This section is not about “the current situation for your team/project.”  Read below!

This section is about the current situation/state as related to the use of and/or need for the process/product upon which your project is focused.  Read on.

This section should be no more than ½ to ¾ page in the format provided, leaning to ¾ page if you include a brief note on a future vision.  If you have two narratives, as is applicable in projects with two different end-user classes and “situations,” then each may be of the noted length, doubling the length of this section.

1     Current Situation

The current situation is the focus.  In narrative form, verbally paint a mental picture of the current situation as it relates to this project.  Including one or more graphics to depict the current situation is a great addition if reasonably possible.  Repeating from the Project Overview section guidance, to help you place graphics in Google Docs with captions that remain attached, a link to a source having a figure+caption placeholder, a table+caption placeholder, and instructions for their use is linked via the comment on the cover page along with the link to this guidance.

If the project is addressing a pain point, then help your audience enter into the pain currently experienced by an end-user.  If the project is seeking a gain over the current situation, then simply describe in narrative form the current situation without attempting to make it out to be a bad or painful situation.  Just tell it like it is.  Including a photo or two is very helpful here to orient your audience to the problem domain and the current situation; not doing so would be seen as a serious shortcoming.  You can extend the page-length guidance above to accommodate a graphic or two (consider those page-length numbers to be guidance on textual length).  Examples (the textual part, no graphics) can be found in the book (A Game Against Reality, Chapter 8, Sec 2.3).

If you include more than one end-user classes/situations, start each with a subheading.  Use paragraph style Heading 3 here, which should introduce automatically subheading numbers 2.1 and 2.2.

Note that our interest here is end-users (typically), not other stakeholders.  Other stakeholders are important, and use cases from their perspective are important; but for now, we will focus on end-user perspective(s) to tell the story.  This should be an explanatory story more so than just an explanation.

2     Future Vision

Only briefly make note of how the future will be different, if you can do so in general terms; that is, in an unforced way given that you do not have a specific solution yet defined.  If you include this, again in narrative form, verbally paint a mental picture of the future with a solution realized and in use by an end-user.  Whether a pain or gain is at hand, the future should be pain-free.  Help your audience enter into and experience what the future could be like.  It is less likely that including a graphic here will be helpful as noted for the current situation above, but if you have a graphic that makes sense to the purpose of this content, include it.  Examples can be found in the book (A Game Against Reality, Chapter 8, the end of Sec 2.3).