Agile Product Management, Marketing, and More
Posts tagged modeling
Text = Ambiguous
Jan 27th
Excuse the short post. One of the projects on my plate this week is an internal support system, from which requirements are being elicited from numerous potential users and business stakeholders throughout a number of segments of the company. The requirements that we’ve created are thorough to the point of potentially being unbuildable, because they support a number of ways of doing business that are in place in those various company segments.
The business is challenging the strategy of supporting all the ways of doing business, since stremalining them might lead to a better solution. The video featured here depicts the challenge of numerous stakeholders and business leaders in a realistic way, and thankfully I am able to state that we have delivered workflow diagrams to go along with the plentiful text-based requirements.
One of the things I’m trying to convince my team about is the advantage of delivering multiple types of models to provide several views of the requirements. To me, it makes the requirements more consumable than simple text or text plus one graphical view.
Enjoy!
Agile Modeling
Oct 25th
One of the challenges I encounter with producing customer requirements for consumption by a development team is overcoming the barrier of understanding. My company does not have dedicated business analysts, so the role of translating customer needs to development needs and architecture is typically handled by our developers. What if they don’t see the big picture of what the user wants, but instead only see a large collection of unrelated detail?
Organizing requirments in categories can help to provide a mental framework, but navigation becomes difficult past 2-3 levels. It’s becoming apparent to me that in order to bridge the gap, some diagramming and coalescing of requirements into pictoral form must be provided. The question is, of the tens of possible types of models, which types are most effective and therefore worth the time?
I’ve found a site that details numerous types of models and diagrams, and provides handwritten examples of each. The silver-bullet takeway from this site is the following:
“know a wide variety of modeling techniques … apply the right artifact(s) for the situation at hand.”
My current problem is that I’ve been away from my brief studies in UML during my Master’s program for six years, and I don’t have command of that wide variety of modeling techniques. I have, therefore, just shared with you the newest item on my personal to-do list…