Required requirements
Incoming! Requirements from everywhere, every day.
Yesterday I was interviewed by the trade press about Requirements Management. Of all the areas in IT today this is the one that is in most serious need of attention. For decades we have failed so enormously in this area and tried to fix the problem downstream instead of focusing on getting requirements right. I think we need a radical rethink of how requirements are gathered, recorded, managed and used.
Here are five ideas on how we can revamp how we do requirements that won’t cost much to implement and which will deliver giant benefits to the organization:
- Pictures not words
- Prioritized lists
- Public lists
- Pick the waterline
- Practice agile requirements
1: A picture paints a thousand words
The English language is so inadequate in explaining what we want. We can take thousands of words to explain in precision what we mean, look at any piece of legislation, yet Bread had it nailed in 1971 with their song “If [a picture paints a thousand words]“. So why don’t we follow their lead and move to requirements in pictures. After all what we are going to deliver is, for the most part, a visual experience.
So I welcome the arrival of prototyping and simulation technologies that enable business analysts and even users to draw facsimile applications and experiment with them. However there is much more to the application than the user experience.
What about the business rules, the flow of work through, the data model? All of these carry valuable information about the solution that needs to be created. We need to move to a new standard for documenting business systems, a standard that incorporates all the function and non-functional requirement and that is entirely, or as much as is possible, pictorial. And I’d like to see it start with a baseline of our current systems.
In fact as we have seen the massive growth in workflow tools being introduced into businesses we are steadily developing the most comprehensive documentation of business in history. While we see this as an essential part of managing the business we should be looking to take this as the de facto ”truth” about how the business works. And if it is not the truth we must work to ensure that it rapidly becomes so.
Using our BPM tool to document the business is a delightful unexpected consequence and for any business teetering on the the decision this is the one benefit that will repay itself over and over again over time.
From the baseline that is our current BPM model we can now engage in a conversation with the business about where they want to evolve their business and we can do it in a pictorial language that is concise and precise.
2: Sink or swim by prioritization
We gather hundreds or requirements every day from the users. We document them and we categorize them and we validate them. But the most important thing we can do is prioritize them.
My first boss once said to me “There can only be one priority one” which was profound and obvious at the same time. Unfortunately he was prone to follow this with “and here they are!”
Prioritization can be can be controversial. Once we have an ordinal list someone’s requirement is going to be above someone else’s and below another’s. However, instead of IT being the villain and deciding which requirements get done, the business users can now engage in a conversation about relative value of the requirements and negotiate amongst themselves on the order. This leaves IT to act as adviser and technical guide organizing and optimizing the list for development efficiency (but not at the expense of business need).
A more engaged business, a more informed business user means better quality of debate and better outcome for the system and the organization in the end.
3: Publish and empower
So now we have a prioritized list but where is it? It should be in the hands of the users. In fact every requirement must have a business sponsor who is notified every time that requirement is changed, updated in any way.
And these requirements need to be out in the public (at least internal public if you get my drift) domain. If everyone in the organization can see how the requirements are prioritized they can contribute to the debate.
It is important for users to mention when the requirement is wrong but if they can’t see them how can they do that? It is critical that they mention things like “this is a legislative change” or “marketing are starting the TV campaign in September” that affect the prioritization. Remember IT tends to work the list in priority order so it is critical to empower all the stakeholders to tell everything they know about the requirement especially information that affects its priority.
And when those users edit the requirements the stakeholders need to know. The owner of the requirement needs to approve the change, the architect, designer, developer and tester working from those requirements need to know too.
There is no reason why requirement can’t change while there are in motion, being developed, but equally there is no reason why the change necessarily makes it into the code. Each situation needs to be taken on its merits. The essential point here is the requirements tie stakeholders, business and IT, together with anyone and everyone involved in the requirements, users, customers, suppliers, etc. Keeping this information siloed only makes the problems worse.
Just a word about crowd sourcing. This is a technique for gaining a collective opinion on which are the highest priority requirements. The process is simple – let the people vote. Adding voting capability to a requirements management system makes it possible for interesting consensuses to emerge that might not occur if a lone manager makes the prioritization decisions.
4: Sink or swim by the waterline
When have our prioritized list, and it is in a place where all stakeholders can access it we, as IT, need to add a waterline. A line which says, above this line are the requirements we have the resources to do, below this line are the requirements that will have to wait.
The waterline is added by taking the initial estimates in the requirements and comparing them to the IT resources assigned for this project.
Now we can see why prioritization is essential. Math will take you below or above the waterline. Not some capricious or suspicious invisible process. When the waterline appears everyone below the surface starts to improve the quality of argument about the requirements and suddenly they get much better.
Once again it is the business that is determining the priorities and therefore which requirements don’t make the cut. Of course, from time to time, the “must haves” are going to go below the surface. What happens now is that it suddenly becomes obvious that we are either over-thinking this project, or overloading it or, perhaps, IT needs more resources. How much more compelling is it for the business units to agitate on behalf of IT for more project funding?
The waterline is a wonderful discipline that is easy to implement, that everyone understands and that takes IT out of the decisions and once again places us in adviser position.
5: Can we do requirements in an agile manner?
We certainly can. As the foregoing (or is that four-going?) ideas show we can turn to automation to improve how we manage requirements and move the ownership and decision making process to the business.
Given that the business is as eager to see requirements definition improve as much as IT is: it is equally true that the business does not like the months of interviewing just as IT hates it too. So can we apply the disciplines we are evolving in agile software development to requirements gathering?
When we have an informed user community we can start to ask them to give us their needs in priority order. We can then start to work on those priorities much earlier in the lifecycle.
Then we can go and get the next set of priorities and work on those.
Of course requirements change, as we’ve said, and when they do it is a lot better to be able to insert updated ones into the next wave of priorities and wait a few weeks for the update to appear as opposed to a few months (or years!).
So agile requirements go hand-in-hand with agile development and agile testing.
Summary
If there is one theme here it is that empowerment of stakeholders involved in requirements. Empowered users make better decisions as long as they realize that with that empowerment comes accountability. So when you decide to Empower Change in your organization’s requirements management processes remember that when it comes to requirements: change is not as expensive as ignorance.
August 14, 2010 at 9:01 pm | Business and Technology | No comment
Disruptive Innovation
Empower business units to innovate by giving them the means to control and access their data
Disruptive innovation sounds like a contradiction. It is a way of thinking that changes how we see technology. It makes us rethink how we apply tried and trusted practices and it usually shatters our assumptions, lowers costs and increases revenue … oh yes, and terrifies competitors.
This week I want to talk about data. To misquote Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “data, data everywhere and no one stops to think”. The Ancient Mariner was surrounded by water he could not drink: we are surrounded by data we do not exploit to the fullest. There are three opportunities with data and each, in its own way, is highly disruptive:
Whose data is it? This is not so much a question about where the data came from (though that in itself is a worthy subject for a blog post) but who owns the data? We have developed a very secretive mentality about data, and for good reason. Much of the information stored on servers today is confidential, often subject to regulatory restrictions and sometimes personal in nature. But what about the business data?
Let’s think about an example: imagine that your computer systems maintained your inventory levels for the raw materials of your business. You would use this information to plan when to order more supplies. It would trigger your negotiation process with your various suppliers and you’d place an order with the one offering the best price/service/quality/delivery characteristics. Then a month or so later you’d do it all again.
Disruptive innovation: what would happen if you let your suppliers have access to your inventory of raw materials? They would now be able to predict when you were about to reorder and, instead could come to you with their price before you ask for it. In fact they could manage their inventory based on the rate of consumption of your inventory. This means they could get better prices from their suppliers and pass this along to you. They could also use the data offer to top up your inventory with lower volume but at high volume discounts when they were cash strapped and did not want to wait until the end of the quarter for your order. Everyone wins. Why is our inventory level a secret from our suppliers?
Who controls the access to the data? Usually ICT does: but why? Surely the data belongs to the business and ICT are the custodians and control access on behalf of the business. The business should determine who has access and the business should specify what access they want. ICT should provide that in a form that can be easily consumed by business users.
Let’s think about an example: Why don’t we let marketing do programming? Well this is a silly question really. Of course marketing can’t do programming! ICT does programming and marketing does … well no one is really sure what marketing does; we just know they run the website. But the website is made by programming HTML (etc). So why can’t marketing have access to all the business systems for incorporating directly into the website? If you, or someone in your marketing organization, wants to let people order your products and services from the web why not let them?
Disruptive innovation: It is their data, their systems and their business. ICT has to get out of the mindset that says they own all software development. Patently that is not true. Have you seen the kind of spreadsheets the business is using today? A disruptive innovation is one that empowers the business to exploit technology without asking for permission, what Alan Davidson of Google called “innovation without permission”. This empowerment means that the business can solve some of their business issues through empowering technology provided by ICT without getting an ICT project spun up.
What is the next killer app? Most business users are very familiar with using Microsoft Excel. In fact they excel at it (sorry – just too easy). The problem with almost every spreadsheet is that the data it contains is static, it is a snapshot in time of the data as was. Invariably some person dedicates their life to keeping the data up to date by copying it from some existing business system. The next killer-app is one that allows MS Excel to feed off live business data. So as you look at the spreadsheet the numbers are moving in real time! So where is this app?
Let’s think about an example: Next time you present your figures to the bank manager, or the board, or your shareholders ask yourself this, “Are data that are a month old good enough for this audience?” If the answer is “no” think about how you could present live information, up to the second, to your audience. Think about all of those government studies that are decades old that we use to make investment and funding decisions upon. If only we see the current situation as it is happening. Paul Ottellini, CEO of Intel, said that the next thing to be obsolete will be “Ignorance”.
Disruptive innovation: demand that all data that is displayed in every situation represent the current situation. Prohibit users from copying data and showing a moment in time to make their decisions. get users used to the idea of numbers that move, trend up and down, have seasonal, even hourly variations. Unless you can feel the heart beating in your organization you will never know how it really works. Once you a plotting the patterns you can see how the changes you make, the decisions you make, affect your business. When the bank manager asks you what your income show him that it just grew by 2% as he was asking about it. Now that would impress the heck out of me.
Putting control of, access to and a way to consume data in the hands of business people is Empowering Change that lets them run their business. Our job in ICT is to make this possible and to do it in a way that is secure, scalable and compliant: but it is our job to make it happen.
August 10, 2010 at 4:33 am | Business and Technology | No comment
Carpe diem
Making a point to the graduating class
In high schools everywhere the graduating class elect a valedictorian to speak on the class’s behalf about their dreams and aspirations for their future. It is a great honor, it often changes the chosen speaker in quite profound ways, and often starts them on a journey of leadership. maybe you were your schools valedictorian? Whilst many of these speeches follow familiar themes, world peace, elimination of disease and hunger, the one thing they always come back to is living up to your potential. Though less well known in the UK, the Latin phrase Carpe Diem, “seize the day”, finds itself in almost all of these graduation speeches. Everyone expects it, some even count occurrences as a drinking game (!), but few hear it.
In the last few days, in one of those strange, serendipitous confluences of incidents that all line up to tell us something we needed to hear I have been reminded of what it means to be an entrepreneur. I’ve been rereading, actually listening to, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers book about what it takes to be a leader. At the same time as I have been traveling I have been keeping up with TED.org podcasts and a thought provoking one from Cameron Herold on teaching kids to be entrepreneurs was in my queue. My daughter is applying for a job and the interview has required her to prepare a 15 minute presentation on Picasso: when I saw her briefly at the weekend she was busy preparing. I met with two very successful entrepreneurs last week: one was setting up a service to train CEO’s to overturn thinking in their companies, the other debating if email is really the answer and wondering if there is a better email than email. And for myself I have been thinking about what is next in tech too in preparation for a talk I am giving tonight at the St. Louis Cardinals baseball game.
All of these threads have led me to the obvious conclusion that we have to have goals, ambitions, dreams but also to the not so obvious conclusion that those who achieve them, those who succeed are those that seize the day. It may be simplistic to say this, but if you want something badly enough you have to work to get it.
For those of you who are feeling daunted by the impossibility of getting your dream started I’d like to tell you the 10 most important things I have learned along the way.
- Dream big: the thing about dreams that we achieve is that it makes us stop achieving. Let your reach exceed your grasp, always be striving for more
- Choose: procrastination kills dreams. You have to make decisions in business so start making them now. The more you practice making decisions the easier it will become. Each time you are faced with a choice: ask yourself “Which option brings me closer to my dream?”
- Accept failures: you are going to make some bad choices, far fewer than the brilliant ones you make – you’ll have to trust me on this, but you are going to have failures. Learn from them, analyze them, dissect them. Being on a winning team is fun but you never learn anything. Losing from time to time gives you something to work on – so work on it.
- Trust your gut: if your employee, your partner, your accountant says everything is “OK” but you don’t think it is – trust your gut. Get them to prove it to you. And if you’re still not convinced go with your gut. You are the boss – you get the right to make the decisions, even the wrong decisions.
- Hire the right people: there is no more important skill than this. Get good people. Hire people who are smarter than you, who are different from you, who will challenge and question you. Hire people who do not need to me managed, who share your beliefs about customers, service, quality. First impressions matter – so trust your gut again.
- Empower your people: your employees are the key to your success. You can’t do it all. Trust them, enable them to take more responsibility, to improve the business. Let them become entrepreneurs inside your business.
- Reward your people: when they do good work, praise them. Reward them when times are good and they’ll stick with you, at reduced pay, when times are bad. Recognition costs nothing but changes how a person feels about themselves. In your newsletter single out the great job done by the kid in the warehouse – he’ll take it home and show his mum and his girlfriend – and he’ll come back next day and work even smarter.
- Set clear expectations: don’t accept what you can’t accept. If you hate lateness – make it clear before day 1. If you hate untidiness – make it clear. Don’t think you can’t ask for the things you expect. But always remember you have to hold yourself to the same standards or higher.
- Deal with it now: if it isn’t right deal with it now. If you have to terminate someone do it now. If you have to redo some work for a client – do it now. Make it clear to everyone that you have high standards and that if they are not met you deal with them there and then. No recriminations, no blame, just an opportunity to get it right and for everyone to learn.
- Have fun: and never forget the reason you are doing this is – whatever that reason is. Come to work smiling and go home smiling.
And if you can do all of this, the remarkable change you will find in yourself, the Empowering Change you are creating for you, will bring you to a point, a few decades from now, when you’ll be able to say I achieved something, I seized the day and made a difference.
August 2, 2010 at 3:02 pm | Business and Technology | No comment
Naughties, teenies and millennials
The next leaders of our world
When someone says “in the roaring 1920′s” we can immediately relate to the era of speakeasies, dancing the Charleston and silent movies. My question is though: what was the decade before that called? I ask because we will soon be at the end of the same decade in this century and it needs a label. Not just “roaring” moniker for the decade of 9/11, 7/7, Iraq, Afghanistan, Wall Street crash, Saville Report, Bhutto and the thousands of other events that have shaped this decade but what do we call the decade of 1901 to 1910 and 2001 to 2010? In the absence of anyone stepping up I’ve picked “naught-ies”. I tried the “oughts” and “zeroes” but they didn’t seem right to me.
And what has been happening quietly in the “naughties”? In September 2000 a generation of young people entered their secondary education: that same group graduated from university this spring. In 2003 MySpace entered their world, 2004 Facebook, 2005 Bebo, 2006 Twitter, iPhone 2007: this generation of young people, the “millennials”, have integrated into the fabric of their world a digital 7 by 24 experience that extends their presence across the globe and connects them to everything in real-time. For them this is not magic, not technology, not new, it is not even cool any more: it just is. It just is what it has always been for them.
These young entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, farmers, doctors, artists, philosophers, teachers, athletes, politicians, designers, technologists, historians, geographers fundamentally see the world as an integrated whole free from borders and restrictions. They expect to be able to answer any question in seconds from the palm of their hands. They don’t need to know anything: they just need to Google. They expect things to work together, they expect technology to be free, they adopt technology easily, they are not loyal to any brand, they are socially responsible, they get the work/life balance and they play World of Warcraft every week with their friends.
And they are your new labour-force. They do not see you are their employer: they see you as their collaborator. They are working for you to find an outlet for their creativity, a place where they can problem solve, somewhere they can express themselves and be innovative. They do not accept anything as a fundamental rule, all rules are meant to be tested and then bent, twisted and even broken if it means doing something better. They fail frequently and they enjoy failing for the lessons it teaches. They learn fast and adopt the latest ideas and technologies even though they know they are not always ready and reliable. Speed is essential to them, documentation is not. Delivering something that works for most people quick is better than delivering a perfect solution months from now. They’d rather be late delivering something cool rather than something business-like and on time. They do not settle for good enough: they want to delight. They love change. They revel in challenges.
So how do you exploit them? You embrace them. You create a culture that allows people to do lots of “R” in search of the “D” in R&D. You encourage them to experiment and if they fail you congratulate them on eliminating one more bad idea and encourage them to learn from the experience and try again. You make it clear that it is OK to challenge long held beliefs and you make it clear that you reserve the right to make the final decisions. You learn to say “OK let’s try that” and never say “That won’t work because …”.
As we move into the next decade, which I’ve dubbed to the “teenies”, the millennial labour-force is ready to change everything in your business. Are you ready allow them to take you to the next level and start Empowering Change in them?
July 23, 2010 at 8:32 pm | Business and Technology | 1 comment
Working in the margin
Turn technology into a competitive advantage
For more than six decades now we have been using technology, specifically computer-based technology, to drive costs out of the business. Quaint hardly describes those now sepia pictures of serried hoards of clerks, stamping, signing and sorting multi-part documents in vast open-plan offices. Typewriters on every desk but phones only on the manager’s. And over the last 60 years we have slowly replaced those jobs with technology solutions and those people have moved their skills into different fields. Maybe you are one of them.
Today there is not much automation that is left to be done. Indeed most people in the computer business spend their time trying to replace the systems they put in 10 or 20 years ago and we are even replacing systems we put in only one or two years ago. And we are doing this now because we are desperately trying to drive cost out of IT.
With the way the economy has been for the past 10 years everyone is completely focused on cost containment.
But that is not the only way to keep increasing the margins in your business. Mr. Micawber once reflected; “Annual income £20, annual expenditure £19 19s 6d, result happiness. Annual income £20, annual expenditure £20 0s 6d, result misery.” Profit is the difference between income and expenditure. We have already driven out all the significant and unnecessary expenditure we can: the pips are squeaking, there is no more juice in the lemon!
Businesses that can turn technology to their commercial advantage will be the Glaxo’s, the BP’s, the British Airways, the Sainsbury’s of the future. It used to be, in 1935, that if you made it to the Fortune list of top companies you’d be on that list for 90 years. Today companies on the list last only 15 years there on average.
Look at FaceBook, Microsoft bought by a 1.5% stake for $250mn, or Amazon, worth over $50bn, these are companies that could not exist without technology to create markets, create products and deliver revenues.
So what does this mean for your business? Look to turn technology into a way of creating new revenue.
Maybe you can deliver your product and services to your customers through technology that gets it there faster, cheaper, safer. Do kids want to go shopping in the High Street? No, they want to surf the web, from their iPhone and get a package on their doorstep the next day. And kids have a lot of money these days.
Can technology help you understand your customers better? Help you with detecting trends, buying behavior? Can technology help you discover why customers don’t buy from you? Or why they start to buy and then stop.
Is the customer experience with your company better because of technology or worse? What can you do to make your customers become your best sales team because your technology makes them love doing business with you? What can you do to make your competitors look un-cool, out of date, not in tune with the customer?
If you have an idea for changing your business model does your technology allow you make those changes? Or does it hold back and force you to do things the old way? Can you model what effect your ideas might have if you implement them? Or do you have jump and hope?
How do you know that you are being successful? Does your technology tell you, give you feedback on how you are running your business? Does your technology monitor your competitors?
There are as many ways of turning technology into a competitive advantage as there are business people with ideas.
In this series of postings I want to explore ideas on how we start to use technology to drive sales, how we enable business owners to run their businesses proactively and how we Empower Change that increases the margins in your business.
Tell me how you turn technology into a competitive advantage.
July 9, 2010 at 11:47 pm | Business and Technology | 5 comments
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