High above the Windy City, on the 66^th floor of the Willis tower, iRise users from the Chicago area were welcomed by Mitch Bishop, iRise CMO, and Emmet B. Keeffe III, iRise CEO.  Emmet began the day by sharing his view that years of IT project failures have proven that business users don’t know what they want until they can see it.  He suggested that the best way to correct the failures of the past is to visualize applications at the beginning of the software development process to help define the scope and requirements of each application.

Doug Hubbard, Author and Risk Management Expert, has helped companies apply actuarial methods to assess the risk of their IT projects.  He warns that the fondness for metrics to predict outcomes and mitigate risks can be dangerous.  While metrics usually make us more confident about our decisions, they can actually lead us to make worse decisions than if we were to follow our intuitions.

For example, Doug says that using a scale of 1 to 5 to evaluate things like customer satisfaction can lead to over optimistic results.  Studies show that most people will select 3 or 4 on that scale, whereas on a -2 to +2 scale, they are more likely to pick 0.  Another problem is overconfidence.  Research reveals that IT professionals, as a group, are overconfident – in other words, their level of confidence about their decisions is higher than the percentage of times that their decision is correct. 

One of the limitations of metrics is that we usually focus on things that are easy to measure, and ignore the things that are most important to measure.  For iRise visualizations, we are more likely to measure the cost savings, even though the business benefits of getting to market faster or becoming more competitive will outweigh the costs by orders of magnitude. 

Doug says there is hope for IT professionals.  A skeptical attitude about metrics and training to eliminate overconfidence can help to improve our decisions and increase our ability to forecast the outcome of our projects. 

Brad Ruiter, Project Manager at Haworth, described how his team became the “agency within”, evangelizing enterprise visualization and helping Haworth achieve dramatic improvements in their software development projects.  Before visualization, Brad was involved in a project that was stalled in the requirements phase.  They had to write off $350K, ask for $470K more to complete the project, and the users were still not happy with the results.

Haworth is a leading provider of furniture and they wouldn’t think of designing their products without visualization.  So, they decided to take the same approach to their software projects.  Their goals were to:

• Improve requirements definition
• Reduce project cycle time and cost
• Improve user experience
• Increase communication and collaboration
• Engage our constituents proactively

Using iRise, they compressed their software development process to combine ideation, requirements definition and design into a single step and were able to begin later stages of the process much earlier.  Brad recalled an SAP order management project where they were able to define 25 requirements and eliminate 5 unnecessary requirements in a six and a half hour session.  Brad said the experience “blew everyone away”.  

Brad has also used iRise during the ideation stage, to get budget for a new iPhone application, and with an outside web design agency for a haworth.com project.  His advice to other “visualizers” is to remember that changing behavior is a lot harder than changing process and you need to be an evangelist to overcome resistance and succeed.  “It’s like a great marriage, 97% is about communication.” 

Max Nelson, from Ally Bank (formerly GMAC), believes that visualization is much more than a product; it is a different way of working.  Max is leading the charge to use visualization at Ally as they launch their new brand.  Max used iRise on the ally.com and ally.ca (Canadian) sites.  Max was able to use visualizations to get his call centers trained before the launch, he also used it in their usability testing.  He even was able to get Canadian regulators to give them approval for the site based on their visualization.

Max found that posting the simulation made it possible for busy execs to stay involved in the review process, even when they were too busy to come to the meetings.  Max cautioned that companies using iRise with outside agencies may run into resistance.  “They aren’t motivated to do projects faster and cheaper.”  Ally got bids from outside agencies for 3 rounds of prototypes that averaged $60,000 – $80,000 per prototype.  He says Ally was able to recover their investment in iRise with their first two projects.  Max believes that focusing on the people who own the results, rather than the people who own the IT process, is the key to further expansion of visualization at Ally.

Aleisha Djuricic, from Northwestern Mutual, latched on to visualization as a lever for organizational change and a way to get her company to recognize the value of User Experience design.  Aleisha had a flash of insight after visiting the Harley Davidson Experience Gallery.  Part of the Harley Davidson museum, the Experience Gallery is a room full of motorcycles in front of a huge screen that played a video of road scenery.  Since 65% of the population learns visually, she realized that visualization was the way to get people energized about UX.

Aleisha focused on some early wins; one visualization was praised by their board of directors as the best presentation they had ever seen, another received a standing ovation at their annual sales meeting.  The result: visualization is now a recognized technique for gathering requirements. 

Aleisha warns fellow UX professionals to be careful what you wish for – once you start using visualizations, be ready to respond to the demand.  A few other keys to the success at Northwestern Mutual:

• Don’t try to do continuous visualization.  The creative process needs some downtime to digest and process input
• Use high fidelity visualizations for top execs/board to help them “imagine” how the new user experience will be better/different.  But, be sure to set expectations that high fidelity won’t be used on every visualization.
• It helps to have an “iRise Whisperer” – a visualization guru on staff who can make iRise do things that even the iRise people think are impossible.

As with the other iRise User Group meetings, the day wrapped up with a presentation about the product roadmap for iRise and an iRise User Panel discussion

Want more details from the Chicago User Group meeting? Video from selected sessions will be available on the iRise site in the coming weeks.  The User Group series continues throughout October, next stop: Dallas.  Click here for more information on meeting locations and dates.