Discovery & analysis
Pain points & opportunities
Gather complaints, frustrations and missed opportunities — quantify them and prioritise with a simple scoring matrix. What rises to the top earns a spot in phase 1.
Updated Jan 23, 2026
Discovery · 3.3
Why this first
Without quantification, the loudest voice wins. With scoring, you win the argument objectively: this pain point happens 200 times a month and costs 10 minutes each time = 33 hours lost per month. That beats “I think it could look nicer”. Pain points + opportunities also become your success baseline: after go-live you want to be able to show they are solved.
What do you deliver?
Pain-point list
15-40 items with description, owner, impact, frequency and priority score.
Opportunity list
What would genuinely add value — independent of current tooling. Source-neutral thinking.
Top-10 for phase 1
Which 10 items you absolutely want to solve / realise at the first go-live.
Yardstick per item
For the top-10: how do you measure that it's solved after go-live? KPI or indicator.
Steps
- 1Harvest during the process workshops — while people describe As-Is processes, pain points drop naturally. Capture them in a separate column.
- 2Anonymous survey to end users — three open questions, max 5 minutes to fill in. Force quantitative: “how often?” and “how much time does it cost you?”.
- 3Look in existing complaints data — helpdesk tickets, fault reports, retrospectives. Often it's already written down.
- 4Deduplicate and reformulate — merged versions often share the same root cause. “I don't get a notification” and “I don't know if my ticket is still alive” = a communication problem.
- 5Score per item — impact (1-5) × frequency (1-5) = priority score (1-25). Use the scale below.
- 6Sort and pick the top-10 — at the top: high impact + high frequency. Below that: discussion with stakeholders.
- 7Set a yardstick for each top item — how do you know in 6 months that it's solved?
Template — Scoring scale
Use the same definition for every item, otherwise your ranking isn’t reliable.
Impact (per occurrence)
- 1Negligible — irritation but no time lost.
- 2Small — < 5 minutes extra or a workaround.
- 3Medium — 5-30 minutes extra or errors in data.
- 4Large — hours of work lost, complaint from a customer or employee.
- 5Critical — process grinds to a halt, financial loss, compliance risk.
Frequency
- 1Rare — less than once a quarter.
- 2Sometimes — 1-3× per month.
- 3Regular — weekly.
- 4Often — several times a week.
- 5Continuous — daily or multiple times a day.
Template — Pain-point & opportunity register
| # | Type | Description | Process | Impact | Freq. | Score | Yardstick |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pain | Reporter doesn't know if the ticket has been seen | Helpdesk | 3 | 5 | 15 | % of tickets with <1h first response |
| 2 | Opportunity | Auto-offer catering for meetings >90 min | Reservations | 3 | 4 | 12 | Adoption rate of proposed catering |
| … | … | … | … | … | … | … | … |
Template — End-user survey (3 questions)
Send to 100% of users, max 5 min completion time
- 1"What costs you the most time or energy in these processes?" Give 1-3 concrete examples, with an estimate of how often per week and how many minutes.
- 2"What would you like the system to do for you that it doesn't today?" No feature name — describe the outcome.
- 3"Which information or notification do you miss today, at the moment you'd want it?" Ask for concrete situations.
Best practices
→ Separate pain from opportunity
Pain = what hurts today. Opportunity = what doesn't exist yet. Different solution paths.
→ Ask for the root cause
"The system is slow" is a symptom. Probe for what's behind it (too much data, bad filters, no training).
→ Tag quick wins
Some items are small to solve (extra notification). Tag them — simple first successes build trust.
→ Keep a “parking lot”
Not everything fits in phase 1. Keep a list for phase 2/3 with date and owner so it isn't forgotten.