Signing-off on your prototypical madness

How do you sign-off on your systems requirements and documentation?

Projects I have worked on previously have collected and collated requirements from business and then produced a large tome so complex that no one understands it (except the author and the IT-dudes), but that they are expected to sign-off on. Once that’s done, the programmers build. But that’s not how things are done on this project.

In my current project, we’re using prototypes to communicate our understanding of business and user requirements. Just recently though, after the conclusion of a presentation of a prototype, and some excellent discussion around their work practices, our team began to talk about the need for requirements. That talk led to the question “how much documentation do we need to get sign-off”.

I would love for The Powers That Be, after seeing a prototype, to agree that it reflects their needs and sign-off on the prototype. My feeling, though, is that they will still want their pound of flesh .. err.. I mean paper to put a signature on.

Maria’s been working on this same project for a while and has noted that our tools for gathering and managing requirements (outside of prototyping) have been lacking. I would have loved for our team to be able to hand over a set of requirements that we’d gathered at meetings and workshops, traced back to specific prototypes or versions of prototypes, so that they had a stack of paper that they could read (if they wanted to) and sign. But all we have at our disposal is Word and Visio.

In an agile project environment, how do you get sign-off on prototypes as requirements? Or do you just make more paper?

M

Lumberjack IA?

“I’m a lumberjack and I’m OK. I work all night and I sleep all day”

…At least that’s how I’ve felt over the last 10 months of this project I’ve been working on. I’m not cutting down wood, but it seems like I work all night on some of the tricky parts of this project (and would actually rather be sleeping … all day even).

What am I up to? I’ve been primarily doing conceptual design in an agile environment — trying to work out how people think about the work they do and then trying to come up with better ways they could work assisted with a nice new IT system.

Last year’s IA Institute survey notes that a lot of IAs are doing this sort of work — out of 315 respondents, 63 reported being engaged with this activity 21% of the time. Labelled Strategic IA, it involves the creation of business models, high-level categorisation rather than just the creation of metadata. What else are they doing?

• tactical IA — metadata and taxonomies
• usability testing
• user research
• project management

Furthermore, IAs report doing usability testing as much as they are doing administration and travel.

Interestingly enough, the IAs surveyed are typically NOT engaged in:

• content generation
• content management
• database design
• graphic design
• IT integration
• general business consulting

So what are you doing as an IA? And if you’re not an IA, are you doing some of this stuff anyway?

M