Where’s Wally? Aka the Value?

If you are developing a new product or service creating value should be at the forefront of your mind, not an afterthought or lost in the noise. Constantly ask questions about what value you are creating and the beneficiary, and ring the alarm bells if value cannot be easily specified or articulated. 

There has been widespread coverage in the press over the past couple of years about large IT projects that have cost millions yet have failed to deliver anything. Many projects are written off, while c-level heads roll. The book of blame is passed from poor requirements, to poor systems, to poor platforms, to poor delivery methods, to poor vendors, to poor management, to poor strategy.

While all this is happening and procurement processes are tightening to avoid repeating costly mistakes I still see projects that make it off the ground, with funding and approval yet nowhere in the business case has value been specified. Or maybe value was in the beginning but as the project has evolved the team has lost sight of what value means and who will benefit from the value created. Another common problem is specifying value for the business but failing to address the value proposition for customers of the business. Having a digital or mobile strategy just because the competition has one will not win the hearts and minds of customers, nor will it win you any favours with the shareholders when you have to explain that you are writing off a £5-10m IT project spend because it failed to deliver any meaningful results. 

If you are developing a new product or new system continually ask ‘what is the value proposition?’ and ‘who will gain from it?’ As well as delivering value to the business, if any part of the system is customer facing then there must be some value delivered to the customer in order for the business to reap the rewards. ‘Value proposition’ can sound all a bit ‘consulting-speak’ but restated in simple terms just ask ‘what’s in it for me?’ with your business and/or customer hat on?’ This simple but effective check can be asked at a macro or strategic level and can equally if not more effective of all the subsequent strata of the project including the lowest level of detailed requirements. If you can’t articulate a true tangible, measurable value for a specific beneficiary at any/all levels of the project then it’s time to ring the alarms bells and stop what you are doing. To continue is to risk waste of time, effort and money. If you don’t know the answer, it is fine to proceed and base your efforts on assumptions, as long a) the assumptions are flagged as such and that you make pains to test those assumptions at the earliest opportunity; and b) that in your assumption you identify both the value proposition and the beneficiary.

Surprised I’m still surprised

I presented at the ThoughtWorks Retail Agility Conference on Agile Experience Design. Specifically I was looking at how retailers can take advantage of AXD to design, develop and deliver compelling, shopper-centric, omni-channel experiences that delight customers and drive business success.

I’ve been doing experience design for a long time. I’ve been doing agile experience design for a sizeable proportion of that time. When I was preparing the presentation I got that pre-presentation feeling, similar to the pre-publication feeling I got when reading the draft manuscript of our Agile Experience Design book. I was worried that I had nothing to say. I’ve been doing this stuff for so long that it has just become second nature to me and feels like common sense.

But no fear! A number of people approached me immediately after the presentation and thanked me for talking about the approach, about how inspirational it was and how it’s really got them thinking about how they can do things differently and most important, make a difference. Perhaps to other experienced practitioners in the same field, what I’m talking about isn’t necessarily all that different but it certainly seems to make a difference to many of the business and IT people that I meet along the way.

I guess that is similar to what James Box and Cennydd Bowles said in their book ‘Undercover User Experience Design’, “The fundamentals of UX design…are easy to learn but difficult to put into practice.” So I guess what I bring to the table is the benefit of my experience and the context of all of my learnings in different situations.

Agile Experience Design - the book

Wow how remiss of me! I have completely failed to blog about my biggest project of last year – the book! In November last year (2011) Marc McNeil and I published Agile Experience Design: A digital designers guide to agile, lean and continuous. To our knowledge it’s the first book to market about the topic of experience design in agile.

How it came about

There has been a lot of banter on the subject for a good number of years on various SIG groups, and lots of great presentations delivered at various conferences and published on the web that have sought to explain how to marry the two. However there was no one go to comprehensive reference point.

I remember when I started with ThoughtWorks (agile custom software experts) as the only UX person in Australia wishing that I could find a definitive guide book on how to do UX in an agile environment. It is a very different way of working but I was keenly aware that someone somewhere must have solved the problem, and that I didn’t need to work it out for myself. The book ended up being the book I wished that I could have read back then.

I joined forces with Marc when I moved back from Australia to the UK and realised we were aligned in our thinking on the subject. We were also still surprised that no one had published a book on the subject and so we set about doing just that.

An non-movable feast

From start to finish we had FIVE months. Prior to signing the contract I talked to Martin Fowler and Jez Humble, both successful authors, about the timescales and the unanimous opinion was that we were mad! Jez said ‘ You need at least 18 months to write the first draft, then you need some decompression time, then you need time to rewrite and edit.’ So we went back to the publisher, in the hope of revising the proposed publication date. However we were faced with a ‘deal or no deal’. Marc and I both laughed and agreed that we might as well die trying as not try at all.

A very non-agile process

In agreeing to the terms we were also asked to commit to the length of the book. At this point all we had written was two paragraphs describing the essence of the book. We had no idea. I flicked through a couple of notable books on my shelf, of the ilk that I thought ours might be, stuck a finger in the air and suggested 100,000 words. When we submitted our first draft, it was 135,000 words long. Naively we had not appreciated that 100,000 words had been cast in stone. We then had a very tough process to cut 35,000 words (over a third of the final book) from the manuscript (and still deliver on time).

Concurrent working

So five months is a doable time-frame, just, if you are a full-time author perhaps. But hey, we both had full-time jobs. This is the job that give us the experience and expertise to be able to write books. We both also have families. So we begged borrowed and stole time and worked bloody hard for five intense months to produce the book. We are grateful to our families in particular who made the bulk of the sacrifices, for allowing us to realise our ambition.

Collaborative and feedback driven

Two aspects that were sacrificed as a result of the timeframe was the ability to collaborate and also solicit feedback from peers and colleagues on the work in progress. We started off with the best of intentions and were able to include some contributions and get some feedback, but not as much as we might have liked. If word count and time had permitted we would have liked to have included more anecdotes and lessons learnt from other practitioners.

Test and learn

This book was only ever intended as a guide, rather than a recipe book. It would be a contradiction in terms to say that there’s a one size fits all approach to agile experience design. Every project will be different because of the budget, timescales and people/process/technology constraints.

However to stay true to the nature of agile experience design I’m keen to hear about people’s experiences and how they have aplied, adopted or adapted some of the concepts and ideas in the book. I promise to share the finding and attribute them to the contributers either on the accompanying website (if I ever get the time to add some content to it) or perhaps even in version 2.0.