De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium

Users, not the Enterprise, are at the Centre of the Universe

Users are the Centre of the Universe

Users are the centre of the universe — not technology, not process, not the enterprise.

Some organisations lose sight of this, some never knew it in the first place, and some resist the very idea as if it were a Copernican revolution.

Commercial organisations make profit by attracting and keeping users. Public sector organisations provide services to users, paid for by taxpayers.

Users are where the value is.

This is a powerful statement that has wide ranging implications for the way we think, our organisational culture and structure, and how we create the right incentives to prevent our focus wandering away from users.

Let’s look at some of these implications:

1. Defining What To Do

Whenever work is initiated, it must centred around user needs. It must be extremely clear what user need is being met. So clear that you can explain it in plain English to my grandmother. If you can’t, you have a problem.

This plain English discipline allows us to filter out work that organisations create, out of habit, or to justify their existence. “We need a tech refresh project”, “we need to implement unified SSO” — but why?

Everything that an organisation does must be justified against meeting user needs.

2. Development

If users are the central focus around which we do stuff, then we must design and develop solutions remaining as close to those users as possible — continuous involvement with short feedback loops.

It means iterative development, with the direction of increments led by users, not detached project managers. The goal is not to deliver a project, whatever shape that project is, but to deliver a service that meets user needs efficiently.

There is a conflict of interest if the project manager, not a representative of the user, is prime. This is why, in the agile world, the role of a product owner is kept distinct from a delivery manager.

A well run project that comes in on time and within budget but doesn't meet user needs is a failure — a waste of time and money. Enterprise metrics, which reward the number of projects delivered alone, incentivise the wrong outcome. Instead, they should measure user satisfaction, together with the costs of achieving and maintaining it.

Develop services iteratively, with users leading decisions, not project managers.

3. Redevelopment

Large organisations will have imperfect legacy. How we deal with it must be centred around user needs, even if that legacy wasn't created from this perspective.

Getting rid of legacy is the ideal ambition — we call it legacy for a reason — we don’t want to be running it any more. That means process legacy too, not just technical legacy.

But where we decide to evolve it, we must not fall into the trap of fixing parts of a broken whole. Introducing elements of digitisation to an ineffective or unpleasant user experience is missing the point.

By stepping outside your organisation, and looking at yourselves from a user’s perspective, you’ll see that it is the end to end user journey that needs reviewing — starting from understanding user needs, and working back from that into your organisation, challenging existing processes, policy and orthodoxies as you go.

This way you optimise meeting user needs, efficiency of user journey and any supporting internal processes. Why would you miss this opportunity?

Review your end-to-end user journey, don’t try to fix part of a broken whole.

4. Insight

In order to monitor progress towards, and measure the success of outcomes, we need metrics.

If meeting user needs is where the value is, our metrics must reflect that. That means measuring user satisfaction, the efficiency (or otherwise) of user journeys.

Enterprises must get away from measuring what they have habitually, or measuring what is easy. Measuring project progress against a Gantt chart has little to do with meeting user needs — delivering prioritised user stories from a backlog does. Measuring data centre CPU utilisation is easy, but has little to do with user satisfaction. The plain English test is useful here — if you can’t explain to my grandmother the relevance of what you’re measuring, you’ve probably got it wrong.

Measure the things that actually and clearly reflect meeting user needs, the effectiveness of user journeys, and the costs of doing so.

But Which Users?

Users are those that your organisation serves. If they disappeared, your organisation would lose its reason for existing.

But supporting those users, are other people. The sales assistants, the case workers, the help desk workers, the nurses.

And supporting these people are yet more people. The line manager, the chief architect, the person from human resources.

All of these people are users, and their user needs must be understood and met.

It is always a mistake to think there are roles or functions in your organisation that don’t ultimately support meeting the needs of your end users.

To effectively meet the needs of your external end users, you must in turn effectively meet the needs of the internal people that support them.