Subject to Change - A Product Design Manifesto
Subject to ChangeAdaptive Path on Design
By Peter Merholz, Todd Wilkens, Brandon Schauer, David Verba
Price: $24.99 USD - O'Reilly Press
One of the oft-repeated and now threadbare criticisms of CIO's , IT managers and developers is that they lack business knowledge. That may be true in specific cases but if one were to move to the accounting, operations or HR departments the same deficits could be found among staffers there depending on how well the organization itself communicates its strategy and mission statements.
But lets look at the question from the other side - where has IT thought and methods influenced business strategy and development. And it is not fair to claim that because IT programs and software are often used as key enablers in the development of strategy and plans for organizations, that is sufficient for its contribution to the development of strategy in general.
However, for the past 40-50 years IT shops have been coping with some of the most difficult conditions for business development and productivity for three reasons. First, the underlying IT technology base(both software and hardware) is and has been changing very rapidly. Moore's Law of doubling in CPU power or halving in cost every 14-18 months is echoed by similar drastic improvements in storage, communication costs, and device miniaturization for decades. Likewise in software, there have been major paradigm shifts of even greater magnitude such as multitasking, structured methods, object design, GUI any event-driven interactions to Web stateless operations. The net result is that in as short a period as 6-18 months strategies and projects that had reasonable ROIs may no longer stand up.
Second, IT development has become inherently more complex as it now permeates every aspect of an organizations operations - from product and service delivery to support and future development. But programs, once confined to a single computer, have been smeared across a network of computing devices - client stations, web+ application servers, database servers, printing and output devices, and networking devices/relays. When something goes wrong, isolating where and why can involve intensive sleuthing.
Third, every software system produces critical internal process changes. Many of those changes involve modifications in how group work is done, personal, group and organizational information flows, and how decisions are made across an organization. These are changes to the basic group and organizational infrastructure involving many economic, social and political interests. Only within the last 10-15 years has the Management of Change process been fully recognized and begun to be controlled and managed in a systematic fashion as part of the IT development process.
So in this extreme organizational crucible, IT managers and developers have had to develop some robust strategies. Extreme Programming's test-based development is one. This strategy places code testing as a critical activity every step of the way in development and operations. Prototype and test goes to the front of the planning and coding processes. This means at anytime in the development, there will be working code that can be demonstrated to users and other interested parties. It also means that improper code and bogus design assumptions will be picked up and fixed early in the process when
Agile Development did three things to IT planning. First, Agile puts the customer as the leading and constantly active decider of the priorities as a system developed. Inevitably, as the program evolved and external conditions changed, new priorities would arise as to when and how new features should be added to the developing program. But customers would lead in deciding feature changes and the trade-offs of what would change: costs, schedules or features as the program moved toward completion. Second, Agile insists on collaboration, co-operation and participation among all the stakeholders of a project. This is a necessary but not sufficient condition to handling the management of change in IT development. Finally,Agile emphasize the iterative nature of the development process - and how it should be shortened during high risk phases (fewer high risk step in any one iteration).
Finally, IT development has adopted the Project Portfolio approach to managing all ongoing IT projects in an organization. The Project Portfolio approach forces projects to track the basic costs, ROI, time and key resources used for each iteration of a project. Then just as as the Agile method helps the customer decide the next feature set or what has to change when a problem is encountered in an iteration, the same basic process is available to the organization's top managers to track all ongoing IT projects. The insights of the Project Portfolio approach is that all phases of project, both costs and benefits to all stakeholders have to be accounted for; and over time the projects will change in their resulting ROI, and top mangers must then make the tough change decisions: stop, drop, continue, or reprioritize in a context that looks at all projects, their current costs, resource usage, and expected ROI.
In sum, IT development has had to refine its delivery methods to cope with historically high rates of abject project failure or severe cost, time and/or functional shortcomings. It has been a tough planning and development environ. Out of this critical environ has come many of the ideas and methods proposed in Subject to Change - creating products and services for an uncertain world. This is a strategic planning and product/service development process that will change innovation - be it new products/services or re-engineering existing ones. This book's ideas have application to the whole organization, certainly not just the IT projects and development. This is a book about a new method and discipline for innovation.
At Last The Book
Adaptive Path in this book has taken the same approach as Extreme Programming and Agile Developers - they have published a Product Design Manifesto. It is this book. The Manifesto gives due diligence to many existing product design strategies. But it also points out that rapid change is the new status quo. Other organizations are innovating at a brisk pace. So the Experience Curve process which Harvard Business Review has cited as accelerating and leading to the rapid commoditization of products or services with quick changes from profitability to marginal to losing operations.
Subject to Change is about getting a handle on those curves and letting customers and their experiences with your products lead to new innovations and services to keep you ahead in the game. Subject to Change shows how to stay at the profitable end of the Experience Curve. The book and method borrow from Extreme Programming and put testing and experience with prototypes and an evolving real product or service at the head of the design and innovation process. It also adds the Agile Alliance idea that the customer and their experiences with your product are the defining factor to make the product better. Finally , it takes from the Project Portfolio approach the idea that a product or service does not stand alone but must be fit into the whole customer usage life cycle and also how your portfolio of products/services matches and meets those needs.
In era of fast product maturation, the Product Design Manifesto envisions a process of adding iterations and features to your product/service that will keep your product on the top and profitable end of the Experience Curve. No small ambition.
The book is like its predecessors, relentless in pursuing its key ideas. Let me illustrate. The book spends three chapters on illustrating why the customer experience is kingmaker in "designing" your product. Typical is "The success of experience-focused products is contingent on everyone sharing and understanding of users and a vision for the experience, because so many people play a role in delivering that experience." Then again, in the chapter on Stop Designing "products" starts with "What do people want to accomplish ? How does that activity fit into their lives ? How can I deliver on those desires? Asking these questions inevitably shifts focus away from one-off, standalone products and allows you to start thinking of products simply as elements of a much larger system." Expect this clarity of purpose and some stellar old and new product/service design examples to underline their arguments throughout. But above all this book is pithy like the Agile Processes it admires and draws from.
Summary
Consider the one major weakness of this book. It is not far from the Price Waterhouse's book on Management of Change - an extended argument and advertisement for Adaptive Path's services. But the essential ideas on the complexity of design and using a customer and experience with your products/services as focusing mechanism to help lead the design efforts are invaluable. Also the book does provide a good bibliography and set of references to ideas about design and innovation.
So the next time you as an IT person hear the tiresome nag that IT people don't know business, cut them down right away by saying that IT processes, methods and leaders are teaching businesses some vital lessons in Strategic Design and Innovation. Second, consider the costs - $25 dollars and 168 pages are your out-of-pockets for getting some potentially very vital ideas on keeping your products and services "fresh". Finally, consider the book as a ground floor investment on how to innovate in the new world of globalization - this book is about finding that customer niche that you can best fulfill.