Comments on: Prioritising stakeholder emotions http://www.dancingmango.com/blog/2006/08/21/prioritising-stakeholder-emotions/ For more than a decade Marc has been a passionate advocate of placing the customer at the heart of business, working with clients in finance, retail, government and entertainment sectors, helping them craft compelling cross channel customer experiences. Marc champions lean and agile approaches for making customer driven innovation happen. He brings design thinking and creativity to clients, engaging across the organisation with a focus on delivery as well as ideas. He is currently writing a book on Agile Experience Design to be published this Autumn. Sun, 25 Sep 2011 23:33:07 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9 hourly 1 By: Josh G http://www.dancingmango.com/blog/2006/08/21/prioritising-stakeholder-emotions/comment-page-1/#comment-2413 Josh G Thu, 24 Aug 2006 11:58:17 +0000 http://www.dancingmango.com/blog/2006/08/21/prioritising-stakeholder-emotions/#comment-2413 I call into question the judgement of the business representatives who were executing the release planning. I know it's hard when you have limited poker chips / coins / beans in your hand and you know those big old "must-do" items are screaming to have "Release 1" written on them. But, failing to fulfill that requirement early could mean the difference between success or failure of the entire corporation. To paraphrase the sponsor, "It's easy to make mistakes when putting loads of naughts on a number". Those zeroes are orders of magnitude. Orders of magnitude precision in a financial transaction are substantially more than just "nice to have". If that 1-storypoint feature was added immediately after the story to implement the capture of the data in the first place, it could save the company (say as Dr. Evil) thousands, millions, or even billions of screw-up money. $143,524,500,100.00 being transferred to an entity in an external jurisdiction is a mighty whallop when it was meant to be just $1,435,245,001.00 Plus, as you point out, the sponsor (person paying bills) is quite happy that the little, but actually quite significant, feature was added as part of that wacky "responsive, adaptive" software development process. I call into question the judgement of the business representatives who were executing the release planning.

I know it’s hard when you have limited poker chips / coins / beans in your hand and you know those big old “must-do” items are screaming to have “Release 1″ written on them.

But, failing to fulfill that requirement early could mean the difference between success or failure of the entire corporation.

To paraphrase the sponsor, “It’s easy to make mistakes when putting loads of naughts on a number”. Those zeroes are orders of magnitude. Orders of magnitude precision in a financial transaction are substantially more than just “nice to have”.

If that 1-storypoint feature was added immediately after the story to implement the capture of the data in the first place, it could save the company (say as Dr. Evil) thousands, millions, or even billions of screw-up money.

$143,524,500,100.00 being transferred to an entity in an external jurisdiction is a mighty whallop when it was meant to be just $1,435,245,001.00

Plus, as you point out, the sponsor (person paying bills) is quite happy that the little, but actually quite significant, feature was added as part of that wacky “responsive, adaptive” software development process.

]]> By: Josh http://www.dancingmango.com/blog/2006/08/21/prioritising-stakeholder-emotions/comment-page-1/#comment-2372 Josh Mon, 21 Aug 2006 12:57:00 +0000 http://www.dancingmango.com/blog/2006/08/21/prioritising-stakeholder-emotions/#comment-2372 This is exactly the kind of example that really worries me about software dev in general, but especially in situations where not enough significance is put on not just a user's needs, but wants as well. What lessons can we take away from this, and do you have opinions on the best way to convince the manager and dev team that this is more than just a "nice to have?" This is exactly the kind of example that really worries me about software dev in general, but especially in situations where not enough significance is put on not just a user’s needs, but wants as well. What lessons can we take away from this, and do you have opinions on the best way to convince the manager and dev team that this is more than just a “nice to have?”

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