The 'soft' underbelly of Software - Elaboration 1/3: Users as first citizen - Essay 0005

I hope you have now expenssed a duster and a blower to ensure that there are never any cobwebs on the business plan.

I have seen many instances where the business plan was filed away once the funding was approved. I am pretty sure you have also witnessed the consequences when this happens. Here are some common symptoms you will observe when the business plan is not used as a common and frequent reference:

• The Product Management team starts defining strategy.
• The Project Management team speaks to engineering teams to create a project plan as the first activity.
• The Project Engineering team begins creating a common reusable framework that can solve any problem.
• The Enterprise Architecture team starts dictating technology because it is considered a 'company standard'.
• Marketing begins defining characteristics of target users.
• Teams start complaining that 'we are compromising product philosophy by chasing customers'. In this case, it is most likely that those responsible for the business plan either didn't communicate it or, worse, didn't take the right stakeholders into account.

Elaboration

Now that we have a solid bootstrap for this series and for the program, let us look at the next immediate step of the process. This is Elaboration. Elaboration is the deconstruction (repeat, deconstruction and not destruction) of the Goals and Objectives laid down within the I-C phase. This is the WHAT. WHAT needs to be built? WHAT will it look like? WHAT will it run like? WHAT needs will it solve for? WHAT (WHICH if you are grammatically sensitive) user base (personas) will it address? WHAT will get me closer to the I-C? WHAT has the danger of getting me farther from the I-C?

The central driver for the Elaboration is where we left off in the initial phases of the I-C. Bring the Users back. Put them in the center of the frame. Every individual doing Elaboration MUST start with the user personas they want to support. There are various methods to formally articulate the user perspective. It doesn't matter which one you use.

For the sake of making the more important psychological adjustments point let me use a commonly used template:

Persona + Need + Purpose

Example: As a site coordinator/PI, I would like to see a list of open tasks immediately on login so that I can perform those tasks and get on with my life.

Let me now present a variation of this from various different perspectives to ensure my point about putting the user in the center.

System in the middle: As a system, I would like to present a list of tasks to the user so that the user can click on each task.

Brain Overload: The user should see a Salesforce list with all the tasks that should also send them notifications and allow them to choose if they would like daily or weekly digests.

Tech First: Run a SQL query to get a list of all tasks for the currently logged-in user with the ability to hyperlink to the task details. And I can go on and on....

Ensure that you appoint the user as the first citizen of your new universe and then put yourself in their shoes to define their interactions with the beautiful world around them.

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