Fail Fast, Fail Often. In Other Words, Iterate.

Iteration is one of the core principles of how we work. We believe you simply won’t get it right the first time. Fast Company has a really great article about how iteration leads to innovation. It tells the story of the Wright Brothers and how they failed, tried again, and failed, and tried again hundreds of times before they found flight.

The article goes on to talk about rapid prototyping, which is simply another way to describe our use of software visualization. Visualization is how we help companies define software. We start with Pre-vis, which is a very low fidelity representation of high-level business requirements and system features. We may take multiple passes to make sure everyone is on the same page about what the project is about, what it will accomplish, and more.

From pre-vis we go into visualization. Now that everyone understands the baseline of the project, we kick into medium to high fidelity and iterate on all the fine details. During visualization, stakeholders see their software come to life. What they see isn’t traditional static wireframes or reams of documentation. They see a fully interactive and functioning “prototype” of their software. During visualization we will iterate on functionality multiple times until we get it right.

Through each iteration and review, the functionality of the software solidifies. We may explore many ideas that we find after testing and review simply don’t work. Making rapid changes to these failures is quick, easy and inexpensive because we’re not writing or deploying code. Changes can be made in minutes, not days or weeks.

Our clients are consistently amazed at how much work we can accomplish over a few days. We are successful because we fail fast, and we fail early.

OneSpring Participates in NAFSA Conference

OneSpring was welcomed with open arms to Vancouver, BC this week at the NAFSA (Association of International Educators) Conference.  The annual NAFSA conferences attract attendees from educational institutions around the world.

OneSpring’s clients, the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) and the Department of State, presented numerous demonstrations of their new SEVIS II product to thousands of onlookers at the conference.  How was that possible?  Visualization!

The power of showing end users a high-fidelity visualized model of SEVIS II reaped numerous rewards this week at NAFSA.  The visualization increased confidence in the user community that SEVP and the Department of State understand their needs, are conducting user-centric design, and will deploy a system that will be an asset to their organizations.  The attendees in each NAFSA session enjoyed seeing the preview of SEVIS II, providing feedback on feature functionality they would like to see incorporated in SEVIS II.

Though development of the final SEVIS II system is quite a way off, SEVP and the Department of State look forward to leveraging the visualization in future training and outreach initiatives in the interim.

UPA 2011 Workshop – Better Usability Through Visualization

OneSpring is honored to have been selected as a featured presenter for the 2011 Usability Professionals’ Association International Conference in Atlanta, GA.

We will be conducting a 3 hour workshop on how usability professionals can use the power of visualization to improve the usability and user experience of software projects.

Our workshop starts at 2:40pm on Wednesday, June 22, 2011.

For those with an interest in this topic who can’t attend the workshop, OneSpring is also leading a presentation co-authored with Ascendant Technology about using visualization techniques to improve the quality of user experience processes, services, and deliverables.

The presentation, entitled “Envisioning Experience“, will be delivered at 11:10 on Wednesday, June 22, 2011.

For more information and to register, visit the 2011 UPA International Conference web site.

Visualization is more than just designing screens

Visualization is sometimes used in the context of visualizing screen design only. In my opinion, it’s much more than that. Visualization is a concept, process, and a way of thinking about requirements. Not only can you visualize interfaces, you can also visualize business process flows, navigation, user flows, content structure, data flows, and more.

The idea behind visualization takes place more on the process side of the software development lifecycle. It’s the setting, people, skill sets, and structure around how you elicit your requirements. There are four key components that need to be in place to make it work well.

• It must be highly collaborative. Collaboration is critical throughout the project lifecycle. Working in a silo doesn’t foster the communication needed to be effective using visualization. It’s all about defining, designing, and building together as a group that drives solid performance. It’s critical to have a strong facilitator to lead sessions and to steer the group toward consensus.
• You must have the right talent. What I’ve seen work is the proper combination of software and hard skills. You have to have team members with good to great communication skills. A lot of the requirements are fleshed out through healthy dialog and debates. It’s important to have consultants that challenge ideas and make them stronger. What you don’t want are note takers that simply write down everything you want without bringing in their own ideas. It needs to function more like a partnership as opposed to a client to consultant relationship.
• If possible, you must have the right stakeholders. It’s important to have stakeholders and leaders that are emotionally and professionally committed to solving the problem. They need to be engaged in the project and make decisions quickly. If you don’t have this on your project, the chances of failing go way up. I would make this clear from the beginning if possible and try to get buy-in and commitment from the stakeholders early in the lifecycle.
• You must have the right technology. There’s a lot of technology coming on the market that help facilitate visualization. It’s critical that you find technology that supports your process and people. Don’t let the technology dictate your approach. You need to find the right fit. Cost, training, adoption, and organization change factors usually dictate the outcome.

About the author: Jason Moccia is the President, COO, and Co-founder of OneSpring. Jason has over 14 years of experience in the software development field. In addition to operating as President and COO, he also runs the company’s Federal side of the business. His philosophy of doing one thing better than any other company emanates throughout OneSpring’s core strategy. Jason has worked with numerous Fortune 1000 companies including but not limited to Ernst & Young, General Electric, SAIC, Florida Power & Light, InterContinental Hotels, Deloitte, and SunTrust.

Use visualization for Risk Mitigation

One of the areas we’ve seen visualization used at OneSpring is on Risk Mitigation. Companies are using this approach and technology to rapidly and quickly visualize ideas, concepts, and applications very early in the life-cycle and then taking the visualization and market testing it.

We’ve done this internally to test product ideas quickly and to reduce the risk of developing the wrong thing, or developing something no one wants or needs. Companies now have the ability to quickly test drive their ideas without spending too much time and money upfront.

Market testing your idea can be done very easily by giving users access to your visualization, or by walking them through it and eliciting feedback. This is a very cost effective way to drive value up and risk down.

The key is to keep your visualization lightweight and streamlined so the concept comes through. The visualization doesn’t have to have all the bells and whistles to be effective. We call this a “Low Fidelity” visualization. As long as you can get your concept across, you’ve achieved the goal.

About the author: Jason Moccia is the President, COO, and Co-founder of OneSpring. Jason has over 14 years of experience in the software development field. In addition to operating as President and COO, he also runs the company’s Federal side of the business. His philosophy of doing one thing better than any other company emanates throughout OneSpring’s core strategy. Jason has worked with numerous Fortune 1000 companies including but not limited to Ernst & Young, General Electric, SAIC, Florida Power & Light, InterContinental Hotels, Deloitte, and SunTrust.

The problem with upfront requirements

Prototyping and visualization technology is starting to improve the way companies define and build software applications. However, requirements management and documentation of those requirements is still antiquated. Most tools on the market are outdated and cumbersome to use. 83% of companies still rely on Microsoft Word and Excel to communicate requirements. OneSpring has worked on over 50 projects ranging from small $20K projects to over $2 million dollar requirements definition projects and has seen first hand what works and does not work.

Most companies follow a documentation centric path to defining software applications where a lot of time is spent writing out text-based requirements. In 2005 we discovered a disconnect exists between what a client said they wanted and what they actually received. We call this the Clarity Curve.

The Clarity Curve depicts the understanding stakeholders and users gain as they start seeing their software project come to life. The problem with this model is that there is a very high cost associated with it. In most cases, once the stakeholder sees what is being developed they typically want to make changes. Changing developed software is 100 times more expensive than catching changes upfront in the lifecycle before code has been written. This is the value proposition we have been successfully selling. Our goal is to create software that allows users to rapidly define, organize, and distribute better and more accurate requirements thus allowing companies to build the right software the first time.

The below illustration shows a traditional software development lifecycle. Notice the increase in understanding at the end of the cycle. It is commonly said that stakeholders and users don’t really know what they want until they can see and interact with it. This holds true for software development as it does for most products.

So how do you improve the Clarity Curve?

The goal is to shift stakeholder and user understanding to the beginning of the elicitation phase. By building visual models, visualizations, and rapidly documenting requirements, you can start to shift the curve to the left. The illustration below depicts what we always try to achieve on projects. This will help you reduce cost, increase clarity, and produce better and more usable software. Use visual representations of your requirements to improve understanding and consensus among your stakeholders.

About the author: Jason Moccia is the President, COO, and Co-founder of OneSpring. Jason has over 14 years of experience in the software development field. In addition to operating as President and COO, he also runs the company’s Federal side of the business. His philosophy of doing one thing better than any other company emanates throughout OneSpring’s core strategy. Jason has worked with numerous Fortune 1000 companies including but not limited to Ernst & Young, General Electric, SAIC, Florida Power & Light, InterContinental Hotels, Deloitte, and SunTrust.

Webinar: The Visualization Maturity Model

There is more to visualization than just the tools (iRise, Axure, etc.). Your organization’s process and people have to be working optimally to get the most out of them. During this webinar, we’ll discuss the three levels of visualization maturity and how you can get the most from visualization. We’ll also show you how your organization can gain early requirements clarity as well as save time, money and be more innovative.

Slides

Webinar: Close the Requirements Clarity Gap

Are you happy with your IT projects? Do you find they never quite meet expectations? During this webinar, we’ll demonstrate how our JAM Session® helps our clients be more innovative, save time and money. We deliver this through gaining technology requirements clarity early using visualization.

Slides

Webinar: What Is Visualization?

Curious about project visualization – AKA “simulation” or “rapid prototyping”? Learn how OneSpring is helping Fortune 500 companies and government agencies use visualization on projects that span mainframe modernization to cutting edge mobile applications and everything in between.

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