What all clients should know

Thu, Dec 7, 2006

Social effects

Aral Balkan made a nice post on what all CEO’S should know and act on.

His three main points:

Use an agile development methodology such as eXtreme Programming (XP) and work in iterations.
Use a user-centered development process. Your teams must capture quantifiable usability requirements and you must budget to cover usability testing in every iteration of development.
Use software design patterns in the architecture of your applications to provide a common high-level language for your developers and take advantage of time-tested solutions to common problems.

Arals memo to ceo’s can be found here: link

I would like to add some points to this (some are aimed at the client):

Invest in professionals: If you can not get the right people to do the project. Don’t do the project
Be allies with the software team. Trust them, share knowledge, be available for questions.
Have realistic wishes. Developers can make almost anything, the only problem is that it costs a lot of time. Know what you absolutely want, and be prepared to not get everything you wish for.

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2 Trackbacks For This Post

FOTB slides: Memo to the CEO at Aral Balkan Says:
December 15th, 2006 at 6:17 pm

[...] What all clients should know at Web X.Y. [...]

Web X.Y » Blog Archive » Adobe live: Letter to ceo Says:
May 30th, 2007 at 9:05 pm

[...] Always great to see sessions by Aral Balkan. Today he presented two sessions. The most important for me was “the letter to ceo” session(older comments about this session, Sheets of older session). He addressed the problem of project failure and the need to use more agile methods. And offcourse to give the user a fair chance to have input in the product. I forgot how serious this problem is, now I am no longer an active programmer but an educator. One short look at the projects I have done shows that a lot of my projects have failed. No right fit with the user, bloated expectations etc. Now I am an educator I have the chance to show other ways of doing projects. For some years now I have tried to get us (our educational department) out of the waterfall. But it’s no easy job. For some reason a lot of students, colleagues and clients have a hardwired “waterfall model” and always seem to fall back into 100 page requirement documents. We are working on this in our minor, but I think we can do more to make a change in the complete department. [...]

0 Comments For This Post

FOTB slides: Memo to the CEO at Aral Balkan Says:
December 15th, 2006 at 6:17 pm
[...] What all clients should know at Web X.Y. [...]
Web X.Y » Blog Archive » Adobe live: Letter to ceo Says:
May 30th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
[...] Always great to see sessions by Aral Balkan. Today he presented two sessions. The most important for me was “the letter to ceo” session(older comments about this session, Sheets of older session). He addressed the problem of project failure and the need to use more agile methods. And offcourse to give the user a fair chance to have input in the product. I forgot how serious this problem is, now I am no longer an active programmer but an educator. One short look at the projects I have done shows that a lot of my projects have failed. No right fit with the user, bloated expectations etc. Now I am an educator I have the chance to show other ways of doing projects. For some years now I have tried to get us (our educational department) out of the waterfall. But it’s no easy job. For some reason a lot of students, colleagues and clients have a hardwired “waterfall model” and always seem to fall back into 100 page requirement documents. We are working on this in our minor, but I think we can do more to make a change in the complete department. [...]

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