra BPM Suite, which is used among many people in a company, many customer stories are needed.
Although the more customer stories the better, writing a lot of them constantly is not easy.
In this article, I wrote about the efforts to consistently write as many customer stories as possible.
The reason why you can’t write many stories
You understand that nothing is more valuable than customer stories, but they’re not always easy to write. Even if you set a goal for the number of articles you want to publish, it’s difficult to achieve that goal.
Why can’t you do that?
There might be many reasons, but I think the main reason is that creating customer stories is time-consuming, and it’s hard to find the time to do it.
In order to write a lot of customer stories, I think the following efforts will help you create as many as possible.
- Efforts to reduce the time needed to create customer stories
- Efforts to secure the time available to create customer stories
Efforts to reduce the time needed to create a customer story
Preparing the overall structure is surely one of the ways to save time when writing a customer story.
For example, Microsoft prepares the following structure for each customer story: (https://customers.microsoft.com/en-gb/home?sq=&ff=&p=0)
- Introduction of the customer
- Background and aims of the introduction
- History of introduction
- Effect
- Outlook for the Future
Using this structure to decide the content of each section will reduce the burden on the writer. Reducing the efforts required to determine the structure and framework of the story will help you just focus on the content.
Preparing the template of the story, dividing the entire story into 3 to 5 sections, and defining the content of each section can help you reduce the time needed to create a story.
Efforts to secure the time available to create a customer story
Actually, even the person who is responsible for creating customer stories has a lot of other things to do, and the stories are often created between other tasks. (At Questetra, the Sales department mainly writes the articles.)
If you have a lot of things to do now, you tend to put off doing things that take a lot of time such as creating customer stories.
Therefore, Questetra is working on two things: securing time for multiple members to write and frequently reviewing stories.
Securing time for multiple members to write customer stories
As I mentioned above, it becomes hard to set aside time to write customer stories when you’re busy with the task at hand. Securing time for multiple members to write the stories means, for example, you prepare a time section for all people in charge of creating customer stories to gather in the conference room to create a customer story, and then you do just that.
Since it is decided by the people in charge, there’s no reason why they can’t gather at that time unless they have a problem. Moreover, once you get together, you can silently concentrate on writing articles.
However, I think it is difficult for everyone to gather like this every day or once a week. An effort to write stories little by little is also necessary, which is why we review them frequently.
Reviewing customer stories frequently
I think many companies hold meetings once a week. For example, each author who is responsible for creating customer stories has five minutes to talk about and review the article they are creating.
As for the text, the person in charge will briefly explain one section and review it with the participants. That can help the person in charge who has time by themself set aside to have the mentality to continue to write other sections before the meeting.
At the same time, frequent reviews can reduce the risk of the completed story being overturned.
Gathering in a room to write all at once and writing a little bit which can be reviewed at the meeting are helpful methods for you to make steady progress in creating stories.
And finally
Even at Questetra it always takes a lot of effort to create customer stories, so there may be other ways to consistently write many of them than what we have written here.
We’ll continue to try the things which we’ve written here, but we will improve them if necessary.
Thank you for reading!
