Monthly Archives: January 2009

Listen, Don’t Obey

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As Tim correctly pointed out in his comment on the previous post, waterfall doesn’t exactly have a stellar record of success. In my experience, a major cause for that is shortchanging the upfront research that is necessary to ensure the success of subsequent stages of development. As I said in my comment, often the proper upfront research that would shape the vision of the product based on business need and customer understanding is sacrificed to meet aggressive deadlines and tight budgets. It’s no wonder that the final product is underwhelming, despite the best efforts of everyone on the team.

If these prior adventures in development have failed, why not try something radically different, like agile. If the organization is not willing to put the effort into a proper upfront research and design phase, then build something and hope you get useful feedback on it, right? It sounds good, but then why do we still find some of the same problems?

Tim hit it again. Often customers, or users, can’t tell us what they want, even when we do ask, or what they say they want is not the best way, or even a good way, to solve their problem. This can happen in waterfall or agile. Customer requests come from their perspective, which is via their domain expertise. They are experts at their tasks, but we are supposed to be experts at designing interactions. The key is to understand the problem and solve it, not just implement what our users request. Maybe the users’ suggestion is spot on. At the very least, these suggestions tell us where to focus our attention. We’ll likely find where pain can be removed or gain can be added. But when it comes to designing the solution, we need to bring our advanced knowledge of computer interactions to bear and conceive of the best ways to address their needs which may be better than our users could imagine.

While working on a call center application, I spent many hours sitting with agents, listening in on customer calls, and observing how they worked. Between calls, I asked a lot of questions about what I heard and what I observed. After only a day or two of this, I had a very good understanding of what their work was like and what their challenges were.

When I asked them what they wanted, they typically mentioned incremental improvements to their current tool, an old ‘green screen’ mainframe application. In fact, when asked if they wanted digital catalogs to replace their large rack of physical catalogs, they categorically said ‘no’. They wanted things similar to how they were. As one agent put it, “I don’t like change.”

However, the time I spent with them plus my understanding of the business challenges led to a radical design in a Flex environment that was light years ahead of what they were used to, and it did include digital catalogs. So how would the agents respond, especially given that we did something they expressly said they didn’t want?

We tested a rough prototype with a handful of novice and experienced agents. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. At the end of the hour usability test, even the woman who didn’t like change wanted to know when the system was going to launch. She felt it was a dramatic improvement over what she had been using, and had mastered, over the past 13 years as an agent.

So do talk to your users. Ask them what they want. But when it comes to defining the solution, remember that you are expert when it comes to building tools. Just be sure to test your design to make sure you got it right.

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Is ‘Good Enough’ Good Enough?

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Fast, good, and cheap. Pick two.fastgoodcheap

This is the familiar instruction represented by the project triangle. A project that is of high quality and delivered quickly will be costly. One that is done well with limited resources will likely take time. An inexpensive project delivered quickly will suffer in its execution. Keeping this in mind, compare waterfall with agile.

Waterfall demands a certain level of quality. All of the upfront research and design, as well as the many gates and checkpoints insure that when the product is released, it meets the expectations defined up front. Waterfall projects can be good and fast, or good and cheap, but the underlying notion is good. Now, experience tells us that the definition of ‘good’ can vary greatly on waterfall projects. ‘Good’ can mean that the end users find the product useful and usable, or that the project is predictable, i.e. that the budget is met with the expected scope, or that the target date is hit and the expectations of scope are managed. I’m sure each of you has experienced many variations on what stakeholders consider ‘good’.

Agile chooses fast and cheap. Sprints are short and teams are small. There are many good reasons for this. They are well documented elsewhere, and include getting working software to users faster, being able to address high priority problems quickly, and abandoning features with little value. With this approach, the mantra for each sprint is ‘good enough’. When choosing fast and cheap, what is sacrificed will be quality. At least initially, this may be true, but agile counters this by adding many revisions following quickly on the heels of an initial release. Problems can be quickly identified and fixed in the next release, which may be as little as two weeks away.

This requires a significant shift in thinking for User Experience. It is our job to ensure that the users have something they find valuable and easy to use. We think big thoughts about mental models and context and integrate detailed thoughts on layout and implications. We have been accustomed to defining the entire picture, making sure all the pieces fit, before moving on. It can be very challenging to take one piece of a larger project and just get it to ‘good enough’ while ignoring the rest of the system. We are judged on how the product looks and behaves. Sacrifices made for expediency affect our credibility and reputation.

We also may have different ideas of what constitutes ‘good enough’. To a prototypical engineer, it may mean that the feature is present and functional. For UX, it’s about utility and ease. A product owner may fall somewhere in the middle. Its important for each team to agree on their shared definition of ‘good enough’. If forced to work under the simplest extreme of ‘functional’, we may not be pleased, but at least our target is clear and we know what to work towards.

This change in thinking is a key challenge to successfully integrating UX and agile. One approach is define a rough, high-level vision so that all involved can get a sense of the whole. During each sprint, or prior to each sprint, fill in the details of the pieces, or stories, about to be built. It won’t guarantee that there won’t be rework, but it will help balance the need for holism with the need for speed. If you don’t get it right this time, there’s always next release.

Adopting Agile is Hard

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Before getting into the details of our particular challenges, I wanted to acknowledge, for all of you going through this, that adopting agile is hard, perhaps one of the biggest professional hurdles I’ve faced in recent history. While I’ve been in the same industry for about 12 years now, I imagine this is about as close as you can come to switching careers without actually doing it. You think you know what’s going on, but the rug keeps getting pulled out from under you. However, I also like the term ‘adopting’ because this is similar to adding a child to your family.

When you have a kid, your life is no longer the same. You’ll sleep less. There will be lots of screaming, and you will have to clean up more crap than ever before. Moving to an agile process seems a lot like that. The hope is that once you figure it out, life is better and you wonder how you ever lived without it.

Even reading about agile can be as confusing as negotiating the parenting section of a bookstore. Want to know how to get your baby to sleep at night? Here are 20 books that all say something different. Want to adopt an agile process? Here are multiple options, each with different interpretations.

To be fair, the looseness of agile, and scrum in particular, is one of the things I like most about it, and what also causes the most pain. If you were to ask a personified scrum process what to do, the answer would likely be, “It depends.” It may be true, but it doesn’t feel helpful.

Agile is more of a philosophy than a process. It dictates very little. We have five scrum teams working concurrently and each one works a little differently. One team has a number of outsourced members across the globe. Two others are working on entirely new initiatives The last two are refining existing parts of the site, although they move from making small tweaks to significant additions or revisions. Some teams do more costing and planning for each sprint, while others are very loose. Each of these teams have developed their own idiosyncratic scrum process that works with their unique situation. This is one of the powerful elements of the agile methodology, the flexibility. It is also one of the biggest challenges. Teams must define their process for themselves. Scrum only provides a framework. Each team is trying to do what is best for their people and their project, but it can be very difficult to work across multiple teams that are working differently.

There seems to be a sense of the serenity prayer to it. Agile is a new process and will require a lot of change. However, realize what you won’t be able to change and find a way to work within those constraints. I appreciate that this process acknowledges the realities of organizations and attempts to work with them. I found Ken Schwaber’s book Agile Project Management with Scrum very helpful in demonstrating this. In this book, Ken presents case studies of teams in different circumstances at different companies. In one case study, knowing that the program management office required Microsoft Project files for status reporting, the Product Owner adapted scrum reporting to fit within Project’s framework. Rather than trying to get another part of the organization to adapt in a futile battle against the windmills, teams in this book found ways to improve their process while working with the constraints they had to live with.

So if this feels painful or impossible, that’s normal. It means that you’re going through change. Recently, our Program Manager and resident certified Scrum Master attended a conference with two major agile gurus. After listening to the other people describe their problems, he says that he came away feeling that we are doing quite well compared to a lot of other companies! Given how hard it has been for us, I really feel for those who are not quite as far along the path.

As we figure things out, I’ll share what I can. Until then, if you have any questions, I may respond with, “It depends.”

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