If you don't have the building bridges(1) conversation how are you going to know that you need to cross a canyon?
It's December 1998 and I've been working in the Software business for little over a year. Through a mixture of arrogance, ignorance, and gonzo(2) project management our small team is on client-site fighting a desperate rearguard action to maintain a massive software release that has no back-out plan. We are facing massive performance issues with our client-server application. Each of the several hundred users has at least one connection open on the Sybase 11.x server; prone as it was to blocking and deadlock problems, the users are experiencing many blocking and deadlock issues which are aggravated by a flaky and slow LAN.
One particular blotter(3) is contentious: the browse all trades view. At any time it seems a score of the users are searching (and locking) all the trades. We don't think this view is needed; the BAs tell us that the users insist on keeping it. Bloody users, eh? Eventually, breaking the unwritten rules, a BA forces me to see a user.
"Can you show us how you use the All Trades Blotter?", says the BA.
"Ok. I need to find this trade for 'XXX', I'll load the blotter and order by fund. Now it's in Swedish Krona so I'll order by currency. Scroll down...... Ah there it is."
Bang! It's immediately obvious that they need a search function. I wrote one. They loved it. They stopped using the All Trades Blotter.
Lessons:
- The users were not being obstructive. They genuinely needed the functionality from All Trades. Everyone's just trying to do their job.
- It's true that often users/customers don't know what they really want. If you don't talk to them, though, neither will you.
Footnotes:
- As in "Don't tell me you want a bridge, show me the canyon you want to cross."
- I didn't have anything to do with the project management, though.
- Term used for a data grid in the application. It's a financial thing.
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1 Comments:
Sounds to me your "BA" weren't really listening to the users when doing the spec :)
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