When your organization is tweaking an existing pension administration system, conducting a significant upgrade or buying new, that is your opportunity to elevate your communication tools. Seize the moment to participate in writing requirements to promote the importance of communications and ensure that the tools you need for your daily work are included in the PAS changes.
User Stories for Communications Managers
January 2025
Modern advice is to avoid solution-specific requirements and instead, express a requirement as a need in a user story. User stories have become popular for requirements because:
- They are written from the perspective of a person (role) who will use or be impacted by the feature.
- They provide meaningful context for why the person needs the requirement.
- They help define high-level requirements without diving into low level detail too early.
Perhaps most importantly, by not tying the requirement to a solution, your developers will have more flexibility in finding a creative and optimal solution.
User stories typically follow this format.
Who… …wants What… ….because Why
For background on writing user stories, see the footnotes below. This article focuses on the kinds of user stories communications managers need most. When writing your stories, consider the tools that you use every day to manage messages to your customers. For each of these, you are the WHO asking for WHAT you want BECAUSE YOU NEED effective, timely, professional communication deliverables. Here are some ideas for you to take and shape when you are ready to make changes to your pension administration system.
As a communications manager,
I want to use both email and print to deliver marketing messages to targeted groups of customers…
…so I can educate our members on their pension system opportunities and inform them of issues with their accounts.
I want my communications team to create and maintain the member-facing emails and letters in the system…
…so that timely changes can be made without the assistance of a developer.
I want automatic, real-time affirmations delivered by email to the member for each transaction completed in the member portal…
…so that the member knows the transaction is done and internal users do
not have to create the correspondence.
I want multiple options for fonts, styles and paragraphing available when creating emails/letters in the system…
…so that those materials represent the pension system professionally.
I want outbound printed letters/forms to be batched and delivered for centralized printing…
…so that internal users are not printing/folding/stuffing mail.
I want to generate a list of all system emails/letters (with their tracking numbers) and the workflows each letter is generated from…
…so I can audit the communications and schedule them for review.
I want to send broadcast email messages to all employers at one time…
…so we can keep employers informed of upcoming due dates, reports,
system events or other plan activities.
Hopefully these examples will help you craft user stories that will get you and your team the tools you need to build and maintain your member-facing messages.
For more reading on writing user stories, try these resources.
https://tech.gsa.gov/guides/effective_user_stories/
https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/user-stories
Written by Laurie Mitchell, Senior Business Consultant
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