Discover “The Pain Chain”

In my previous blog I mentioned briefly the concept of “The Pain Chain”. The Pain Chain is a part of a methodology to determine the Key Business Requirements (KBR’s) of your business. The methodology is from the Infomentis Group - http://www.infomentis.com/

It is a methodology that is used by some of the software vendors to explore with you the business challenges and KBR’s. In this blog I focus on an element that you actually could use yourself to prepare yourself for an IT Business Solution software vendor/ implementation partner selection.

"The Pain Chain" is a concept to very easily visualise the challenges your business has. What the cause of these are, the consequence as well as the relationships of these between departments and organisation level (e.g.: operational, management, executive). It is an extremely powerful visual tool (map) to get to the source of challenges and discuss with the right people how they could be potentially solved. The solution could be a process change for example of or an IT business system change. In case you are starting the journey of selecting a new IT Business Solution, this map could guide you which IT Business Solution fits your business the best for now and the long term.

How do I start to create “The Pain Chain” map.

What you need is the following:

- Pile of post-it notes

- Three questions to ask to the people that should be interviewed to get the map in place


The three questions are:

1. What are your current challenges (pains) in regards to perform your job and what business processes do they impact?
2. What is the cause of this challenge? (Note: here you discover if the issue is caused by another level in the organisation and/or department, I also call this “down the pain chain” and you discover the “tactical pains” (TP) here. Examples of these are:
   a. I have no way of accurately recording forecasts;
   b. Our procedures are too manual;
   c. We can’t view information in real time;
3. What is the consequence of this challenge? (Note: here you discover what the impact is of this challenge and for who in the organisation, I also call this “up the pain chain”. There are different type of so called consequential pains (CP); strategic, financial, internal and political.

Let me give you a simple example;
You are working in a wholesale distribution organisation and we start at the Warehouse Manager and ask him/her the first question. The answers you get is:

• Inventory is not accurate (TP)
• Too many wrong items in stock (TP)

When you continue the journey and ask the Purchase Manager about these TP’s what the consequence is than you discover the following:

• Inventory costs too high by 15% compared to budget.

This is a consequential pain as a result of the TP’s.

When you than ask the Director of the business, his/ her answer is:

• Improve profit margin by 15%.

This is the actual Key Business Requirement (KBR). If you put these answers on post-it’s, sort them in a hierarchy than you start to get the so called “Pain Chain”.

It is important that the KBR’s are measurable. With selecting the software solution, you should focus on letting the solution fix the TP’s. With the pain chain it becomes than clear how that impacts the rest of the organisation.

I hope this helps your business to discover what the KBR’s are and by what TP’s and CP’s they are feed.