The user, end user, ambassador user or even the user representative is the role that is most influential in the project:
- Plan. The user is responsible for determining which smart use cases are handled during an iteration, off course advised by the project team.
- Design. Even more important is that the user is involved in enhancing the requirements, the user interface and business rules during the realization of the smart use cases.
- Accept. The use accepts the tested smart use cases.
Preferably users are involved on a daily basis. However, in lots of projects this is not the case. There are lots of alternative models where the involvement of users is concerned; from one day per week, to a number of afternoons.
Normally these are the people that will work with the software being delivered. Under some circumstances however, it is hard having the real users on the project, for instance if you are building a web shop, where the real users are out of sight. Being busy on the other hand, is not an excuse to play truant. Users, or user representatives play an crucial role in Smart projects. They prioritize the use cases during project kick- off, and monitoring the implementation of the smart use cases. During an iteration ideally they accept the use cases developed and tested by the team. This way or working signifies a daily involvement for the users of half an hour to an hour. Although this is far more time effective than being involved full- time over a period of a number of weeks, this situation is not always tangible. In this case, the users and the team will have to find a suitable feedback cycle, as short as possible.
We ran a project with complex business logic for an energy company at our office in Utrecht. The customer however was located in Best, which is about 60 kilometers and 2 hours of traffic jam from Utrecht. This made it more difficult to consult the customer about the complex business logic. In this project the customer spent every thursday and friday at our office. Thus, we delayed user related questions to thursday. This model worked very well in our project.
Robert de Wolff