With a beautiful view of the San Francisco Bay as a backdrop, iRise users met yesterday to hear case studies from other users and compare notes on driving adoption of visualization for software projects.  Highlights from the meeting…

Marty Chuck – Keynote Presentation

Marty Chuck delivered a keynote presentation at the San Francisco User Group meeting with his view of the inside of a CIO’s mind.  Marty, the former CIO of Agilent and Electronic Arts, is now the Managing Director of the CXOs | Experience Matters and provides IT consulting services to start up companies.

Marty says CIOs live in a world of organized chaos with constant criticism from the outside.  CIOs must depend on internal and external partnerships for their success and can only work with a strategic horizon of about 18 months, since the typical CIO tenure is two years.  According to Marty, successful CIOs are optimistic, thick-skinned and run IT like a business, with a performance mentality that is focused on the success of the business.

Marty shared his success with introducing iRise at Agilent, where they went from 5 months of arguing over application projects, to just days.  Visualization helped him quickly get agreement on the 95% of project requirements that was common to all stakeholders, so he could focus on the 5% where there was disagreement.  He tried to do the same thing when he became the CIO at Electronic Arts, but discovered that EA’s fiercely independent business units had a culture that didn’t see much value in defining common ground.  The lesson from EA is that successful visualization requires more than picking the right tool; it is an organizational change that involves people, process and technology.

Customer Case Study: First American Title Financial Services

Jayson Murray and John Totoiu, from First American Financial Services, co-presented their story about using visualization with their new Project Fulfillment Group, based in India.  Jason is the VP of the Project Fulfillment Group and John the Director of IT for the group.  After struggling with long written documents to communicate requirements between the US and India, First American implemented iRise in the first half of 2008.  By Q4 of that year, they had completed four projects. 

Then, in January of 2009, new regulations required the delivery of a new application before the end of the year.  First American’s waterfall process was going to take 18 months, so they moved to an Agile methodology using iRise that compressed the schedule down to 12 months. They have had their challenges getting used to the Agile method, but after 6 iterations, they were able to cut their timeline by 40% and are on track to release this application to production in early December.

Based on their experience, Jayson and John recommend:

• Avoid creating multiple iDocs for a project or you will have to keep track of which iDoc has which requirements.  Use a project template to make it easy to merge iDocs.
• Keep a simulation change log in iRise
• Use real data and calculations in your simulations so that QA can use them to build test cases

Customer Case Study: Genentech

Susanna Goldstein, a Business Systems Analyst for Genentech, shared her experience working with iRise to improve the usability of a physician portal that enrolled patients for reimbursements of their medical expenses.  The previous version of the portal made it hard to find important information and commonly used features.  One of Susanna’s biggest challenges on this project was to integrate the needs of a diverse set of stakeholders that included six separate product sales and marketing teams, IT and, of course, the doctors and other medical personnel who were the users of the system.  A reorganization in the middle of the project further complicated things, adding the Managed Care group to the project team.

Susannah began the portal simulation, building out the functions and workflow.  Then, she worked with the marketing teams to layer in branding and “voice” elements.  She used a weekly cycle on this project, incorporating feedback and adding new features to the simulation in each cycle.  The Genentech field team was initially reluctant to participate in the application design workshops, but after experiencing the iRise visualization, they were excited to share it with their customers.

Susannah attributes the success of this project to the use of frequent iterations and the ability to spend more time on defining the portal and less time on how to present the definition to the team.  She used iRise to manage all of the communication with the project stakeholders and says, “iRise is the best form of communication I have ever used on a project.”  For future projects, Susannah plans to focus more on the end to end flow of the application and use high fidelity details only when necessary.