The Washington D.C. User Group meeting was held at the CSC Executive Briefing Center in Falls Church, Virginia.  Many thanks to CSC for hosting the final meeting of the 2009 User Group series.  It was a terrific setting for the packed house of iRise users.  Michael Schrage, Research Fellow with the Sloan School of Management and the author of “Serious Play”, helped to moderate the topics on the agenda.

Lem Lasher, CSC: Keynote

When it comes to innovation, Lem Lasher knows his stuff.  As the CSC’s Chief Innovation Officer, Lem accepted a challenge six years ago to help CSC become more innovative and less “boring”.  Over the years, Lem has built the Office of Innovation up to 60 people and has won two APQC awards as the best practice partner for innovation. 

Lem acknowledged that innovation is a difficult thing to master for most companies.  He cited Henry Chesbrough’s innovation paradox – “Most innovations fail, and companies that don’t innovate die.”

Common Innovation Missteps:

• Hire Innovative People – Many companies mistakenly believe that if they hire the right people, innovation will increase.  Lem says that it is more important to create the environment that fosters innovation.  He suggests that innovation is like photosynthesis, you need to let light into the environment or nothing will grow.
• Measure Innovation – Lots of companies try to measure the results of their innovation investments, but Lem believes that you can’t measure innovation, only its proxies.  He measures sentiment of customers, employees and shareholders to see how CSC is doing on the innovation front.
• Focus on Big Breakthroughs – Execs may think of innovation as “game changing” event, but Lem prefers a constant flow of incremental or adjacent innovations that carry a lower risk than going for the big, disruptive innovation.
• Implement Best Practices – In the pursuit of innovation, Lem believes companies must go beyond “best practices” to look for “next practices”.  Next practices are creative approaches that have not yet been broadly adopted.

CSC views enterprise visualization using iRise as a “next practice” that gives them a unique approach to meeting the needs of their clients.

Customer Case Study: CACI

Dan Swedberg, VP of the Transformation Solutions Group at CACI, talked about using visualization to spark innovation in health care delivery.  Dan believes that healthcare is ripe for innovation and that the next wave of innovation will be driven by IT to extend both the reach and the richness of healthcare services.  The ultimate outcome of healthcare innovation will be to create virtual delivery organizations.

There is a lot of focus on healthcare these days, but Dan says that one of the biggest barriers to change is the complexity of the healthcare environment.  Healthcare has lots of stakeholders, it requires a high degree of specialized knowledge, and life and death consequences can be caused by any changes.  Visualization helps reduce that complexity, leaves less room for misinterpretation, and encourages collaboration. 

CACI uses the Joint Application Modeling (JAM) process developed by OneSpring (see below for a summary of OneSpring’s presentation).  They have even conducted virtual visualization sessions using iRise and Live Meeting.  Dan thinks that visualization is a key process to the creation of collaborative innovations in healthcare.  According to one of his JAM session participants, “We could have saved millions of dollars and hours and hours of time…if we had had [iRise] on my other project.”

Customer Case Study: OneSpring

OneSpring developed the Stream Process™ back in 2003 and has been enhancing it over the years to help accelerate the “clarity curve” in the requirements definition process.  The Stream Process uses Joint Application Modeling (JAM) sessions to bring small groups together for real-time visualization of their requirements.

Four representatives from OneSpring shared a presentation of the evolution of their process from prototype replacement, to requirements validation, and eventually to requirements elicitation.  In the beginning, OneSpring accidentally discovered the power of JAM sessions when working on a project at IHG.  They ran out of office space and had to put the project team in a conference room.  With the User Experience Designer and the Business Analyst in the same room, the time it took to achieve clarity about the project requirements dramatically dropped.  Over time, they added the role of the Producer to these sessions to facilitate the process and ensure a balance of both the left-brained and right-brained approach.

OneSpring shared their experience with one client who had written off a $2M, 12 month project because the users refused to work with the application.  OneSpring stepped in and was able to define 2,800 requirements in 4 months and the project was successfully completed within a year at a $500K savings.  One of their clients left a JAM sessions saying, “Now, I have hope for this project.”

Customer Case Study: FedEx

Scott Gillam is the IT Director for FedEx Services who oversees their ecommerce program management and metrics.  FedEx is one of the largest transportation, and global logistics companies with over $35B in annual revenue.  Their goal to “Make every FedEx experience outstanding” is what led them to adopt visualization as part of the IT project management and governance processes. 

Back in 2007, FedEx was running into the same challenges that plague many companies.  Massive textual requirements documents were being written, but rarely read, and requirement reviews were complicated and lengthy.  That fall, they formed a dedicated team conducted a root cause analysis which revealed a need to simulate applications before sending requirements off to the development team.  They evaluated 15 simulation tools and then narrowed the field to the top 4.  After a detailed assessment of the finalists, FedEx selected iRise because it scored five times higher than the other tools.

Their next step was to set up a pilot using iRise to visualize a redesign of their FedEx Shipping web application for the Asia Pacific market.  This was a difficult project because of the language issues and the geographically dispersed stakeholders.  Scott credited 24×7 access to the iRise Definition Center as a key resource that helped make this project successful.  This project was featured in a recent article in CIO magazine.

With the successful pilot behind them, FedEx turned its attention to institutionalizing visualization across the enterprise.  Scott says they started an internal iRise user group and established an online Center of Excellence to share visualization best practices, tips and tricks.  They also focused on training and mentoring sessions to spread their visualization expertise.  Today, FedEx has an enterprise-wide license for iRise with 200 U.S. employees trained, and over 200 projects under their belt.

Based on the experience at FedEx, Scott has some suggestions for other companies that want to adopt visualization:

• Focus on your needs, not on the tools that are available
• Find an effective Executive Sponsor (like Rob Carter, CIO at FedEx)
• Involve all the stakeholders, including development, training and testing
• Build visualization into your processes, don’t let it be optional
• Capture qualitative and quantitative data (e.g. reduction in change requests, stakeholder satisfaction)

Customer Case Study: Delta

Carol Kilkpatrick is a Sr. Design & Modeling Specialist for Delta Airlines.  Delta has prioritized User Experience in their software development over the past 15 years, which has led to significant cuts in their maintenance costs that are due to unforeseen or unmet requirements.  Carol’s User Experience team includes 7 people on staff, plus external agencies, and they work on both internal (reservation management and luggage handling) and customer-facing applications (delta.com, gate displays and mobile notifications).

Carol has identified three hot spots where visualization can have a big impact on accelerating development:

• Prototyping – Carol prefers to start with low fidelity visualizations, taking screen shots and adding the “as-is” workflow and asking users to post notes on each screen to indicate desired changes.  Some projects may require higher fidelity, but Carol believes that the key to success is to iterate and test rapidly
• Expert Reviews – Carol likes to limit the review to the key areas where usability can deliver the biggest win
• Usability Testing – For internal applications, Carol suggests informal testing sessions, facilitated by a Business Analyst or a Usability Specialist.  For customer-facing applications, she recommends more formal 30-minute sessions with 6 to 8 users

Over the years, Delta has cut back on the size of the usability team, so Carol has focused her resources on the early stages of requirements definition and is running training classes to transfer knowledge about usability to Business Analysts and business stakeholders.

Customer Case Study: CSC

Paul Taroli, Managing Director of the Visualization Center of Excellence (VCOE), and Susan Johnson, Practice Director, CSC User Experience shared the stage to talk about CSC’s vision to bridge the “Biz2IT” gap through collaboration, communication and innovation.  The VCOE was created to train and energize the practice of visualization, proliferate “next” practices, and inspire innovation.

Paul sees the VCOE multi-million dollar investment that will grow the group of trained iRise users at CSC from 20 to 1,000 over the next three to five years.  The VCOE generated the initial interest in visualization with a series of webinars, and followed up with product and process training.  Now, they have a waiting list for their training classes and Paul says, “The momentum is very exciting.”  He sees visualization as a “game changing” core competency that can add value throughout the software development life cycle.

CSC is so confident in the power of visualization, that they offered a free, two-day visualization session to potential client with an SAP integration project.  They started on a Monday, presented their visualization on Wednesday and by the following Tuesday, they had won a $2M engagement.