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A company has just completed a two-year project to implement a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) system in its customer service department. The results have been significantly worse than expected, with staff being forced to create manual workarounds to accommodate the expectations of large customers. Which investigative technique would have been most likely to uncover these problems earlier in the analysis process?
The key issue described---staff creating manual workarounds to satisfy important customers---often reflects tacit knowledge and ''what really happens'' in day-to-day work, not what is written in policies or what people might summarise in a survey. The guidance is clear that while interviews and workshops can reveal stakeholder views, the ''back-story'' of real working practices can differ; techniques such as work shadowing and observation help clarify what actually happens.
Shadowing is specifically defined as following a user as they carry out their job for a period (e.g., a day or two) in order to find out what the job entails. This is exactly the kind of technique that exposes hidden steps, exceptions, customer-specific handling, and unofficial procedures---precisely the conditions that drive workarounds when a COTS package does not fit real operational needs.
The observation section also highlights that seeing the workplace provides a much better understanding of problems and difficulties faced by business users and helps uncover tacit information that would otherwise remain unstated. Additionally, the guidance even uses customer services as an example area where an analyst might shadow staff to record real call types, durations, and retrieval delays---evidence that supports discovering process pain and mismatch early.
Therefore, shadowing customer service personnel (D) would have been most likely to uncover the workaround drivers earlier.