So my first venture into work related blogging, prompted by current events bringing back some memories.
It’s the early 1990s, Gazzas tears are not long dried, and a colleague and I are sat in a public sector office building in the Midlands (drab walls, drab furniture, you know the kind of thing). So far so dull. What is unusual is that we are talking to colleagues, ‘users’ about a new IT system we are developing with them. We are trialling an approach called ‘SystemsCraft’.
To provide some context; up until now my role as a ‘Senior Analyst Programmer’ (mainframe green screen systems at this point) had been to receive detailed functional specifications from the System Analyst. A guy with a big brain who sat in an office on his own, and was generally not to be disturbed.
My job was to convert these into working code. If I had any queries they went back to the analyst — I almost never spoke to system users. SystemsCraft proposed something radically different, working directly with end users to develop the system iteratively, through prototyping.
To try this we developed the following working pattern
Day 1:
* Travel to the Midlands (we were London based),
* initial meeting with the users to discuss a specific area of the requirements,
* Start developing the prototype
* Stay over
Day 2:
* Complete the prototype
* Show it to the users — which included them getting hands on with it.
* Get feedback on the prototype
* Travel back to London
* For the next couple of weeks work to turn the prototype into working software.
Our next trip would involve demoing that software, and starting on the next prototype.
A benefit of this approach was spending quite a bit of time, over cups of tea, getting a much deeper understanding of our colleagues roles way beyond just the business rules.
We did this for a couple of months and at the end had a working system that was shown to the wider user group. Not only was it well received, but it was the colleagues we had worked with that demoed the system, handled the questions and clearly felt ownership of the system.
This wasn’t something IT had done to them, it was their system. Involve people in the process of change and you are more likely to get buy-in.
Jump forward 25 years and I’m a Business Analyst at a stand-up in a modern .Gov office (primary colours, lots of white boards & breakout areas, you know the sort of thing) we are all learning to be Agile, to ‘start with user needs’ and’ show the thing’. Some of it feels familiar.
Now I’m not claiming that what we were doing back in the 1990s was Agile, there is a lot more to Agile than a bit of prototyping. But it certainly had agile elements. It does make me wonder why it took us so long to get here? Well that’s another story.