Are your users on CRACK?

Users are the core of our existence… they are the customer, the business and the people that make things happen. They give us ideas, suggestions, feedback, criticism, etc. We need users, but not just users for the sake of users, we need their input and participation.

When we talk about user participation, we mean full participation throughout the project lifecycle. In the old days, we would ask users for the requirements and then go away and develop/configure them. This meant that the work was being done without any user feedback or guidance, and when delivered, there was almost always some misunderstanding or the user (having had an opportunity to see the end result) wanted things done differently. You can see how this ends up costing more time, money and frustration.

In our current world of Agile Development, we work more iteratively and interact with users regularly. We start building the framework and then tune it along with the users… this ends up giving the users an opportunity to evaluate the solution early when it is easier to add new functionality never considered before, or to improve on existing requirements. This is definitely the kind of interaction and feedback we want to encourage.

But in order for this to be successful, we need users that meet certain characteristics… we need users that confirm to the CRACK mnemonic:

C – Collaborative – able to work with the team and communicate well
R – Representative – of their business segment, we want a good characteristic feedback
A – Accountable – to make decisions on the project
C – Committed – to the project, not frequently swapped for someone else who needs re-education
K – Knowledgeable – about their business area, able to answer questions and provide missing details

So when we engage on projects, we make sure and find users that are on CRACK!