One of the key characteristics of Smart is the high involvement of business users throughout the project - from day one of the Propose stage, up to application maintenance in the Manage stage.
How involved?
Business users are involved in the project in a number of ways:
- Prioritize business processes and forms (together with the project sponsor) for the requirements stream to investigate at iteration kick-off.
- Deliver knowledge to the requirements stream on a bi-weekly basis (workshops), as input for modeling the business processes, smart use cases and forms.
- Prioritize smart use cases (assisted by the project team) to be realized at iteration kick-off.
- Deliver input (preferably on a daily basis) for the realization of the smart use cases, just prior to development.
- Review and accept the developed and tested smart use cases, on a per use case basis.
- Join in iteration evaluation (as does the project sponsor). Such an evaluation is called a retrospective and helps the project team to perform even better in the next iterations.
Benefits?
This very interactive approach has a number of benefits
for the business users:
- Highly involved. The business users are highly involved in setting the order in which the business processes and forms are realized.
- Short feedback cycles. Feedback cycles are as short as possible. This allows for full flexibility for the business users. In most cases, the business users can give their feedback on a particular smart use case (or other products) during the time these products are worked on.
- In this project such frequent interaction is essential, because to a large part, the future requirements for the automation of the business processes are not known.
- Daily participation creates involvement, and accounts for smoother acceptance of the delivered software. Under normal circumstances, user will feel co- responsible for the project (as they are).
Consequences?
Although the benefits are immediate, this approach has some consequences as well:
- Regular presence. Business users are consulted at a regular basis. The project functions optimally when business users can spend time with the team a number of times per week. It is best to regulate this during the iterations. It needs to be said that, although it seems counterproductive, this approach is actually very time-effective when compared to more traditional approaches where the users are needed full-time for a longer period when the development, and testing for the whole project is completed.
- Co-responsible. Business users are co-responsible for the project. This means they need to be mandated to take decisions on a daily basis, for instance about layout or fields on forms, or about the order in which steps in a business process should be executed.
In general, the notion for this responsibility with the business users grows as the project progresses.