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Dear Volere User,

The news for this season is that we have completely overhauled the Volere Requirements Website. Please come by at http://www.volere.co.uk. (You may need to hit ‘refresh’ if your browser has cached the old site.)

The site contains downloads to help you with your requirements work, articles, book reviews, requirements training and guidance, event notification, contact with other Volere users, along with other requirements and innovation resources.

The new version 14 of the Volere Requirements Specification Template is available on the site. We have to announce that after many years of making this a free resource to many thousands of users, we are now charging for it. Academic use of the Template is still free.

Personas

A technique that we have been having a lot of success with lately in both innovation and requirements is personas. A persona is an imaginary, but nevertheless archetypical (or target), user or customer for your system, product or process. The persona specific, and must not be general. It is also common practice, and advisable, to have a photograph of the persona. This helps people to read more into the person’s character, and predict its behavior.

image 1

For example, we found this photograph for one of our clients working on an Aged Social Care program. Note the character in the old lady's face. This corresponded to the characteristics the team had given to their archetypical customer for the social service. They had written a description that included her name,preferences, attitudes to various relevant governmental factors, her approach to technology, new people, comfort with making arrangements on the telephone (the team discarded the internet as being irrelevant to this persona) and various aspects that could influence the product. The photo served to bring the persona to life—the team looked long and hard into her face before making decisions about their product.

The intention of the persona is to make it easier for the innovators and requirements gatherers to think about their customers’ needs. When they can see a photo, and speak about the persona as someone real, it puts a human face on what otherwise would be abstract data about potential customers. The question they ask is not what a set of data wants, or that they themselves want, but “what does Hilda (the name the team gave to the persona in the photo) want?” or “what would Hilda do with this product?”

One of the valuable reasons for having a persona is that the team avoids trying to derive a product or service for everybody. We know well enough that when we try and please everybody we usually end up pleasing nobody. Personas also prevent the team building a product to suit themselves. It is not a matter of what you think is a good feature, but what Hilda will think of it.

In the case of "Hilda” and the aged social care, the team reported that they came up with a far better service than they would have without using the persona. They keep Hilda's photo on the wall still regularly refer to her when they make changes or additions to the service. “What does Hilda want us to do for her?” is a regular question at team meetings.

Unless you have a very small number of users/customers, we recommend you consider using a persona (or possibly two) as your proxy user. If you have a well-thought out, or better still well-researched persona, gathering requirements or innovating for that persona becomes far more straightforward than guessing what functional and non-functional requirements are appropriate. Alan Cooper's book "About Face 3" has a significant section on personas. There is a short review at http://www.volere.co.uk/books.htm

Back at the Volere site: Recently posted articles include "Why is Innovation so Hard?", a look at organizational lethargy when it comes to innovation, and "How Now Brown Cow" which examines useful ways for business analysts to look at systems and business processes. These are available at http://www.volere.co.uk/articles.htm.

Reviews of recent books http://www.volere.co.uk/books.htm include "Discovering Requirements” by Ian Alexander and Ljerka Beus-Dukic. Also reviewed is "Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies - Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior" by your Volere authors and their partners in the Atlantic Systems Guild, Tom DeMarco, Peter Hruschka, Tim Lister and Steve McMenamin. This book recently won the Jolt Productivity Award for best general book 2009. http://www.joltawards.com/winners.html.

Apart from the Volere events, we also announce two special happenings:

  • Suzanne speaks on the topic "Mastering the Requirements Process” at the ICT Conference at the European Commission in Brussels on September 17.
  • The Business Analysis 2009 conference hosted by IRM UK, runs from September 28-30. James and Suzanne, along with colleague Neil Maiden, will be giving a tutorial "Innovation, Creativity and their Role in Business Requirements". http://www.irmuk.co.uk/ba2009/

Our best regards,

Suzanne Robertson

James Robertson

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