Ask:
How Will You Know?
Ask this questoin to improve your description of your business.
Ask this question to find causal relationships.
Add Assertions to your model that provide how you know?
Then ask about those Assertion how you know?
You end with a tree of all the information needed to assess a state of affairs of the original.
Then you can ask what do I need to do to make the feeding information more likely to advance the final state? Where are resources likely to have the most effect?
This is the approach of ‘Assertion Thinking‘
Asking these questions (and capturing them accurately) ensures you understand the contribution to your desired state of affairs.
It does not matter if you call your desired state of affairs an outcome, objective, goal, milestone, deliverable, or whatever. Stop wasting time on semantics, you know what you want. But you must understand how you will know you have reached it(and how close). What you expect to be told. And how close you are.
This promotes benefits realization a way of constantly assessing advancement to the desired state.
Many Transformations fail because of the inability to assess incremental advancement to the goal as responsibilites slide further and further away from the original beneficiaries.
Not that Phase 3 is complete (that does not mean that you are have 3/5 ths of the benefit. To know you have 3/5 ths of the benefit you need to know that you have a high likelihood of the benefits with 2/5ths of the effort. Perhaps some of the benefits now. And you have a better, less risky set of actions to finally achieve. And you have information that helps you reassess actions.