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Joint Application Design (JAD) is a group information gathering technique developed over 19 years ago by IBM Canada.  JAD techniques have been used successfully by many companies to accelerate application and process development while ensuring higher business client satisfaction.

Following a structured method that utilizes group dynamics, electronic meeting software, visual aids, and software modeling tools, JAD encourages a partnership between business clients, management, and information systems personnel.

Much of the value in the JAD approach is that it requires the right people, in a sophisticated work group which is managed to achieve what psychologists call "consensual validation".  The group is "called into being for a predetermined, clearly defined primary task which has been openly accepted...by its members and at which...they have agreed to work...The members cooperate freely in primary-task implementation through the skills each brings to this task; indeed, each member is valued for the skills brought to its implementation."  (Turquet, Pierre M., "Leadership:  the Individual and the Group", in Gibbard, Graham S., Hartman, John J., and Mann, Richard D., eds, Analysis of Groups: Contributions to Theory, Research, and Practice Jossey-Bass Pub, 1974.)

At the core of JAD is a session requiring the active participation of the group, working together to document the required information, from the business clients’ perspective.  Conflict can be used to energize the group.  Given a clear set of goals, management commitment, and the right participants, JAD groups will accept differences, focus conflict on substantive (rather than personal or political) issues, promote deeper communication and understanding, and in the end achieve a superior quality product.  The Meetingworks suite of products, run by an experienced chauffeur in collaboration with a talented JAD facilitator, enhances and encourages consensus and focusing on substantive issues.

The following JAD session was held with management of the pharmacy operations business of a major drug store chain.  The purpose of the JAD was to ensure consistency, reliability, and usability of data accessed to create meaningful pharmacy management information and reports.  The purpose also entailed ensuring availability of data to be accessed and/or reported so that management had the information to enable them to drive the business’ profit picture.

The JAD objectives, which were accomplished in phases, were to:  gather requirements for all pharmacy management information needs and reporting; review, detail, and come to consensus on the gathered requirements; and prepare documentation of the requirements.

Requirements Gathering Phase:  During this phase, a facilitator/chauffeur used MeetingKit to conduct interviews with all appropriate stakeholders.  Some of the interviews included groups of people who worked together in business areas.  A projector was attached to the facilitator/chauffeur laptop enabling those groups to view information they were contributing as it was being collected.  A set of appropriate questions, which had been developed by the facilitator/chauffeur and the Executive Sponsors, was put into an Organize step.  Each time interviews were conducted the completed outline was saved with a different file name which corresponded to the business area being discussed.  This left the original template of questions for reuse for each interview.  After all interviews were completed the requirements were compiled into one outline, by business area but with general requirements grouped together, and documentation was prepared for the participants of the next phase.

Consensus Phase: In this phase the compiled requirements were reviewed by the stakeholders to further detail and come to consensus on the management information needs and reporting requirements.  During this phase there was a separate facilitator and chauffeur for the group meetings.  This enabled the facilitator to work with the group, to keep them focused and on track, while the chauffeur ran the Meetingworks software and scribed all information.  Because MeetingKit and Meetingworks are fully integrated, all information from the requirements gathering phase, which was collected using MeetingKit, was ready for use in this phase with the Meetingworks software.  The general requirements were viewed on the first day by all business area participants.  The list was in a File Editor step.  The facilitator worked with the group to add any other general requirements, known at the time, and to clarify the items on the list while the chauffeur made additions or changes to the list.  Each requirement was then used as a topic in a Generate step.  The participants were asked to comment on the requirements, they had knowledge or need of, by answering the following question, “If this requirement is fulfilled what will it mean to the pharmacy operations business?”.  This information was a way for the Information Systems group to get a feel for how important different requirements were and to help them in planning their projects.  After the information was generated it was opened as an outline in an Organize step.  The outline was by topic (general requirement) with the answers to the question as sub-items for each topic.  After reviewing quickly for clarification, not evaluation, the outline was saved and the step was left running in the background as items would be added during other parts of the meeting.  Going through the general requirements, which were renamed “management information needs”, enabled the group to get a much broader understanding of different business areas and how they all related to each other to form the total business.  This helped the people from the separate business areas work with their individual requirements in the next sections of the meeting.

On certain days, or parts of days, participants from specific business areas, along with participants from closely aligned areas, were invited to the meeting to go over their requirements.  Each group viewed their list of requirements in File Editor and additions or changes were scribed by the chauffeur.  They then answered the same question that was asked on the first day and the information generated was viewed in the same manner.  The outline was then collapsed so only the requirements were visible.  The facilitator worked with the group to determine if their requirements should be categorized as either management information needs or management reporting requirements (production/ad-hoc reports & on-line data).  The chauffeur copied the general requirements into separate windows for either category.  Then the group, after a brief tutorial on data elements, determined what data elements were necessary for the information needs or reporting requirements.  The chauffeur scribed the data element name with its information as a sub-item to the general requirement.  After all groups had completed this same process the management information needs from each business area were compiled into one outline.  The group returned and reviewed all of them for understanding and additions.  Then the group was given a list of all of the reports, which had been determined necessary by each group, for an Evaluate step.  Before the step was run each participant was given a sub-group name depending on the business area where they worked.  The chauffeur sent out the registration to each workstation and each participant put either “finance” or “operations” on the second line of the registration form.  These were higher level business areas than were actually in the meetings.  Then each person was asked to rank the list of reports for how important they were to the profitability of the pharmacy operations business.  In this type of evaluation the participants are forced to place each item on the list in order from first to last.  There was complete consensus (0% variability) on which report was put in the first place and which report was put in the last place.  The other reports, except for three, had 37% or less variability which is a good amount of consensus.  The group spent time discussing the other three reports and the discussion was captured by the chauffeur for each report.  The facilitator gave a re-cap of all of the days meetings and information.  The group then worked through establishing the next steps with timeframes while the chauffeur scribed the information.  An Evaluate step was run to get feedback on all aspects of the meetings and the final wrap-up was given by the Executive Sponsors.  One of the most frequently stated comments given with the evaluation of the meeting was how much information was gathered, clarified, and documented in a much shorter time than in meetings where electronic meeting software was not used.  Also, people were very excited about their greater understanding of the whole business, which they didn’t feel would have been possible without having the information gathered, presented, and reviewed through the software.

Document Preparation Phase:  During this phase the management information needs and reporting requirements, which were detailed and reviewed in the consensus phase, were completed and a final document was produced.  The facilitator worked with the Information Systems representative to finalize the data element information.  The chauffeur and the facilitator had prepared a “shell” document before the consensus phase which followed the agenda, and had kept it up to date with any changes during the meetings.  The shell document contained headings for sections for the different types of requirements and the different business areas.  A title page and a placeholder for a final table of contents was set up as well as an attendee section.  Overview information was given for each section and general evaluation results information was in place.  Meetingworks formatting commands, which retrieve the meeting output data, were inserted in the appropriate places in the document.  Once the data element information was finalized the chauffeur ran the Meetingworks formatting commands and all meeting information was inserted into the document.  The table of contents was inserted, minor formatting changes were completed, and the document was given to the Executive Sponsors.  The sponsors were extremely impressed with the turnaround time which was one week.  In previous JAD sessions of this magnitude the turnaround time would have been at least two weeks and the documentation would not have been so professionally presented.