The setting for the iRise User Group meeting at the Texas Motor Speedway was a perfect backdrop for three customer case studies that focused on using visualization to help IT be more responsive to business needs and speed delivery of critical business applications.

Customer Case Study: Regional Grocery Chain

The first customer case study of the day featured Roberta Henson, an application development manager for a regional grocery chain, talking about how her company used visualization to increase the responsiveness of its IT department.  With iRise, Roberta says that her Business Analysts are able to adapt to business needs more rapidly, acting as solution architects, not just documentation specialists.  That’s important in the grocery business, where margins can be razor-thin.  Roberta says visualizing software requirements has cut their cycle time from 12 to 18 months, down to 3 to 6 months.

iRise Training and Mentoring has been a big part of the successful transformation to visualization at Roberta’s company.  She uses at least 20 days of iRise services each year and brings in an iRise expert to mentor their team when they are working on a high visibility project.  One person on Roberta’s team is certified in iRise and she plans to get one or two more certified in the next year. One of her goals for this year is to get 100% of her Business Analysts trained on iRise. 

Roberta also believes in taking a community approach to visualization.  She set up a community of practice to help spread the knowledge about using iRise.  She holds a peer review every month or two and includes internal and outsourced developers along with her iRise team in these sessions.  Roberta says that with iRise, “We are more sure that we understand the requirements and the business is more sure that they are going to get the system they need.”

Customer Case Study: VHA

VHA exemplified the idea that visualization helps build a better partnership between business and IT with a joint presentation of their case study.  JJ Perry, a Sr. Business Analyst at VHA, talked about the business challenges that led his company to adopt iRise, including consistent UI design, tight schedules and “runaway” requirements sessions that resulted in scope creep.  VHA brought in iRise two years ago when they had a change in leadership and wanted to move to a more agile process.

 Joe Ruvalcaba shared the podium with JJ and talked about how iRise impacted VHA’s development team.  He presented a couple of iRise projects, including a MicroStrategy application for spend analysis.  VHA was going to use MicroStrategy’s developers to build prototypes, but then realized they wouldn’t be able to keep up with the process.  With iRise, they could run a 2-3 hour requirements gathering session, visualize the results, email an iDoc to the development team at the end of the day, and get feedback from the developers the next morning.  Joe says that visualization helped them to identify a “huge” number of requirements discrepancies without impacting any development resources.

Joe and JJ recommend using daily iterations during the requirements phase to keep the momentum going.  They also suggest that teams focus on workflow first, before simulating the user interface.

Customer Case Study: Deloitte Consulting

Scott Marvel is a leader in the Information Management practice for Deloitte Consulting.  He shared a story about a large oil company with a $3.5B tax liability that was being managed with a “forest” of spreadsheets.  They came to Deloitte Consulting to “keep their leadership out of orange jumpsuits.”  This was a massive tax reengineering project with a five-year development and implementation plan and an 8-figure price tag.  Deloitte initially presented a conceptual architecture to explain how they would approach the project, but their clients were tax attorneys and accountants who didn’t understand a lot of the terms and concepts and refused to sign-off without a clearer picture of what was being proposed.  Deloitte was able to win the deal after spending two weeks building a basic visualization of the solution.

Now a year and a half into the project, Scott says that using iRise “went as smoothly as it could have.”  He used iRise to simulate the document management process in Microsoft Sharepoint as well as to get approval of the canned reports and ad hoc reporting tools.  He also visualized a dashboard from four different user views that resolved concerns about data access and was a real “homerun” for the client.

Victory Lap

As we have in each city, the Dallas User Group meeting wrapped up with an overview of the iRise product roadmap, some suggestions on creative ways to use iRise, and an iRise user panel. But, Dallas attendees had a special treat at the end  of the meeting, as we shifted gears and headed down to the track for a few laps around the Texas Motor Speedway.  Clearly, iRise users are comfortable with speed because they all jumped at the chance to go 160 mph in the passenger seat of a Nextel Cup race car.