The Universe Matters
I was in heavy discussion the other day on a topic that I’m sure reoccurs in many technology spaces around the world.
As is always the way these conversations go, the general theme was: “Can’t the system just do this? Our users want to do xyz and it’s just not working for them.” All good – it’s why we’re here. But then I got to thinking how I take our user community representatives on the journey that it’s not always best to change the system to meet the needs of the few, something that is requested so very frequently by many.
Certainly it’s a balancing act between the user, what they’re trying to do, and what system to do it with, something like this:
How do we support this ecosystem in the typical business environment? Perhaps an over generalisation but to most; we support with a help desk for the “how to” questions, training for the longer, process related topics and if there’s an issue with the system then we ultimately fall back on development, and this lends itself to the same basic triangle:
But how did this help me with explaining limitations and setting expectations to the user community?
Ensuring an understanding that issues relating to user “how to” questions are best served by a help desk rather than through a development change certainly helped a great deal. But what really ticked the boxes was putting the above triangles into a worldlier context, like this:
And what does this mean?
It meant that I could take the conversation into why certain things could, should or wouldn’t be done. For example:
Users are people (obvious really!) they can revolt of course, but they can be supported and they can adapt to the planet they live on extremely well once they know their environment.
The planet is able to be changed, but it will affect the people on it directly. What’s more it’s limited by the rules of the universe. I could even point out that gross misuse of the planet wouldn't help the people in the long run!
The universe, well… we can change that, and surely it will, but if we do the planet won’t be the same and the users will likely have to adapt to it all over again. What’s more, to change the rules of the universe means that there are likely consequences to the planet and people which really need to be thought through before we change it.
This went over extremely well, putting context around proposed changes to the systems we develop and the processes working within them.
My user representative left totally bought into looking to community changes before changing the planet, and accepting that the universe won’t change overnight to suit the few.
And finally I have it, Master of the Universe at last.