Eliminate Costly Development At The Prototype Stage

@Enricgili and I showed some intial ideas as a prototype to @Jeremiahstone today. He gave a very good idea. He asked us to show all the screens of the prototype to the architects and ask them to put a $ sign on every component on the prototype. Not person days. Not dollar value. Just a rating systems where they put $, $$, $$$ or $$$$ on the components on the screen. Then he asked us to look at the most expensive components and check if they bring adequate value. We plan to do that.

This sounds so simple and makes so much sense. I wonder why we never did this at the prototype stage. Jeremiah also shared some interesting insight about the reaction of development colleagues. When developers say "I don't understand that feature. Why do we need that", what they are really saying is "That is a lot of work. Are you sure that brings significant value for customers at the cost of losing other things that may be more valuable".

Image from http://www.webdesignerdepot.com

Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski

I attended a session by Luke Wroblewski on Mobile First today in the offices of Ning in Palo Alto. Since we have been thinking mobile first for the design of Career OnDemand with good success, I went to this meetup to see what's new. There are a lot of new things. Here is his current presentation. http://www.lukew.com/resources/articles/MobileFirst_LukeW.pdf  I highly recommend it. Please visit www.lukew.com for his upcoming talks. He has a book in the making named Mobile First.

In Career OnDemand, we designed every use case Mobile First. We painstakingly created prototypes for every sea level use case for the employee view and manager view. It helped us focus on the most important things, clarified the purpose of a use case and made the use experience significantly better.

When we transferred the mobile first design to the web, the main button that showed up on the mobile screen was displayed in bright orange color in the web page to indicate the most probable action to the user. It was received very well by users. I'll keep you posted.

Agile Development Across Locations

The Career OnDemand team is distributed across Palo Alto, Walldorf, Germany and Budapest, Hungary. It has been an interesting exercise of Agile development so far. We relied on prototyping and did not write any detailed specifications. The designers of the product are heavily involved with the development team, sometimes on a daily basis.

When it comes to discussing the details of features, we are relying on limited use case descriptions, prototypes along with videos that tell the story. It has been a learning experience. I'll keep you posted about how it goes, from the product manager's point of view.

Many colleagues from other companies have told me that Agile development does not work across locations and they switched back to the waterfall model midpoint.  I hope we don't have to go there.

How we should be delivering enterprise applications

I recently listened to a conversation between Jason Averbook and Bill Kutik.

This is a summary of their views on how the workforce is changing and how we should be delivering enterprise apps. I added some of my comments in the sub bullets.

Overview of the session

• User Defined
• Participation based on user preferences. At SAP we think of this as people centric. Finally we need to build software that is useful and usable.
• Cloud Computing
• Almost all HR software purchase today is Software as a Service
• Consumer Driven
• Don't waste people's time. Make it usable
• Perpetual Beta
• Deliver small increments of innovation
• Interactional
• Focus on collective intelligence rather than transactions. 

Jason on Social Networking in the Enterprise

Jason says that collective intelligence needs to be captured in some form so that they can be reused. Jason did not mention the phrase 'knowledge management'. But he alluded to it. I am not sure storing knowledge has worked in the past. I am inclined towards knowledge flows rather than Knowledge stores.

Collaboration needs to be integrated with daily work
It should not be a separate system where people discuss topics that do not matter for the business.

System Go Live is not success. Business benefit is the success

The best place to listen to business drivers is an earning's call.

SaaS Deployment requires more planning...Not Less
Saas software cannot be changed by an Internal IT team after deployment. So SaaS deployments need better planning and careful implementation compared to OnPremise software. Because there is limited customization possibilities in hosted software, SaaS will keep HR focused on business value compared to OnPremise software says Jason.

The Power Of Mapping Value Drivers To Features

My colleagues and I in the OnDemand product team, design enterprise software products using the design thinking methodology. As part of the process we identify value drivers that make the product useful for people.

Value drivers may not seem important at first, until the product designer or product manager is challenged about the need for a feature or the priority of a feature. Mapping value drivers to use cases and features is a useful exercise that has helped me on several critical occasions when I had to defend the solution or design.