Running a User Story Workshop

Today, I tried to run a workshop to gather user stories for a project over in Mt Eliza. (This meeting was also notable because of the ratio, 9-1, of women to men.) I took the approach outlined here which basically suggests several iterations of user story writing, followed by several iterations of writing acceptance criteria. I've run a couple of workshops like this before and a lot of similar things keep coming up which I think limits the benefits. Here are some things I'm going to try next time to help improve these workshops.

Address "How Do this Project Affect Me"?

Many of the users at the workshop are our frontline employees, those with the most to gain (and lose) from any new system or change in process. As with any good IT project, there is always the potential to make existing employees obsolete. Any changes should be communicated to the employees so they can feel secure in their job and comfortable that they can still perform well.

Know Your Audience

In this particular meeting, there was about 15 people there. They all had different needs and requirements, some thinking that this project probably didn't apply to them. An informal catchup with groups of like-minded stakeholders would smooth the user story exercise.

Stories First. Platform Later.

Many IT projects are run in near reverse order: first the technology platform is chosen, then the stories are written, estimated, and prioritized. I've italicized estimated because this is step most affected by your existing technology choices. Quite simply, using off-the-shelf software makes some things trivially easy, while others are outrageously difficult. Choice the platform (or build it from scratch) in a way that will minimize estimates across the board. To be successful here, intuition becomes key since there are and will be just-in-time requirements.

Education Your Constituents

"We don't know what we don't know." "Is this even possible?" "Here's a stupid question: ". These are comments I hear all the time. The problem stems, at least partially, from people simply not knowing what IT can do. I think this quite unfortunate and I'm often puzzled by those who claim to "not be computer savvy." Who hired these people, and why aren't they receiving training?

Before these workshops, we should fill some of these gaps. If we know this is a content management-type project, let's demo three very different kinds of content management systems. If anything, this can be fodder for people's imagination during the workshop. Hopefully, it stimulates discussions between people and their managers and can often put people at ease on the relatively low learning curve involved in new systems.

Come with Examples

It's hard (at least for me) to give good, relevant examples of user stories on the day. Bring a few user stories that were actually implemented in a previous, high profile project. Show the life of this story, from workshop, refinement, implementation, testing and so on. Ask: given this user story, do you think it is done? How could this story have been written better?

Wrap It Up

In the end, these workshops are important, but the project really takes shape after a few of those first stories are implemented. Don't be afraid to change direction nearly straight away. It's way better than throwing something away after it is completely "finished."

Microsoft Has Technical Support Too

I'm convinced that Microsoft indirectly employees thousands of help desk employees throughout the world. These are the brave soldiers troubleshooting problems with Windows and Office in most corporate offices facing angry office lemmings just trying to do their job. In a  way, I'm grateful to Microsoft; my first real job lasted so long primarily because of all the bugs in Windows and Office and the fact that most Windows applications tend to conflict with each other, not cleanly uninstall themselves and consume system resources inversely proportional to the utility they offer (I'm looking at you, Outlook).

One thing I never did though, was call up Microsoft Technical Support. We just accept that software will break and crash and hold Microsoft to zero account. Instead, the world's help desk employees can go through various troubleshooting steps which often involve either reinstalling the offending application or the entire operating system (a so-called rebuild). 

Why the reluctance? I suppose this can be expensive (I've been told that in one company, they treat the hours on the phone with Microsoft like "gold"). This assumes, of course, that the idle employee waiting for someone to troubleshoot their computer is a better alternative. Sometimes, companies can be so misguided. 

It also assumes that will actually be charged by Microsoft. From what I hear, Microsoft is fairly liberal in waiving charges for things that were its fault.

So I'm putting the challenge out there to the world's help desk workers. Next time someone brings you a problem that you can't easily solve (Outlook losing calendar invites, for example) insist on calling Microsoft before running through the ridiculous step of uninstalling the application or worse. Help desk should be for helping with the day-to-day operations of a computer, not for rectifying the arrogance of a monopolistic software vendor.

Using Google Analytics to Track My Job Prospects

I use Google Analytics to track visits to both my blog and my personal web page. One feature present in most analytics systems is tracking the keywords people used to get to your site. This helps with such dark arts as search engine optimization where you might try to increase your relevance in searches using so the so-called "organic" listing.

My blog generally receives traffic form Google searches, and the eclectic nature of my blog is reflected in the multitude of search terms people use to get here. Common topics are ColdFusion, marketing, Microsoft and Melbourne Business School. I think that's a pretty good mapping to the actual content.

On the other hand, traffic to my personal site, which has almost no content whatsoever, is driven almost entirely by a single keyword search: Scott Arbeitman. Again, that's a pretty good mapping to the content of my personal site. But who are these people who Google me? From the topic of this post, you might have guessed: recruiters. IT recruiters, to be exact. They usually find my name on LinkedIn or some forum discussing technologies they might be trying to find someone with skills in.

Recently, I have seen the traffic to my personal site drop off considerably. People just aren't googling my name as much as they used to. The reason, no doubt, is that there are simply less recruiters trying to hire IT staff in Melbourne with my credentials. That's not a worry to me at the moment, but for my peers looking for work, hang in there! And for God sakes, start blogging. At the very least, you'll know if people are googling you.

Accounting for Managers... Applied

In Melbourne Business School, one of the core MBA classes is Accounting for Managers which covers many topics in accounting that are important for managers. One cornerstone of accounting is when to treat a cost as an asset (capitalized) and when to treat it as an expense. A cost can be capitalized when:

• it is likely that future economic benefits will arise
• that amount can be reasonably estimated

Apparently George W. Bush, himself a Harvard Business School graduate, does not understand this distinction, or doesn't apply conservatism -- another key accounting principle -- when dealing with the American people. I immediately recognized this when reading this article from the New York Times:

But one reason that the agency’s deficit estimate was higher than those of outside analysts was that it added in hundreds of billions of dollars in spending tied to the government’s existing bailout programs, which the Bush administration has thus fare treated as “investments” it would recoup rather than “spending” or “costs” that are down the drain.

In other words, the bailout cannot be treated as an asset; it doesn't fit the above criteria and therefore must be expensed.

That worries me.