Communication / Consulting / Outsourcing / Project Management / Requirements / Requirements gathering

Maine Mangles Medicaid – Charges CIO

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Allan Holmes, for CIO Magazine just posted a scathing and detailed autopsy of the disastrous Medicaid Claims System project run by CSNI and launched in January of 2005. Requirements elicitation failures combined with incompetent vendor selection and project mismanagement lead to a $30,000,000 oops for the state of Maine, jeopardizing its credit rating. The system failed to process 300,000 claims in the first 3 months of operations, causing many health care providers to close their doors – and presumably causing citizens of Maine to go without needed services. Maine is the only state in the union (as of April 2005) not complying with federal HIPAA regulations.

Product Management / Requirements / Requirements gathering

Product Manager Role Definition

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Michael has posted a great definition of the product manager role on his blog, Product Management and Product Marketing – A Definition. He covers a whole host of activities in six seperate areas. Some of the responsibilities, while not product management, are often the responsibility of the product manager. It’s a good real-world assessment of what product managers are often asked to do.

Design / Interaction design / Requirements / Requirements gathering / Software development / Software requirements specification / UX

Interaction Design Process Overview

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Interaction design, as described by Alan Cooper in The Inmates are Running the Asylum, is a process for designing software by focusing on the most important users. Unlike traditional requirements gathering and solution design processes, interaction design focuses on the goals of a specific class of users, represented as a persona. Those goals are considered when defining scenarios that represent how the primary persona will use the software. The combination of goals and scenarios leads to design artifacts and a functional specification. We will explore these steps in more detail in this post.

Agile / Interaction design / Requirements / Requirements gathering / Software requirements specification / UX

Interaction design explained by Alan Cooper

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There’s a Clash of the Titans joint-interview posted at FTPOnline between Kent Beck and Alan Cooper called Extreme Programming vs. Interaction Design. It’s 10 pages of back and forth. In short, these icons agree on objectives, and disagree on how to achieve them. They also spend some time (mis)characterizing each other’s positions and defining their own. In this post we will look at how Alan Cooper explains Interaction Design. We would say that he defines interaction design more as a requirements than a design activity.

Consulting / Lists / Process Improvement / Project Management / Software development

Top ten tips for preventing innovation

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At a recent presentation in Austin by Seilevel about the goals and methods of requirements gathering, a member of the audience asked “What can we do with our requirements to assure innovation?” That’s a tough question with an easy answer – nothing.

What if the question had been “What can we do to prevent innovation?” That’s a better question with a lot of answers.

Requirements / Requirements gathering / Software development

This Software Sucks! – Say Users

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You need to read Scott Berkun’s Essay # 46 – Why software sucks (and what to do about it). His content is great, his style is easy and fun, and he has good insights. If his other essays are this good, he goes in the same bucket as Joel Spoelsky and Paul Graham for us. As Berkun points out, we don’t set out to write bad software. Here’s how we can avoid some of the different mistakes.