Thursday, February 17, 2011

What's With a Use Case? Winning Strategies for SMEs

Almost every Small and Emerging Business must have heard of the word called "Use Cases". Especially the IT and the Project Management companies which have for long created use cases and powerfully leveraged their power to streamline many processes which fuel execution.

What is a Use Case?
This Wikipedia article provides much needed clarity on Use Cases. Though it really talks about how use cases are used within system engineering at a higher level within the scope of software engineering.

The IndiaMART Knowledge Services team set forth to take key learnings of the 'Use Case' process to create a powerful, process oriented mechanism for Small and Medium enterprises.

Time to learn: leverage the power of Use Cases
When you go out to the market to buy something, the usuage of the product in your life is clear to you. Isn't is? Buying clothes in winter is about shielding yourself from cold.
Lets set the context: The most effective way to sell the execution of an idea is to describe the use of that product/ service/ proposition and then create and put forth the case first. An obvious question before you do that is, the information you need first hand. Obviously you would need enough information about your objective and then come up with a case compelling enough that it will sell and make a dent in the universe.

And how does it all merge within an enterprise?
Every step of forming up and growth! When a start-up, an organization is in its initial phases of building up the team, the core team has to create a really compelling case to ensure that talent other than them actually is attracted from the market.

When it is about scaling up and raising funds, the 'Use' of the funds has to be very clear to the founding team and a powerful and engaging enough case has to be created for the investors to be pulled towards and convinced of the potential of the idea.

Decision to invest into technology? The 'Use' of technology is clear and so are its advantages. We just need to ensure that we are clear on why should we invest into technology, its benefit for our business and hence make a compelling enough 'Case' for inclusion of technology in your emerging company.

Driving sales again is similar. Your customer/ prospective target audience has to be one with the 'Use' of what you are proposing to them. You must communicate the same 'Use', what your customer perceives of your product, to create a compelling enough 'Case' for your customer to buy.

What are we proposing?
For our emerging partners what we are suggesting is a 3 step Use Case Architecture (defined in the image below):

To know more about how you can make more compelling 'USE' 'CASES' for your business and take it to the next level, contact our IndiaMART Knowledge Services Team!!
Why not start with a comment to this post??

2 comments:

  1. Certainly a very interesting post for all small businesses.

    Thanks

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  2. Thanks for liking the post, look forward to more ideas from you, on what would you like to read about!

    ReplyDelete