Methodology

Does this train go to Bangor?

  • Tuesday, 2 June, 2009
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Over the loudspeaker comes a garbled message “…this train divides at Chester.  Customers for Bangor must travel in the front four coaches of the train”.
There was a group of women behind me talking loudly, one of them picked out part of the message and was worried.  The train guard (sorry, Customer Revenue Protection Officer) walked by.
One of the women got his attention, “Excuse me, we’re going to Bangor?” she said.
“Oh” said the guard.  “You need to get out at Milton Keynes and walk to the front of the train”.
“What? We need to change trains?” the woman replied.
“No, it is the same train, just the front part of it.”
“Is it on the same platform?” Asked the woman.
“Yes, just walk up a little” replied the guard.
“We don’t need to cross over to another platform then?”
“No, it is the same platform, the same train”
“So why can’t we stay on this train then”
“Because this part of the train divides at Chester?”
“But we’re not going to Chester, we’re going to Bangor”
The guard was getting frustrated, “when the train stops at the next station, you just need to get out and walk up the platform, in fact to the next carraige and get on the train there”
“So why can’t we walk through the train to the next carraige?”
“Because it is a different train”
“but this train is going to Bangor isn’t it?  We are on the right train aren’t we?”

And so on until a fellow passenger jumped in “when we get to Milton Keynes, I’ll show you where to go” and at Milton Keynes he led them all off the train to walk past the train divide on the platform and I’ll assume they made it to Bangor in one peice.

The point of this narative is that not everybody “gets it”.  Just because you think something is straight forward or obvious doesn’t mean that your customers will.  You are not your customer, be wary of making assumptions on how people will use your Great New Product.

Innovation through the recession

  • Thursday, 30 April, 2009
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Two men were running through the jungle chased by a lion.  One of them stopped, took off his backpack and took his trainers out.  The other man turned around. “Why are you putting your trainers on?” he asked, “They won’t make you run faster than the lion”. To which the man replied “I don’t need to run faster than the lion…”

In the current market conditions just blindly running won’t get you ahead of your competitors.  And standing still is not a sustainable option.  Those that succeed won’t be the ones that batten down the hatches and retreat to the trenches, history shows it will be those that continue to innovate and cultivate ideas.  During the 1990-91 recession, according to a Bain & Company study, twice as many companies leaped from the bottom of their industries to the top as did so in the years before and after.

“Even though we’re in an economic downturn, we’re in an innovation upturn” said Bill Gates at the time.

In the 1920’s Post and Kellogg’s went into the recession head to head. Post cut back, it reined in expenses and slashed advertising budget.  Kelloggs meanwhile maintained their marketing spend and pushed their newly launched product, Rice Krispies.  Today Kellogg’s are a household name.  Where are Post?

IT organisations are retreating to core, keeping the lights on and holding off any “non-essential’ projects, innovation included.  This is a shortsighted viewpoint, but not entirely unexpected.  With project life cycles taking so long, innovation traditionally takes significant investment and time to see results.  Modern lean and agile approaches to IT are a challenge to this entrenched view.  It is possible to innovate at speed.  It is possible to take an idea and turn it into something tangible in weeks rather than years.  Let’s start with the idea.  Where does it come from?  You could get the brightest minds from expensive management consultancy firms, but they take time. And in uncertain times, what do they really know? (I speak with experience having once been a customer strategy management consultant).  Alternatively you could harvest ideas from your customers.  That’s what IdeaStorm does for Dell.  And Mix does for Oracle (built by ThoughtWorks by the way). Don’t restrict this to your customers, building an internal ideas engine in the enterprise yields great results.

So once you’ve got the idea, how do you nurture it from a vision into a proposition that has legs?

Product innovation is all very well, but do you have the capability and the attitude to really do it?  In the current ecomomic climate, unless product innovation is in your DNA, chances are it will need to be accompanied by process innovation.  Why? Because most organisational processes are slow, cumbersome and hinder the agility required to really innovate.

In 2009, if there’s one thing that organizations need, it’s agility. Our economy and the business environment are a steady stream of ups, downs and rapid change; in such an environment, the ability to sense, respond and react are true survival skills!

At ThoughtWorks we do both these things for our clients all the time, helping them introduce aligity into the whole product development lifecycle; product innovation through process innovation.  It starts with helping them rapidly distill their vision into something concrete, then prirotising and estimating what is important before building it at speed with quality to get innovation to market; fail fast or succeed sooner.

Recession doesn’t make the market need disappear. Andrew Rezeghi in this great paper (which is abound with stories of companies who have innovated through recession) argues you should invest in your customers, now they need you most, loyalty hangs in the balance.  Whilst the market may be driving down prices, now is the time to focus on experience based differentiation.  How can you use digital channels to engage with your customers in new and compelling ways?  How can you harness social media and new interaction paradigms to delight and engage your customers?  Ho can you innovate at speed? Go beyond your product and grow roots for lifetime value when the good times return.

Are you managing expectations beyond the team?

  • Monday, 30 March, 2009
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There’s this idea called the Disconfirmation of expectations theory that states that having unrealistically high expectations from the adoption of a new IT application will result in lower levels of realised benefits.  Get customers excited about a new product and fail to deliver on it and you will have unsatisfied customers.  And unsatisfied customers are unlikely to use the product to its full advantage.

There is a risk with products developed using agile approaches that they fail to deliver on their initial promise.  The immediate stakeholders know that the product will evolve incrementally, but is this true of the broader audience? Are they aware of the intended regular heartbeat of delivery or are they expecting a fully featured product at the first release.  How are you managing expectations beyond the immediate product team?

Be wary of what you say early on.  Creating a vision is essential but be mindful of how this is communicated. Early demos, proof of concepts, prototypes, wireframes often show a vision of the end goal, several releases into the future.  Words are easily forgotten, explaining that this is an end goal vision is not enough, you must show a vision of what the cut-down product for the first release is and ensure it is appropriately communicated.

Expectations work both ways, it is easy for the business to tell IT their requirements and assume they will be developed in their entireity in one go.  Similarly it is easy for agile developers to expect the business to understand their incremental approach to delivery. The key to success is effective change management; identifying all stakeholders (both core and peripheral) and create a culture of agility that goes beyond the immediate project team.  In a large organisation that maintains more traditional approaches, agile projects must be supported by a well designed communication plan that builds the relationship between both IT and the business. Identify whose life will be touched by the product and develop a strategy for communicating to them.  This doesn’t mean “they can see what is going on on the project Wiki” this means someone taking responsilibity for listening, engaging and evangelising on the product, the project and its goals.

Have you considered the cost of context switching

  • Tuesday, 24 March, 2009
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One of the great things with running a project with Microsoft Project is that it enables you to allocate resources to activities and you can assign the time they work on each activity.  A resource can then work on several projects at the same time, 50% on project A, 50% on project B.

With this ability it is easier to accommodate multiple projects that the business request.  Rather than having to say we can’t start on a project in six months when the current one finishes, we can run both projects at the same time, using the same resources.  We can do things in parallel rather than in series.

Only it doesn’t really work like that.

One of the great things with running a project with Microsoft project is that it enables you to allocate resources in a way that hinders productivity, effective planning and quality.

The problem is with context switching and the overhead that multi-tasking brings.  This article succinctly describes the problem.

No matter how efficient you think you are, multitasking comes with a high cost. Because we’re people, we don’t swap out the content of our brains as easily as a computer does, and we definitely don’t swap in the old state when we’re ready to return to the original task.

Gerald Weinberg, in Quality Software Management, Vol. 1, Systems Thinking (Dorset House, 1992), estimates the context-switching cost among three tasks to be 40 percent. That means that 40 percent of your available work time is spent on non-task activities. The rest of the time is split among the three projects. So, if you thought that in a 45-hour week, you could spend 15 hours on each of three tasks, don’t kid yourself. You’re really spending eight hours on project A; eight hours on project B; eight hours on project C; and 24 hours context-switching, figuring out where you were and what you have to do next. The time spent on each project works out to about half of what you expected.

So whilst it is easy to appear to please business sponsors by taking multiple projects on at the same time, and the model of working in parallel rather than in series being a politically favourable approach, in fact the costs of multi-tasking far outweigh the benefits.

Thinking about value in terms of advantage and benefit

  • Tuesday, 10 March, 2009
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A product rarely sells itself.  What sells a product is the advantage it brings and the benefits it delivers to the customer.  It is the benefit of the product that sells rather than the product itself. What is the advantage of the requirement you are stating, and what is the benefit it will bring the customer?

Let’s start with a product.  Think broadband.  It’s dull.  Put 10MB in front of it and it is still dull.

Now think about the advantage that 10MB broadband brings.  The advantage is that it is fast.  Lightning fast.

Now think about the benefit which that advantage brings.  The benefit is that you can download an MP3 tune in seconds rather than minutes with your old dial up connection.  You are no longer selling broadband, but the experience that it brings.

Let’s consider IT requirements to be products.  A dull list, a thick document gathering dust. How do you prioritise one requirement over another?  What is more important?

Agile introduces ‘stories’ as the requirement product.  They are written in the format ‘As a <role>, I want <a feature>, so that <some benefit is achieved>’.  It is the ‘So that’ which is usually the hardest part to articulate, yet it is the most important part of the story.

Liz Keogh describes how prompted by Chris Matts her preferred narative reads:

In order to <achieve some value>
As a <role>
I want <some feature>.

Applying the marketing thinking to how the story will “achieve some value”, don’t just define that value in the advantage it will bring, rather also consider the benefit it will deliver to the user.  The two are different.  There maybe a business advantage to delivering some feature, but if the benefit to the end user can’t be articulated, it’s real value must be questioned.

What is the story?

  • Tuesday, 13 January, 2009
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One of the problems with IT development is that it is tactical and piecemeal in its approach. Functionality is added in response to competitor or broader market activity. Expect to see an increasing number of brands doing something ‘social’ (and tactical) on the web, but don’t expect these new initiatives to be (strategic) seamlessly integrated into the existing digital channel offering.

This piecemeal approach extends to larger initiatives as well. In refreshing the website or developing new digital channels such as mobile and TV, IT will typically build out features and functionality prioritised upon their perceived individual business value regardless of what the sum value of the proposed release is. (Focusing all your effort of building functionality that delivers to your bottom line will seldom be as successful as you predict if it is not supported by features that meet the customers needs).

So when it comes to thinking about new features and functionality, where’s the best place to start? I’d suggest collaboratively, thinking around the customer. Collaboration is important to ensure that everyone starts with the same vision. It needs to be shared it with the broader audience, the product teams, IT; anyone whose day to life life will be touched by the project when it starts. I’d argue that you cannot start this soon enough. You don’t need to spend time doing analysis, interviewing all stakeholders individually, coming up with a document that is circulated and reviewed and re-written (with all the delays and waste that such a process incurs). Start the process getting all those stakeholders off-site for an afternoon and get the thoughts out on the table.

Commence with a presentation that introduces thinking in terms of customers and customer journeys. The below SlideShare presentation does this for the airline industry, addressing a new customer experience across channels. I acknowledge that it is pretty simple and doesn’t touch on half the ideas that airline executives may have. That is the point, it is just enough to get people thinking about different customer types and their touchpoints without getting bogged down in detail. This is what we want the participants of the off-site to share.

[slideshare id=912224&doc=airline-deck1-1231817842408345-3&w=425]

Once we’ve been through the presentation we break out into small groups a, each taking an individual customer (or persona) and build up a story; a day in the life of… (It is important not to forget the internal users of the system). These breakouts last 15-20 minutes with ten minutes for the team to play back their findings. As they build out a richer picture of the customer interactions they are asked to sketch out what the user interfaces may look like. The process is rapid, intense and iterative, but always focussing upon the customer journey; how will the customer realise their goals. When the teams tell their stories an analyst captures the essence of the requirements on index cards. The final exercise is to lay all these cards on the table and ask the team to group them into similar areas then prioritise them according to their perceived importance. In an afternoon you will have achieved four things. Firstly, you will have captured a vision for the new product in less than a day, with all stakeholders understanding not only the vision itself, but also the process that developed it and the concerns and issues that different parts of the business have with it. Secondly you will have an initial prioritised roadmap for its development. This will change, but it is a good strawman to circulate. Thirdly you will have introduced all the stakeholders together – projects succeed or fail based upon the strength of relationships and getting people engaged from the start will go a long way to creating shared ownership. And finally you will have generated energy, engagement and traction; to do the business case and to get the project started, recognising that just one part of the business having a vision is not going to bring it to the life that they dream.

Words are slippery things

  • Tuesday, 30 December, 2008
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Want to prove it? Take a sheet of paper. Tear it in half (under the table so I can’t see).  Now show the two halves.  You tore it in half side-ways didn’t you.  I tore it length-ways.  Same instruction, same materials, completely different result.

Are you experienced?

  • Thursday, 13 November, 2008
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“For you who have had the experience, no explanation is necessary. For you who have not, none is possible.”

I’m going to attribute that saying to Ram Dass, a Harvard professor who via psychedelic experiences ended up a spiritual teacher in the Eastern Tradition.

The problem with too much software/web design is that it is produced by people who have just not had the experience, or do not see the experience as relevant to their organisation or domain. They just don’t “get it”.

(“For you who have an apple product, no explanation is necessary, for you who have not, none is possible?” Cue “it’s an enterprise application we’re buiding, not a ****ing iPhone”).

If we want to build memorable and compelling products, we need to focus upon the experience. To dwell on the feature list or functional requirements is to build mediocrity. Nothing wrong with mediocrity if you don’t want to delight your customers or increase the performance of your workforce. Without considering experience you will miss innovation and added value.

So how to focus upon experience? Get your team to undertake different tasks to get under the skin of what customers go through.

Telco product?
Spend time in a retail outlet and watch different customers buy phones
Go into all the phone shops on the high street and ask the rep “hello, I want a mobile phone”. Suspend all your knowledge about phones and tariffs. How do they sell?
Leave your blackberry at home for a day (how dies it feel? How does it change what you do?)
Download instruction manuals from different phones from manufacturers websites

Travel product?
Go into a travel agents and ask for a holiday “somewhere hot and cheap in February”

Credit card product?
Ask to borrow money from someone you don’t know (how does it feel?)
Apply for a credit card at another bank
Collect all the Credit Card / loan direct mail and emails that you and you get sent over a week, photo / scan all the credit card advertisements you see in a week
Go into a car sales room and look to buy a car on credit

Supermarket product?
Get behind the till for a day (In the UK, at least a few years ago, all senior executives in both Tesco and Sainsburys spent time in the stores over the Christmas period)
Ask a shop assistant to help you find an obscure product that is not in stock
Go into a store with a shopping list and a single bank note, (no credit cards)
Go to the pharmacy when it is busy and ask to buy the morning after pill

Extend your team
Bring in representatives from completely unrelated parts of the business to participate in brainstorming sessions. Building a “youth” social networking website? Get someone from legal or corporate finance to join in. (Get’s you thinking along the lines of extreme characters – here and here [pdf]). Working on a complex exotic financial instruments? Get a few PAs to join in. You may learn something (that your product is too complicated and even you can’t explain what it really is).

I’m sure you can come up with better exercises. The object is that with this collection of experiences and related emotions new ideas can be brought to the table. They can offer insights from another, different perspective, providing more chance of business innovation being realised. More importantly, if you have an emotional attachment to the product you are building through real experience, you are more likely to build a better product that will fullfil the needs of and goals of the target audience in the way they want. The day your enterprise application team all have iPhones will be the day you start building better enterprise applications. For them, no explanation will be necessary. They’ll just “get it”.

How are you managing the change?

  • Thursday, 16 October, 2008
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To the development team ‘change’ relates to scope and requirements within the project, but change runs far deeper than that.

A question that I am often asked is how do you manage business change on agile projects. Release regular and often is an often quoted mantra, but what does that mean to the business where rolling new software across the large, multi-site organisation? How do you manage the piecemeal introduction of new technology, features and functions to hundreds or thousands of people, many levels removed from the project across remote offices and geographical locations? How do you ensure the recipients of the new technology rapidly adopt it and accept the change, even when change is occurring every few months.

What are the financial and human performance implications of each new release in terms of training, productivity and morale? What is the overall burden on people in frequent change?

The reality is that it is not unusual for projects deemed successful by IT and the immediate business team to ultimately fail when released to the broader organisation. Effective change management can be even more important when an organisation adopts agile software delivery.

An analogy as an example. If I expect a screwdriver and you only give me a cross-headed screwdriver when I really want a flat head one I am going to be unhappy. The core team may have prioritised the cross-headed one first for good reason, a flat headed one maybe coming just round the corner, but if you don’t deliver to my expectations I am going to be unhappy. Worse, I am likely to become resistant to future change and less likely willingly cooperate with the uptake of future releases, even if they do start to deliver to my needs.

Keep it on the shelf
The first point is that regular and often does not necessarily mean release to production for the entire organisation or marketplace. Running a number of internal releases, keeping them on the shelf until a complete and marketable product is ready is a strategy often employed. Significant value can be accrued by getting tested and working software into a pre-production environment and held “on the shelf” awaiting a full release. This maybe a UAT environment where a limited number of stakeholders test the functionality in an ‘as-live’ environment. Or it maybe a beta release to a small, selected number of interested people (e.g. a ‘friendly user trail’). This can often pay dividends with usability issues and minor gripes being picked up and addressed before a major roll-out.

Communication
Let’s assume that the team wants to roll out the application early and often to the whole target population. Critical to the success of managing the business change is communication. It is important to manage expectations on a timely and appropriate manner. Explain what the upcoming release will do and more importantly what it will not do (and when it will do it). Keep all stakeholders informed of the project progress (setting up a project blog can be a cheap and easy way of letting interested people know of progress), yammer maybe another way of broadcasting updates and information. Having a release count-down can also prepare stakeholders for the change. The techniques can be googled, the important thing is to communicate and manage the expectations (and be ready for inbound questions and comment after go-live).

Adaptable user interface
It is not unusual for the core team to drive for as much functionality as possible in the first release, considering UI enhancements as ‘nice to haves’ and consigning them to later releases. This is a false economy. Consider the cost of training and lost productivity through a hard to use interface. Now multiply that across multiple releases that focus upon utility before usability. Delivering a first release that is self contained and compelling will go a long way to driving organisational buy-in of the new application and greater acceptance of future change. (Jeff Patton writes some great stuff on using story maps to explain what the system should do. Using these will help focus on complete and useful slices through the application rather than random features that are perceived to be of value but do not make a coherent product).

A new user interface, however well designed will inevitably take time to learn the first time it is used. The challenge is with each subsequent release to introduce funcitonality and interactions that leverages the users existing mental model of the application, building upon what has been already been learned. Starting with the end-state, wireframes that articulate the final application then trimming out features, feields and controls to represent each notional release can be a good way of ensuring a UI that will scale as new functionality is added.

Agile organisation
Ultimately the most successful way of introducing agile is to build a beta culture with everyone as agents of change across the whole organisaiton. More importantly change becomes a cycle of learning and continuous improvement. And here I’ll borrow this most excellent graphic from David Armano. David compares what he calls conventional and unconventional marketing but the parallel with software development is obvious. His iterative cycle is “plan-design-launch-measure” but that is not a million miles away from the lean philosophy of “plan-do-check-act”. And critical to the journey is the learning cycle between iterations.

Users is a dirty word

  • Tuesday, 14 October, 2008
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Language matters.  How you describe something frames your reference.  One of the problems with so much software is that it is designed for generic “users” (typically UML stickmen) who may also have roles, but don’t have lives.  Why this obsession with users?  Everybody “uses” things.  Surely the important thing is to understand the nuances of that usage, and that means thinking about real people.  Josh Bernoff wrote a while ago,

Nobody talks about users of dishwashers, or users of retail stores, or users of telephones. So why are we talking about “users” of computers, browsers, and software?

Try, just for a day, to stop using this word. You’ll be amazed at how differently you think about the world.

Stop thinking about “users” and start thinking about people.  Personas are a good way to start doing this.  Get all your stakeholders thinking about the people whose lives will be touched by the product that is being developed.

Jeremiah Owyang updated his model of what web strategy is. It’s a cool model and worth a look. One of the things he has done is changed the word “users” to “community”.

One of the comments from Connie Bensen reads:

“I recently had a discussion about verbiage on our corporate website & heard the phrase ‘those words are industry standards’. Well, customers don’t know them. An analogy from the library world is that I took down the sign saying ‘periodicals’. It now reads magazines. (a shift towards making things customer friendly)”

I like that.  It is a subtle change, and when I’ve argued with colleagues in the past about the difference between users and customers and consumers they just don’t see the point.  What is wrong with users, after all it is the language of the industry.  Yes, that maybe, but it is not the language outside our industry and they are the people that we build applications for.

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