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Innovation through Iteration

bio.ppt

cocktail: http://flickr.com/photos/feastguru_kirti/2472177819/in/photostream/

Background

Background

Washington Post IT Unit

• About 150 people

• Supports operations of the newspaper and some operations at other

Washington Post Company affiliates, including:

• Publishing

• Advertising

• Circulation

• Syndication

• Accounting

• Production

Washington Post Web Solutions

Quick commercial

We’re hiring.

(See me after.)

Designers, engineers, developers, managers

Traditional methodology flows like a waterfall

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• Test Scripts

• Working Build

• Wireframes• Architecture Diagrams

• Requirements Doc• Known specs

• Discrete phases

• Tight discipline

• Specific and unchanging requirements

• Design and development standards

• Extensive testing

The Waterfall: Measure twice, cut once

Discovery

Design

Development

Testing

Deployment

• Launch

The goal: Build the thing right.

• When it's familiar territory

• Better for projects with high levels of integration

with existing systems

• When working prototypes for user feedback are

more expensive/difficult to produce (e.g., non-

web)

• When revision is difficult

Waterfall works well for large-scale projects

Waterfall projects

Familiar territory Integration with DSISimple transactions

Waterfall projects

Familiar territory Simple transactions Integration with PAS

• Simplified project governance (Senior Management)

• Bigger projects mean fewer per year to track

• Project bloat

• Hoarding of IT Resources

• Inaccurate LOE and schedule estimates (IT Management)

• Bigger projects with more parts and objectives are harder to estimate

• Tendency toward "Launch and move on" mentality

• More risk that changing business needs will outpace development

Potential effects of waterfall projects

When things go wrong in the waterfall

“We built all this upsell capability, but after launch we learned it was completely off-target for the audience.” – IT

“By the time the project finished, the business needs had totally changed.” – Business Analyst

“By the time the site launched it looked completely different from what we had envisioned.” – Designer

“If I knew in the beginning what I know now, we would have made a very different site.” – Business Client

New strategy, new methodology

16

Business in transition

Business in transition

Where IT comes in

Align our methodologies to support innovation. . .

• Partner with the business to explore and realize new revenue streams

• Enable new “bets” and “small-scale experiments”

• Improve speed to market; bring value faster

. . . While we remain true to our core mission of supporting the traditional business

Decisions Knowledge

Knowledge gap

time

vo

lum

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A shift in emphasis

Build the thing right.

Waterfall:

Build the right thing.

Iterative:

An alternate approach: Iterative

Discovery

Design

Development

Testing

Deployment v1.0

ß ß ß ß ß

T I M E

• Better fit for product innovation

• Speed to market with beta releases

• Betas prove/refine the concept

• Earlier value generation

• More user feedback, which guides the next iterations

The goal: Build the right thing.

Beta is the new black

22 Releasesin 9 months

Post-1.0 iterations

5 Releasesin 3 months

Subscriber Self Service Commercial Classified Self Service

Let’s clarify: Iterative vs. incrementalhtt

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Got the whole brick wall metaphor from Jeff Patton talking to Jared Spool.http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2008/08/05/spoolcast-ux-in-an-agile-environment-with-jeff-patton/

Maintain a complete user experiencehtt

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Got the whole cake metaphor listening to Brandon Schauer talk about The Long Wow.http://www.uie.com/articles/the_long_wow

The Iterative technique• Smaller teams

• Close collaboration among IT and the business

• Use of non-traditional technologies and services

• Open source software

• Existing services/API’s

• Beta releases

• Rigorous collection and analysis of customer usage and feedback

• Site metrics

• Customer service

• Community interaction

• Exit strategy

• Customer

• Technical

Modular code enables re-use

ß

Social Networking

ß

Shopping Cart

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Credit Card Processing

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Mobile Browsing

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Text Messaging

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Google Maps Integration

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Video Player

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Rating/Reviewing

• Business case preparation

• Product conception and roadmapping

• Site marketing to drive traffic

• Content creation and management

• Partner management

• Advertising and consumer sales

• Financial management

• User community management

• Collecting, organizing, and responding to customer feedback

• Collecting and analyzing metrics

Business-side roles in iterative projects

• When the feature set is evolving

• Bets on ideas; small-scale experiments

• Minimal IT investment

• Low-cost failure

• Because it’s in line with the advantages of the web

• Easier to update, enhance, evolve

• Instant customer feedback

• Incremental releases of new functionality (Betas)

• Product improves as more people use it

Iterative works well. . .

• Do you ever get the feeling

that you’re surrounded by

total and complete chaos?

• Organizational inertia, cultural

change

• Integration with enterprise systems

• Transition from Beta to bulletproof

• Abandoning unsuccessful Betas

Challenges/Risks with iterative products

You

Challenges/Risks with iterative products

• Business pressure to deliver results early after release

• Requires more agile-oriented

• Marketing

• Support

• Expectations

• Resource proportioning

Pilot project: Vine

That’s it.

Questions?

35

Dave Burkedave@daveburke.com

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