User Involvement

I started my career as a software developer and designer, and later on, in my career, I've been in charge of several large IT departments for many years. In my early days as a developer, I was amazed that all this money was spent on IT while so many projects failed. And I was eager to change that. And so I did, on several occasions.

The key to changing nonfunctioning IT departments is user involvement. Yes, it is that simple. Involve the people that are going to use the system that you're building, and you will see that you get better results in less time for less money. You can hardly imagine that nobody could think of that before. And I can tell you that most IT departments still underestimate the importance of user involvement.
Luckily a lot of people saw that user involvement was the way to go and several new methodologies were born.

Nowadays we see this most clearly in Agile Software Development. Apart from Involvement, Agile Development distinguishes itself from other methods by delivering products in small iterations. Thus making everything much more manageable and allowing people to have new insights along the way.

But although there is more to agile than just user involvement, it still is the user participation in the development process that is the most important. In the past few years, people are discovering that working agile is not only applicable to software development but in fact to every kind of work where people of different disciplines are working together.

The bottom line is: Involve the people that are going to use your product or service, and you will see that you can get better results in less time for less money.

Thanks so much for being here.

See you on the next one!