The iRise Blog

Interop and Software 2008 at Mandalay Bay Convention centered just wrapped up last week.

James Maguire from Datamation filmed a “virtual booth crawl” with 30 second pitches from select vendors - most of whom were being awarded for innovation in software. You can check it out here or watch below.

Yours truly happened to be manning the booth when James came by. I gave my best 30 second rendition regarding iRise below.

Originally posted at http://ideasbyjohn.wordpress.com/

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A new article by Heather Havenstein about how UPS is bolstering their web application development with iRise came out in Computerworld.com yesterday. The article summarizes how UPS has overhauled it process of designing user interfaces for all of their new and upgraded web applications.

This story is not new to anyone who attended Fusion ‘07 last year as Guy Hamblen was one of the our featured speakers. In fact, you can read the blog post and listen to Guy’s presentation from this October iRise blog post.

Here are some new quotes from Guy:

• “The biggest challenge that an application development team has is eliciting the correct requirements at the beginning of the development effort”
• “By modeling the user interface in the requirements phase, the design team can be sure that it knows exactly what the user wants because it has used a simulated version”
• “That allowed us to improve our time to market with application-development releases. That is the fundamental business driver that iRise enabled for us”

The complete Computerworld article is available here.

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The CIO of CompuCredit gave a compelling talk this week on how to drive ‘disciplined innovation’ at the annual Computerworld Premier 100 conference in Orlando, FL. Dr. Guido Sacchi was honored at the conference as one of the top 100 CIOs in the country and is one of those CIOs that could easily be a COO or CEO in any company. He has that unusual ‘right brain - left brain’ combination that is powerful stuff in a business leader. According to Dr. Sacchi, ‘disciplined innovation’ is characterized by companies that have a high degree of execution skill, along with a high attitude for risk - another unusual combination of (corporate) skill sets. In his lively talk he spoke about the challenges that many CIOs face today: governance, too many ideas with too little execution and long cycle times; all of which tend to mire innovation in the mud of good intentions.

At CompuCredit they’ve solved these problems with leadership, focused execution of innovative new ideas and leveraging visualization as a strategy to dramatically reduce cycle times. CompuCredit has established an ‘innovation council’ made up of senior executives and other people in the company. They’ve also launched an ‘Idea Factory;’an internal Website that gives employees a platform to voice new ideas.

Using iRise to visualize applications during rapid, iterative and collaborative definition phases allows CompuCredit to “fail cheaply and fail fast,” according to Dr. Sacchi. And visualization is allowing the company to create “iPod equivalents;” applications that are so intuitive they require no training nor user manuals. Dr. Sacchi noted that iRise is also helping the IT organization drive higher quality applications to market faster, along with giving the company sourcing options that would not otherwise be available.

If you’re interested in learning more about CompuCredit’s approach, watch this video of Dr. Sacchi speaking at the iRise user conference in October.

What are some of the unique things your organization is doing to drive innovation? Any additional tips you can share?

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Are you having trouble communicating with your stakeholders?  Do you want to improve how you gather requirements?

If so, you should join the Catalyze Community monthly webcast on February 14th with Barbara Carkenord from  B2T Training as she explains how to  design a sure-fire strategy for developing a communication plan.

Both business analysts and usability professionals will be more effective when they think ahead about how best to communicate with their stakeholders.  This presentation provides attendees with a communication planning technique that can easily be used on any project. 

Webcast Details:

• Date and Time — Thursday, February 14 at 11am Pacific/2pm Eastern
• Registration — Sign up at this link
• Recording – If you miss the live broadcast, the recording and presentation will be posted in Catalyze by February 18

Barbara is the President of B2T Training and has over 20 years experience in business analysis.  Barbara has an MBA from University of Michigan and is a Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP).

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Along with 30 IT executives, I attended the final iRise Executive Roundtable event of the year in Mexico City last weekend.  The event was held in conjunction with the Grand Prix of Mexico, the last race of the year for the Champ Car World Series.   The weather was perfect, the networking was world-class and the content was stellar.

It all started with a fabulous dinner at the W Hotel on Friday evening, at which PKV Racing driver Neel Jani talked to the group about how he gets mentally psyched for racing and what it’s like to approach turn one at the Mexico City track at 195 MPH!

On Saturday morning there was 4 hours of great content.  Leading off was Doug Hubbard, who runs his own consulting firm called Hubbard Decision Research and is the author of the book “How to Measure Anything; Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business.” 

Doug has spent many years working with IT leaders on ways to measure risk and assess chances of success.   He talked about the “risk paradox” prevalent in many organizations: the highest risk problems get the least attention.  Companies simply are not good at assessing risk and measuring things, because most people think the toughest problems are intangible (i.e. not measurable).  Doug very skillfully and quickly proved to the group that this point of view is not based in fact.   Anything can be measured by asking two simple questions: “What do you mean?” and “Why do you care?,” followed by controlled experiments and observation.   

After working with many companies over the last 12 years, Doug has some interesting views on project failure.  For instance, after doing some exhaustive research Doug concluded that the chances of a large IT project being canceled turns out to be 1.2% for every month the project continues; in other words, the longer (and larger) a project lasts, the greater the chance it will be canceled before completion.  Doug pointed out that high yield (junk) bonds default less than large IT projects!  Not a good situation.

The bottom line?  Doug ended with the following three points: Information reduces uncertainty, reduced uncertainty improves decisions and improved decisions have observable consequences with measurable value.  So measure the tough problems and use those measurements to make better business decisions.  Good advice for any IT organization.

We also heard from Bob Strang, CEO of Investigative Management Group.  Bob and his team are all law enforcement veterans and are experts on corporate security issues.  It’s no secret that the world of corporate risk and security has changed dramatically in the last 15 years.  According to Bob, the new flavor of corporate security officer must have both a law enforcement background, as well as the technology experience to face new kinds of security threats enabled by the Internet.  The whole topic of security, according to Bob, has moved “from the basement to the boardroom” as the focus shifts from physical to cyber threats.  There’s a good reason for this shift.  Bob cited recent statistics from OSHA that concludes the U.S. loses $1.6 trillion every year due to fraud, identity theft, data theft and property destruction.  Amazing stuff. 

One great recommendation from Bob was that security organizations from different companies need to collaborate, even if they are in the same, competitive business.  Sharing information is really the only way to keep ahead of the bad guys.   Another solid piece of advice was to make sure that your company has a written, published set of policies that document a high standard of care that protects corporate data and physical property. 

Following the formal content, the group had lunch at the track and received a rare, ‘backstage’ pass to the world’s fastest sports, with garage tours, pit lane walks and talks by the drivers.  The weekend ended with a satisfying third place finish for PKV Racing driver Oriol Servia and a trip to victory circle for the roundtable participants. 

We got lots of great feedback on the event, including this from a CIO: “The whole weekend was masterfully organized.  Both the roundtable and the Champ Car events were great, insightful and fun.”

The next executive roundtable event will be held January 25-27 in conjunction with the world famous Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona in Florida…can’t wait!

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More than 600 business analysts attended the World Congress for Business Analysts (WCBA) at Disneyland on November 15th and 16th. 

iRise was the Executive Sponsor of the conference and we posted the following blog entries on the conference proceedings:

• Thornton May on How to Thrive in the Age of BIG Information
• Patrick Lencioni Highlights The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
• Cynthia Froggatt Leaks “Secrets” of High Performance Distributed Teams
• Building BAs That Any Business Sponsor Would Fight To Have On Their Project
• Delivering Effective User Acceptance Testing
• How NASA Uses Storytelling to Promote Success
• Richard Sheirer on Lessons for Leaders from 9/11
• Building a BA Center of Excellence at Wachovia

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At the World Congress for Business Analysts (WCBA) in Disneyland today, Amy Nichols of Wachovia (an iRise customer) and Glenn Brûlé of ESI International talked about the best practices around building a BA Center of Excellence.

Amy laid out the business case for why Wachovia started their BA Center of Excellence 18 months ago.  They had unpredictable project cycles, no concise way to measure ROI, customer satisfaction after project closeout was poor and they had waste with their SDLC.  There was also confusion around what are requirements, why are they valuable and what makes a good requirement.

Glenn laid out a Capability to Maturity Model to follow when building a Center of Excellence.

He also mentioned that you have to work incrementally by starting out with a Community of Practice (COP), progressing to a BA Bureau and then to a Center of Excellence (COE).  One way to think of the progression is as a bulls-eye with the Community of Practice as the outer ring and the Center of Excellence as the bulls-eye.

Where do you start?  Glenn said the model is designed like a checklist - start with the first row for each column and work your way down the model to move from a Community of Practice to a Center of Excellence. 

Why build a Center of Excellence?  The benefits include:

• decreased risk on our projects
• increased value for our projects
• improved quality of our deliverables
• improved time to deliver our goods and services

Amy and Glenn closed with Five Factors for Success:

1. have a plan (from concept to enterprise analysis)
2. consider the framework
3. obtain executive sponsor
4. align corporate goals (what’s the value perception?)
5. define roles and responsibilities (who’s going to maintain it?)

Glenn thought step 1 - have a plan - was the most critical while Amy added that having a passionate executive sponsor was also very important.

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At the World Congress for Business Analysts (WCBA) in Disneyland today, Richard Sheirer from Guilani Partners shared lessons learned from 9/11.  Richard was the director of New York City’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) at the time of the crisis. 

His message was that there are similarities between the business community and public safety.  He stated that planning, preparing, practicing and execution are as important in public sector as in the business sector.  In addition, communication is the key to success during a crisis.

In terms of practicing, Richard noted that simulating events is critical and that NYC held drills and simulations for many different potential castastrophes - and that practice was critical to their response on 9/11.

Before concluding with a photo montage from Ground Zero, Richard highlighted 10 lessons from the events of 2001:

1. think the unthinkable
2. factor in for Murphy’s Law
3. appreciate that catastrophic events don’t recognize turf
4. accept policies over reason/science
5. be prepared for the knucklehead factor
6. value and encourage strong leadership 
7. rely on your frames of reference
8. appreciate the need for redundancy and think outside the box
9. recognize the importance of communication
10. commit to relentless preparation and practice

Richard wrapped up by saying that America and American companies are and will continue to be major terrorist targets - they will likely strike something unlikely and we can never let our guard down.  Natural disasters like Katrina and the Southern California wildfires will pose greater threats.  Finally, planning, preparation, and practice contributes to prevention.

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In the Modeling, Testing and Design track at the World Congress for Business Analysts (WCBA), Jonathan Kupersmith (Kupe) of B2T Training (and formerly of Turner Broadcasting) described how to deliver effective User Acceptance Testing (UAT).

UAT represents the final approval by the customer and is typically conducted by users with assistance from the project team with tests derived from day-to-day operations, use cases and process workflows.  UAT validates that the final solution meets the needs of the customer.

First, Kupe pointed out that UAT is not the same as usability testing.  And a project is doomed when it substitutes or replaces usability testing for user acceptance testing.

In the traditional approach, project team members, business analyst (BA) or quality assurance (QA) write test scripts, users get a quick demo of the new application and then walk through test scripts step-by-step.

Kupe described the shortcomings of the traditional approach including:

• project team members pressed for time
• users were not fully vested in UAT
• users did not fully understand how new functions should work
• tests are often generic
• high pass rate (because the BA wrote the scripts), but risk of major issues not being discovered until production

Kupe confessed that he came up with his more effective approach based on a bad experience he had with the traditional approach.  He described the more effective way to approach UAT as:

• involving key users early
• providing users with hands-on system training
• facilitating sessions that create the test plans

The end results from this revised approach were that:

• users took responsibility for project success
• users were comfortable with new functions
• test scripts involved real life scenarios
• issues formerly caught in production were caught in UAT
• no major issues made it to production
• users felt they were part of the team and helped champion the release

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At the World Congress for Business Analysts (WCBA), Cynthia Sniezak from Disney Parks described how Disney Park’s IT Academy “Builds BAs and PMs That Any Business Sponsor Would Fight To Have On Their Project.”

First, I want to point that I love how Disney refers to all of their employees as Cast Members.  It clearly demonstrates that everyone is part of the ’show.’

Disney views talent management as a business differentiator and the mission of the IT Academy is to “make our cast wildly successful.”  Disney uses an approach they refer to as HILL which is an acronym for:

• Hire the very best
• Invest strategically
• Lease rising skills
• Lease setting skills

Cynthia also shared their “Leadership Framework At a Glance” which is a generic way to view all jobs on a consistent basis.  The key elements of the framework are:

• Delivery and Action (delivery, initiative, organizational stewardship)
• Personal Dynamics (flexibility and adaptability, impact and influence, interpersonal understanding, relationship building)
• Managing Others (developing others, team leadership, teamwork)
• Thinking and Solving Problem (analytical thinking, conceptual thinking, technical expertise)

In terms of training, the IT Academy makes sure that their training is consistent for both the project managers (PMs) and business analysts (BAs).  Their training is vendor-delivered (ACC Learning), aligned with the PMBOK and BABOK, and aligned with Disney business objectives.  The core PM training is 11 days with 6 days of electives which is completed during an employee’s first 12 to 18 months with Disney.  The BA training is a subset of the PM training.

Cynthia also shared some of the tips that they use to reinforce training which includes laminated cheat sheets, note cards and resources such as their internal BA group called BALOO and the external Catalyze community.

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