About Expectations
Why Expectations?
If you understand this classic joke – you get the point
“Expectations” is about to spoil this great joke. Sorry, but it’s for all the best reasons.
“Expectations” is a holistic approach to generate the best input to the solution. We have packed the best from requirements engineering, testing, risks and configuration management, to ensure that the evolvement of expectations to the solution is optimised to serve all stakeholders involved .
We have done that, because interviews with 10.000+ development professionals has made it painfully clear to us, that the current way of communicating between all stakeholders has failed. Despite the fact that many good methods has been proposed.
We have seen:
– That different roles need different competences. Thats why “Expectations” is role based competence development.
– A common framework for understanding is required! That’s why “Expectations” is a holistic approach across classic disciplines with a strict defined terminology.
– No one size fits all! That’s why Expectaions” is driven by the benefit you will achieve and then enabling you to make the best choice of methods and practices.
– Splitting up the responsibilities in requirements, risk and test destroys the “flow”! That’s why “Expectations” support the “flow” (from e.g. a need is expressed and until it is validated that the solutions is supporting it).
– When information is spread around, it is not used! That’s why “ExpectationsWintroduce a corporate memory.
– When stakeholders don’t recognize the full complexity, they care only about their own problem! That’s why “Expectations” ………..
– The Product Owner have to be superman! That’s why “Expectations” is a corporate competence.
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Why did the industry fail?
While “Expectations” claims to solve a problem that all have experienced, we better be shure why it was not wolved before!
Short answer: Underestimated complexity!
Communication is surprisingly difficult among the stakeholders.
Everyone feel that their perspective is obvious
No-one feels really understood
Root cause: Misunderstandings, small but many.
Add to this:
- There are many stakeholders
- They have very different background
- They have different motivations
- The key stakeholders are those that are the least “accessible“
- New Technology opportunities appears fast
- Sometimes faster than a project can react to them
- Tools to support the communication has been very poor
Suddenly it seems reasonably to believe that poor communication on a very complex matter is constantly leading to misunderstandings that jeopardize development projects.
Failed strategies: Individual training in narrow disciplines.
The last 3 decades we have seen a lot of effort going to test/risk/requirements training to individuals, but it has hardly improved the industry’s performance. The market for these individual trainings is declining for good reasons, – because it is a teams game. The sports analogy is appropriate. Even the best trained individuals cannot make up for a poor team performance and if they on top of it all are to narrow specialized, no one should expect a high performing team.
“Expectations” is covering the three steps to coporate competence
1: Training of all the basic competences required
2: Design of the company specific practice and tool design
3: The company specific training to individuals.
And “Expectations” is a holistic approach to requirements engineering, testing, risk management and configuration management.
That is how we should respect the complexity, handle it, avoid the misunderstandings. Then you can ambitiously go for the business opportunities, and expect reliable results.
The journey
Expectation engineering is a corporate competence.
Little will the best individual trained employees help, if the company does not support their professionalism.
Little will the best designed and tool supported practices do, if the employees dont know how to use them.
But when skilled professionals are supported by well designed processes with state of the art tool support, thats when the quantum leap in performance is experienced. That is expectation engineering. That is a journey. And it goes like this:
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- Step 1 is training of generic competences.
- Step 2 is to define the optimal way for your organization to perform Expectations Engineering.
- Step 3 is to ensure that all relevant employees are capable of using Expectations Engineering to create the best possible input to those who are going to make the solution.
