Nueronic Consulting

This is the second part to the previous post regarding the reasons IT project’s fail.In the previous post i mentioned the general reasons,which most of the IT projects from small sites to enterprise applications have in common.
The second post focuses on the little things. Small misconceptions that if you add them up can make or break an IT project.
All team members have responsibilities within a project, clients, employees (developers in this case) and managers.

(Read more…)

First-of all-Happy new year and i hope 2008 is a great year for all, thanks for visiting this blog, reading and asking for advice and hopefully you have learned something.

Each year passes ans some businesses ( focusing on e-commerce-even some on ine web/software development) make it and some just don’t, the reasons are plenty but we will not focus on those in this post. What i want to focus on is something perhaps every business owner/manager should do each year in order to prevent disaster and foresee catastrophe-think of it as your usual heart check-ups and medical check ups after you are  fifty; to asses the viability of your business. What do we mean by that? Economic viability refers to the ability of the business to survive in the market strategically and economically in a period of time.

There are two ways to do that-Strategic analysis and financial analysis.

Strategic Analysis

Using strategic analysis the management team can focus on the industry in which the business operates but also in the internals of the business. There are a number of factors in which a business should look into:

• Barriers to entry: How easy is it for new entrants to enter the industry? Do we as a business have or can set any barriers that can obstruct that (e.g high market rate, patents,intellectual property)?
• The power of suppliers: How do suppliers control the demand of the product we sell? Are there any alternative products? Alternative suppliers?Can we bargain prices with a number of suppliers to minimise costs?
• Substitute products: Do these exist? How can they affect us and our revenue and the industry overall?How do these affect our prices?
• Power of customers. How does customer demand affect the prices,where do we stand in consumer preferences as a business? Why do customers prefer our competition?
• Industry value chain:How do we influence the value chain of the industry and how do we react if that changes?
• The nature of competition: What differentiates our competitors?Price?Quality?Products? How do we change that?
• Company value chain: How does our value chain react to the change of the industry? How often does it change and why? How is it to re-align out business processes?
• Competencies: Is our competencies easily duplicate by 3rd parties? Do we as a firm walk in parallel with changes in the industry or do we risk those competencies becoming obsolete?
• Technology: Does the firm really own it’s own technologies or are these outsourced? Is bringing these in-house a better choice? Do we keep up with technology and how does it affect our overall business plan and vision?

There are of course countless other points that manager’s should be aware of- in the next post i will be focusing on the more social and financial issues.

Lately,especially with the explosion on the web there has been a lot of talk on Usability and why it is important. A lot of people at the time said,who cares, if we can use it anyone can. Developers usually test system’s this way (Joel is right,you do need testers-not only for bugs), by testing the system themselves and find it to an understanble level they usually release the software to the client. This is where usually trouble begins, the system is not used by the client and eventually you have another failed project in your hands.

Usually when client’s come  and say to me, the software that  “Leaping Bass company” did for us, doesnt work as it should, we can’t use it, it’s not easy to learn, and it is affecting our productivity. The approach to that is to first find out why this has happend -by ofcourse using the software yourself, but also to try and understand the users from a business perspective.



Ask the Questions
Often i ask and try to find out a number of details using the following questions:

1. Why the system is not used efficiently and not by all users? What are the reasons behind this?
2. Is the system compatible with the Usability requirements and  criteria set(if any)?
3. Is the system designed to standards? If not, how can that be achieved?
4.The user’s opinion and the manager’s opinion, and how these affect the systems acceptance?
5. Changes that would be needed, both in the system itself, the company employees and the company.

Set the Criteria

There is a range of criteria (depending on the project), you can check the system against. The first step should be to first define them.The most important ones are:

1. Understandability: The system should be easy to understand, Interface elements should be clear and labeled appropriately. (http://www.usabilitynet.org/tools/requirements.htm)
2. Learnability:  The system should be easy to use, and most importantly easy to learn. Users should not be forced think or guess what the system is trying to do or what they are supposed to do next. Novice users may need initial training (e.g training is aimed at a 2 hour system walkthrough. New features training will also be provided) but expert users should need no training at all.
3. Effectiveness:  The system should provide efficient ways and means for users to achieve their tasks.
4.Efficiency and Speed of performance:  The system should help the user to complete certain tasks in at most 3 steps. Each step should not take more than 10 seconds.
5.Consistency:  An overall consistency of pages, tools and processes must be followed. This will ease the learnability of the system and increase the knowledge retention of the users.
6.Feedback:  The system should provide user feedback at all times. This should be evident across the system, and should happen as a response for each user’s action or system’s error.
7. Error Prevention:  The system must help to prevent the user from making errors. This increases the productivity and efficiency of the system and decreases the user’s errors.
8. Error Recovery:  The system should give the ability to the user to recover from errors quickly and easily, e.g. when a user makes an error in a form he should be able to return at any point in the processes and correct error based on the guidelines given by the system’s error message.
9. Visual Clarity and Interface Attractiveness: The content of the intranet should be at all times easy to read and comprehend. The colours used in the system and the overall intranet structure should be appealing to al users
10. Compatibility:  The system should be compatible with all the companies systems and should be accessible remotely. Furthermore the system should be compatible with the two languages spoken in the company e.g English and Greek.

Having done that you set yourself a basis and goals that the system must meet in order to solve the problems defined above. Moreover a set of requirements need to be set that will validate the criteria set above. This can me in the form of:

1.The system has to be designed to standards.  Specifically the system should be consisted with web standards such as the WW3 guidelines. (http://www.w3.org/)
2. The system should be compatible  to accessibility guidelines ( http://www.w3.org/WAI/ )
3. The system should cater for users with disabilities and should enable future modules (depending on the users disabilities) to be ‘build on top’ of the existing modules.
4. The system should be compatible in a range of browsers and devices (handheld pc).

This way, you can gather a number of information which will allow you to determine both the technical and non-technical issues that affect the system thus enabling you to propose and implement the correct solution.