[Sigia-l] rapid prototyping by business managers

[Laura S. Quinn]

HK wrote:

> He is convinced that the (non-technical) company business managers need to
> build some sort of prototype before any vendors have been hired to build
the
> application. He has the idea that this prototyping effort will help to
scope
> the project more accurately -- that the business manager would put
together
> something simple, get approval from various stakeholders and *then* hire a
> firm to build the full application.

I worked with a client who used to do this - she herself was a business
manager, and she would go around to other business managers and get opinions
on what should be built, and put together psuedo screen-shots of the app,
which she would then bring to us (as her primary consulting company) to
implement.

I can't really argue that it helps to scope the project more accurately -
having the whole definition of the project done before you hire anyone does
that.  But it almost eliminated the ability to build a user-centric project,
for a couple of obvious reasons:
- No one asked any users - it was just managers sitting around hypothesizing
- The managers had little idea about the realm of things that might be
possible, so every project (we did several) looked similar, and did similar
things, and overlooked all sorts of possibilities to do things that would be
much more useful which were actually easier to implement
- By the time they had argued out a single "vision", they were very sold on
it, so it was very politically difficult to suggest changes or user test it

Perhaps you could finesse it so that you get a bunch of "prototypes" - say,
each stakeholder does their own mockup of what the site would look like.  It
seems like that could be a useful starting place, and they would be less
likely to expect the finished product to look exactly as they proposed, as
they would realize all the "prototypes" would have to be synched up.

But that doesn't really meet the scoping issue, if it's the primary concern.
Fundamentally, this is a very traditional corporate IT mentality - to feel
that the business ought to sort out what they want so we technical folks can
go implement it, and if those fuzzy business folks can't even figure out
what they want, how could we ever build it?  This is simply the opposite to
me of UCD, and I don't know how to overcome it other than espousing  the
virtues of UCD (which has, obviously, varied success).

Laura