All right, welcome everyone People still feeling feeling seem to be a thriving so Or waiting for them. I'm gonna Tell a bit of a metaphor or what I've been talking about so today. I'll be talking about results only web investments and I did a rehearse this session with my brother and he he was confused by a word. I used called learning and To explain it to him I used I used something else on TV recently I watched a show called extreme engineering you may be familiar with it and in one episode they explained how they built a train tunnel under the Swiss Alps and The project is extremely like budgeted and set in time and scope and so on there are severe penalties for delays and They they halfway through they realized that the next section of mountain is not solid rock It's penetrated by water so they need to replot the entire course and That was something they couldn't know at the outset of a project and being able to Work with that and work with the fact that you learn the terrain as you go is Isn't it's a good example of learning and he thought it was such a good except metaphor that it made it all clear to him. So There you go. That's learning All right Looks like it's time to start All right My name is your passion Mostly you may know me from node one. I was one of the founders in 2008 I left not one last year and right now. I'm working with it's fate. It's a company. I found it Here are my contact details if you want to follow me on Twitter or something Straight it's a company that works with the lean startup methods Essentially, what we do is that if you have an idea whether you are working for a big company or you're an entrepreneur And you need someone to turn that idea into a product To find out market fit or find out its viability as a real product You can talk to us and we're gonna prototype it on Drupal among other things and After you have to after that period you have a much better understanding if your product actually has a chance or actually is viable That's what we do It's so it's not a web agency, but it's still a lot of Drupal Which means I get to go to events like this which I love so all right. Let's get started 16 percent 16 percent of all web products are considered complete successes. I Would like to add that only 16 percent are considered successes As a how much is 16 percent? Well It would be like one out of six person will check in one of the check bears awesome, right? If it's something we learned this week that check bears great. I mean, I don't know many of you to join us at the beer garden last night, but and As for cars like imagine five out of six cars crashed as a rule I mean who would buy a car or look at pets. I mean five or six pets would be abandoned, you know sad puppy And I think the reason for this is very simple It's a quote by theater Levitt and he was a marketing professor at Harvard It might still be it might still be but he would say to students that nobody wants a fourth-inch drill What he wants a fourth-inch hole? Customers buy benefits. They buy they buy what they buy the impact of what you do for them But most of our products they they look like this the requirements shoot and It controls everything the order of checkboxes where the buttons go and everything but the questions we need to ask is does Requirements it say who the people we need to involve and engage are no it doesn't Does it say what the buyer expects the return to be of the project and Doesn't say why the buyer is spending resources in mind of this project in the first place. No, no, it doesn't so so I mean the crime sheet is is more often than not is is a shopping list in the words of Gorka Osage I will be quoting more of later You may be familiar with some of his some of his books this Way of doing requirements is like This you go to the hardware store you want to drill and the salesperson what this is what it gives you This is the reptile guts gives you like oh, you know the motor, you know in the battery and everything you like like does it make a hole? That's what you're interested in So how can we build something that brings value to customers by only focusing on whether to fulfill the requirements to the letter I Don't think we can So When you leave here, we'll be leaving here with a with a way to shift the focus from how to fulfill requirements to the letter to a way To work with or into what's results and the result will be happy customers and happier teams So we need to emphasize investment results and not custom requirements so to illustrate Let's have a poll I'm gonna make I'm gonna ask some questions now about your last project And I want you to raise your hands if you agree with them if they are true So all right first question Did everyone involved in your last project understand what the intended business results of the project were? Not many hands here now. Oh one two. Okay. The world isn't totally dark. Okay, that's Mattias But he knows this stuff really well already, so Was everyone buyer and seller able to communicate clearly and transparently about the risks and problems that occurred Okay, Mattias again, I maybe have to invite you up on stage here All right, did everyone feel that the product was something they could be proud of in terms of achievement quality and innovation Okay, that's better. That's good. That's good. We're getting somewhere Did everyone involved understand the definition of a successful project and how success was measured? All right That's Mike, but you work for ThoughtWorks. So like you guys are ahead of the game anyway So in the end, did the customer get what they needed to address an actual business problem or opportunity? A few has. Okay. That's a 16 percent. Good statistics are true at least sometimes so One to me zero to Mark Twain All right, so let me tell you a story and this is probably a story you recognize and you're probably familiar with in more ways than one I'm gonna tell you a story about widget code and They need a website because they want to get into e-commerce and They find out that many of the customers would prefer to buy online if they could This is Susan she's the marketing director and She knows that the she knows that the goal is to She wants to find the visitors to e-commerce and she also wants to understand the customers better because she's been reading a lot about you know social media and social networks and Facebook and and Like not just one channel communication and everything like big all the latest buzz So what she does she proposes this to the rest of the management team and They have their staff for money now so she tried to keep the you know keep the budget low You know me it is a cost like you don't want to like this is expensive You know and they don't have to have it, but it's still it's it's it's not something they you know really can afford right now So let's let's keep the cost low So she reaches researchers a lot of competitive websites and she also involves the IT guy Mark and he used to procure software and hardware for this company because he's used to reading requirements list and and producing requirements list So marks look at the companies for ideas and people in the company find out about this project And it's in the known you know one suggestions everyone the company basically emails mark and Susan with their ideas So what should be there and the result is a big pile of requirements? Mark thinks they're on structure, but Susan says no they'll be fine You know the beaters here they've seen this before they can sort it out and the design and function requirements are all mixed and But they feel like okay, so we have the function perspective that mark brought and the more design perspective or more the Maybe more emotional perspective the system brought. Okay, so let's let's let's involve a mock-up designer That just makes a mock-up in Photoshop So they do that too and They send it out and They get a lot of phone calls and emails because these requirements were far from clear a lot of these was Ambiguous and it's really hard to compare the bids too because Marcus Susan first of all They're not formally trained in bids and they're not formally trained in they don't have any time a lot of for this work So in the end they end up going with the cheapest bidder Now the thing is even this bit was a bit higher than they had set the budget to so they make a deal They say that you get to feature this project and with an exclusive interview interview with our CEO After the project is completed in return a week at 10% discount and it's a new agency and they need the publicity You know so they like they agree they agree to it so they agreed to run the project with a With a 10% smaller budget than they actually had anticipated Now widget code they want to make sure that stuff could live to live online on time So they set up milestones. They tie the milestones to scope and they tie them to dates The reason for this is because they need to involve people in organization to fill in content So they don't really care about what the what the structure of project is and won't care about how ties in the organization itself And these are fixed and they also add a pen on to class to make really sure the bidder won't screw up this time But Things that seemed easy when they were planning seem out turn out be much harder and their requirements they're not complete they're in conflict and They need more information. The problem is that Susan mark are not the ones with information the person who is it's not available at this time so what happens well working days turn into working nights and The agency is pretty inflexible at this point because they have already First of all, they give them a really low bid and then they actually accept it a discount of 10% So now even less willing because the change might mean that they're gonna run even more in the red They all ordered the running in the red, but they might even run even more red So they're really strict on following this the waterfall approach to accept it And what happens well the project gets finished and on time but the team is Exhausted after having worked the night and their project manager from the agency desires to you know He goes and made the glee. This was just too much for him And the day comes and it looks six months later and the figures are not impressive There's no hockey stick So What went wrong? Well, let's look at the scoreboard here On the plus side the requirements were filled to the letter But the team worked the crazy the seller made a loss and the buyer didn't see the results. They were hoping for it. So How do you end up here? Well, let's analyze this project and break it down into its constituent part So probably it's usually start with a with a need phase because some identifies a need and the first mistake they made here was that they did not communicate to the business goals to the team and and Tech experts if they don't know that business goals They cannot offer better solutions the management team thought they need a website But it might have been something else and if they had been more transparent but business goals The agency may it might have been able to offer other solutions or suggest other solutions And the team was not aware of the business goals and that meant that they could not react to unforeseen problems in a way the further those business goals and this is something that we've seen in many cases and those of you that studied management a bit might know about something called commanders intent and There are cases for example in Iraq where they see the tankers are much able to react to unforeseen consequence If they know the reasons for their commanders Orders or what they are set out to do and Also and finally The product was given a too small budget and but the reason for that is very simple No one ever talked about the business return or the or the investment perspective was so seen as a cost So the price becomes cost-driven and that caused a lot of problems. That's what we should was seen to see soon All right So once the need was done They started to compile the requirements in order to get the get a good agency to work for them Requirements were a shopping list They lacked focus and forethought I mean they focused on the exciting new stuff and the stuff that was easy to define not the stuff that was Hard to achieve or hard to because you know this stuff that is hard to define is usually stuff that that you know That this brings most value Putting together this presentation. I was a lot of putting a lot of thoughts together in such a format So I could communicate my ideas to you that was the hard part making the presentation itself the slides and everything That's the easy part And the requirements they were not related to the business goals. They were half asset, you know, like just a collection of them and They were also skewed towards what was easily defined for someone like mark And the mock-up just shifted the focus to even more relevant aspects. So finally Well, the next step is finally next step is bidding. So finding the right agency Well bidding work would be like window shopping, you know, you just looked around what could they offer was a price tag and The local requirements made it very easy for the agencies to make good beds and the discount even forced a winning bidder to be inflexible later on In bidding the buyer tends to focus on what's easy to compare not sorts of relevant to compare and bidding is about getting the lowest price And it's a very dependent on software estimates and all of you that's been to my, you know early estimates that you know that estimation is hard if not near impossible and This entire situation leads to sort of knife to throat mentality for the agency involved And that makes it That makes hard for them to be flexible later on the project next step is the execution of the project and Here there was a very central theme of a need for control from the from the buyer Controlled under my trust learning and be able to react to the unseen and foreseen The scope based milestones They didn't help the business goals being achieved and the scope is mustn't are the result of decided to control and Decide to control comes out of fear So they come up with this form of the milestones in order to create a sense of security The problem is that control limits learning and adaptability and as we shall see in a project that is not entirely completely definable needs to be able needs to be adaptable and all this All of these together create a very bad relationship between buyer and seller and It's our relationship and under my trust and trust is a known factor for success in project trust between Executive sponsors project manager and team. All right. So what happened? What was the verdict then when they finally saw the results? Well The product fulfilled the shopping list, but we didn't see the the results were hoping for it We didn't see the hockey stick. We didn't see the conversion rate. They were hoping to see and The team was not aware of the business goals. Like I said, and it was built. It was built to order, but they failed to materialize and And this is not a rare case I mean just looking at some basic statistics companies aren't among top 25% technology users in those three out of ten projects failed on average and What are the causes well? lack of user input and involvement in our case the collection requirements wasn't structured and there was no user research done early on So they need it even have an upfront understanding of who working on and the upfront understanding was limited in scope and limited in Relevance so no way Incomplete requirements Did we did code the systematic collection requirements? No, they didn't It did link to crime into the goals. No because the goals were not communicated They were not even mentioned. There was someone had a hope that this would lead to something but it was never verbalized and Was the agent able to offer advice or recommendations or insight or Used a collective wisdom to improve the requirements. No way And the expectations were just through the roof they were not communicated and The budget was more focused on trying to keep the cost down rather than trying to you know, achieve the expectations that we're hoping to see so and Even when products are successful 70% of them are over budget over time or defective in function upon completion Which means they're gonna have to need additional work just a function So my question to you is is this sustainable for you whether you're a buyer or seller for your customers or for your business I don't think it is so I have a I have an idea for you here What if we inverted the scoreboard? What if instead of the other way around we just flip it? So the team worked in an effective pace The seller makes a profit The buyer sees the result they're hoping for and the requirements are not fulfilled to the letter think about that one so We need to change how we view project and I am proposing a a four-fold change here and the change consists of four things it consists of Viewing the results If either the project has intended to create results and then when I say results I mean this but I mean tangible business value being created There's agreement on what success is and how it's measured The view the product is viewed as an investment and that's follows naturally if you view the project as we're generating again Then you can actually value then you can actually balance the investment in return in relation to that And finally the project is characterized by learning on all parties We can't foresee the future and we accept that and This change has some really amazing consequences First of all, it creates trust the parties Expect each other to act and deliver to the best of ability. There's no mistrust between them There's no thinking I remember I had I was back when I was a freelancer talked to one customer And he said like well There's no point of me telling me you how much money I have because you're just gonna try and sort of get away with a Few hours possible I'm gonna just gonna try and get as much work of you out as possible And this is the what people approach these projects and this is what this is the fear-based approach to project management gain The broadest projects done on budget and both parties gain I mean the the the buyer gets value and the seller actually makes a profit of it There's respect there's respect for the mutual experience there's respect for the subject area the business area experience that the buyer provides and The expertise in the actual the application that the seller provides There's purpose Everyone feels this project is worth doing. It's not a waste There's some value just in doing this and there's a sense of value and achievement being proud or something you made something They can put on your resume later or putting your company, you know among your case files So if the world was like that like what would it be like so let's head back to our analysis here and see well Started starting at need here The business goals would be communicated from day one The project budget would be based on the expected return With a potential risk of failure taking into account. So say we see a return of X amount over three years, then maybe we're gonna invest a third of X amount In an initial phase and see what the results are And there's a there are measurable success criteria That everyone involved with it are aware of and also have I mean they bought into them They they believe they're possible and they believe they are there are realistic challenge The requirements are focused sufficient high-level and relevant to the success criteria And the success approach will be judged on the success criteria not on something else And there's understanding that the requirements are just an initial understanding. There's gonna be learning going on. There's gonna be We're gonna understand more as we go and there is an effort to make use of research and a strategic analysis and the project is going to be driven by a strategic roadmap and Requirements are not used to control the project instead It's replaced by ongoing communication so It's a whole different the the project is is Characterized by a whole different kind of culture and feel the bidding process works differently focus on just getting the lowest price is folks by wish to find the company with best of belt to deliver this and Software estimates on the service input for the first stage and the agency is actively involved in what they can provide And I can show you a bit how that could actually happen how you can create the kind of bidding process But maybe the the the biggest difference might be actually be in the execution phase So it's interesting. It's understood. There's gonna be learning things might be more difficult to ease them with first thought and There's constant learning and some requirements are built as prototypes and they're tested We build a subset of something or a simpler version to see if it works And that might produce the value. We're hoping for you might have to build this entire complete blog with those bells and whistles and everything and Communication and trust are replacing the need to control and Keyword here is that is that how do we establish trust in project? Well, that's by always showing results and I'm not so much saying that the results have to be exacted to requirements But something that takes us close to the goal The projects that have really low amounts of trust are the ones where I've been going months and months and you haven't seen anything tangible in just a lot of talk and This kind of flexibility gonna create a high degree of It's gonna create high morale and the creative atmosphere because people want to be autonomous and want to be trusted and we trust to solve Problems according to their mind. I want to be market-managed Finally the evaluation is based on the business goals the team understood why the website was being built and designed a certain way and everyone involved know what the partners goals were and Everyone is also eager to see those goals being materialists because everyone bought into those goals They didn't just go there build a website and just you know ran off, you know, they actually they were part of discussions led there So this this might sound, you know too good to be true to some of you, but You might ask why did all these ideas come from like did it just did it just make them up? No, in fact, I didn't you know, they're all out there and this is this this is just a combination of agile which I assume many of you are working with and Sort of called impact mapping and effect mapping So let's go through those real briefly The agile methods are more like a family and some of them are concerned projects higher scope and some are practices like extreme programming and Even though we can trace back the ideas and agile back to lean or lean production in the 40s Toyota model and everything They really came into popularity, you know in the mid 90s and the and the recent result of This way of working is is is lean startup which combines scrum and Camden and lean methodology Do they work well an early study of agile product management showed ten to twenty percent improvements in revenues Qualtten cycle time in fifty four percent reductions in costs that means you get you get twenty percent more for half the price. It's pretty good, huh and Even if we and and going back to see how successful well according to standards group According to 2011 report. They are three times more successful agile product But you might say well agile isn't you know, actually isn't right, you know for everything and everyone Yeah, I can I can agree with that and There's something called the the Ralph Stacey's complexity matrix and This is a great way to map out projects and and where they line up here So on the top right we see the complex the unknown territory and on the bottom we see the simple The simple section and Those of you that remember my talk on our estimates know that I talked about reducing features into something you've done before We're trying to map it into something you've done before That effort is completely about bringing something that's completely known It's something that's unknown you take it bring it from the center of this graph to the bottom left The advantage of that is that you can actually apply a more waterfall Approach because if you're forced to apply waterfall You're gonna try and make the best of situation and that is to try and more waterfall water-foliify what you've done and So just like this We can see that We can see that There are cases where waterfall works And they might be if you work with an existing software with it with a basically limited number of use cases And you've done the same thing a thousand times over then waterfall might be a great idea But in the world of Drupal my experience is that agile is best because every project presents a new challenge in a new way to solve a problem So what is impact mapping? Oh impact mapping is it's not that heard of but I'm sure this is going to be really popular really soon Impact mapping brings usability and speed to proven product and project management strategies helping to fit better into modern software delivery Constrange and at the same time applying some great ideas from other industries to software delivery What does it mean? Well, it means that it facilitates strategic planning You get a big picture view where you go from there from the goals to the deals to the details of the implementation and It facilitates learning the learning I talked about gets easier if you work this way And it helps us maintain a roadmap over the course of the project and It represents a deliver scope that makes sense to everyone you can actually have the executive sponsor You can even have the CEO of the company and the development team in the same room and they can do the same thing and they understand It makes sense imagine that Devs speaking to people in gray suits. Come on All right, so how does it look well The impact map is a visualization of scope and underlying assumptions and it's quite a collaborative like I said you know what the guy's in t-shirts and the guy is in suits and It goes from the business goals and how it and into deliverables and some of you might have been to session I called delivering best business how to deliver business value and this is something I talked about earlier versions of this Coco has put this into a consistent model There's there's a book that you can download and read and he has a there's a workflow ready. You could just apply The ideas are are similar though And this is an extreme powerful way to make sense of a of a strategic driven road map and What it does is that it looks at looks at the business goals Then we look at the people that we need to involve in order to achieve those business goals We'll look at what kind of impact they can make and what we have to do for them to make that impact The effect map is similar. The fact is that impact maps have taken a lot of influence from effect maps Originally go you could call them called called his maps impact effect maps But then the creators of effect mess felt that now what this is not really what we're doing, you know, like you're just confusing people so but I think you need both and Effect maps they are based on user research. They help you This they help you design for the end users and you get a different deliverables out of these and The impact maps gives you the city high road map to may help you make a prioritization decisions over the course of the project Like I said, I think it's good to learn about both So if you look at the effect map, for example, we go from the business goal Turn into user group group user need and a feature and this stuff will get out of this or stuff like personas wireframes and prototypes which allows us to do usability testing even before we build stuff the The impact map helps us translate our goals into actors impacts and and deliverables Deliverables aren't just just features in the website on the software. They can be manual tasks. They can be they can be marketing campaigns They can be a they can be a series of different things And the really interesting thing here is as you can see the words build measure learn This is the this is the lean startup cycle You build something you measure what works when you learn and then you do a so-called pivot This method is extremely powerful If you're just if you just if you don't really have a good idea who your market is and you just don't validate your assumptions And the assumptions are falling out of this module by themselves You can in a structured way validate your assumptions how they help you achieve your goals but you might not be convinced anyway despite all this overwhelming evidence and and One kind of argument hard is that but without price bidding and sellers have no incentive to be cost effective Well price must of course be a factor. I mean, well, it's a market economy and and you know supply and demand but We have to see the price in relation to the impact it creates and a low price always comes at a cost So there's always cost involved So just just have a bit of more multidimensional view what what price means and They buy it but by needs a set of clear milestones other where the product will fail Well, I agree that we need to have clear milestones But but they should be pretty should be tied to the business course not to not to a scope We defined months ago because it's not relevant anymore and they're just gonna be a paper product. They have no value and It needs to be trust and everyone needs to have buy into the business goals You can't just have as bad business goals that the team that don't believe in don't live realistic or understand the rationale and They need to allow learning to happen. You can't put you can't put them in the way of working in an adaptive way Another argument is customers don't always know what the business needs goals are and that's that's absolutely true And that's why we need to help them do that. That's why the method. I'm gonna show next It's extremely good at helping them identify and this is often like an eye-opener for many customers and If you can't apply the five apply they can if you can't find a business goes away You can apply the five wise The five wise method might be familiar with that. Yes. Why I'm gonna give a reason why give a reason you keep asking to get to the money and You need to find something that clearly shows that the same money earn money or protect money. That's usually what you have there That's why that's where the business. That's where the money is and Even when the customers don't have an existing problem business opportunity You can approach customers in a field of it or field of branch where you think that you know What kind of problems they have and you can foresee them and help them solve problems that that's a sales method So depending on where you are you can actually do this you can do this pitch differently depending on what kind of situation you are So things can be done very differently from how they're often done these days so Let's imagine the world was different. Let's imagine there was a second universe called universe 2 and there is earth 2 it's a nice universe and in the nice universe There is a much nicer story taking place There's a widget code in this universe, too I did a website and I want to get into e-commerce and They've made the same realization that widget code in universe one have realized, you know that the the customer would prefer to buy online There's a Susan in this universe, too, and she's in charge of the project And she knows that there's a need here to drive traffic to the e-commerce section on the site so she defines goals and She projects earnings and she sets a time span we want to see these things materialized in six months and This informs the budget. I said, okay, we have potential making this much money Okay, that tells us how much it's worth for us to risk trying to create that. That's a that's an informed risk That's an informed risk taking and she gets buy-in from the management team. They like it. It's rational They could they could you know in case it really failed they could even justify it You know to shareholders into the board in case, you know, it's a really big project and They set up measurable times goals type of time frames. They set up smart goals If I'm familiar with With with smart goals smart goals are if you can remember the acronym now I Can't okay, Ram fever They're specific and measurable Attainable realistic and time bound exactly. Okay. Those are the ones How good are acronyms, you know, we can't remember to stand for And they want to achieve this in six months. So they're 10 by time on and she involves Mark the IT guy And they also bring an consultant because you know that bidding and this is it's not the 48 So they decide to keep the coins high level. I mean the goals are very high level so they want requirements reflect that and they interview their They interview their users they they are aware that limited knowledge that they have limited knowledge So they try to learn as much as is irrelevant And they make also make a like I said, they make an impact map the city road map involving all stakeholders So they have the city road map ready They also involve someone to draw wireframes just to get an understanding of how things could hold together And the wireframes are sufficient to detail so they can get a sense of what they're trying to do But not so detailed that they are they're completely locked in So by now they feel they have a basic understanding But you know, they will have to learn a lot during the course of this project And but they're confident with this degree of upfront planning So what they do now is they create a presentation The presentation shows the goals the budget the requirements and what they have learned They try to be as transparent as possible about what the company sees the risks of opportunity zone and how much the company sees the potential make And the ages respond and the ages they make pitches They come and you talk about how they see and how they how they see a division and how what their ideas are how to how to achieve These goals and the solution mark get a lot of good ideas this way They come to think of things that didn't even couldn't didn't think of in the first place And they picked the agency eventually based on the track record and based on these interviews and these pitches and The price in the case is just a factor out of many They just the price tag is important, but it's not the number one Decider the team that they just sees this project would suit an agile workflow really well And the team is the team is it's cross-functional It consists of developers designers and people with marketing skills and they work closer together The project owner and team and Susan are marked to work closer together And they can turn directly to the customer. There's something need to answer The question for need a bit of a question in answer for And the team takes big pride in shipping regularly and that's something that Susan Mark likes that that that builds a sense of trust So they started for the kickoff and Susan is very enthusiastic They mean they love what they do as soon as Mark they believe in their jobs and the team sees that and they're like Wow, I mean get a work with these people like wow and they start to believe sort of share the same visions as Susan Mark have and and The folk there the focus is exercises isn't defining roles expectations and accountability So we're we're not so much time bound down on the requirements now But we still need to see results and people need to know what's expected of them And the clear expectations is another thing that reinforces Susan Mark's trust in in the project And the initial work it takes takes a lot of thinking and it results in in several backlog items And the team then advice them what's what's what's high risk and low risk and how much time it will take Some things are left at the moment because they might be Clear and later. Let me learn more and some things that just worked on right away And that's the thing when you work agile that you understand if your horizon of knowledge moves all the time In one project with we sat down and we and this is one early days in doing our agile So don't judge me now So we sat down and we estimated 250 backlog items in one room and after they realized this is not agile We didn't waterfall by agile So like if you try to estimate your entire backlog epics like the big news stories and all forget it You're not doing agile The team of continuous meetings And they decided some things are gonna be time boxed and tried as a prototype to figure out more This is the hard to to how to how to the hard to implement stuff And the team thinks that they can build them in a much simpler way and it turns out is true But as it happens you can't build everything that is in in the backlog and Some requirements are wrong, but this time in this universe the person who has the knowledge is there is available But they know enough to prioritize So what Susan remark do is that they sit down and try to figure out which requirements contribute most to achieving the business goal and those get implemented and They don't get implemented exactly as they were initially thought but it implemented in such a way that it generates a business goal and Susan market fighting with that and so is the the management team of the company because they're in the loop They know what the team is talking about They know what what's been going on and they understand the rationale and you know that this is the best best decision they can make So the entire back leg doesn't get delivered But that's not a problem as long as you can see the results they're hoping for and everyone is excited to see the result And they had a lot of fun even though it's been it's been had to work a bit hard but they had a good they had a good time all together and It's they launched a website and suddenly appears that there's a small bug that blocks user registration the agency is at a good experience and isn't isn't isn't It's it's eager to to maintain this good relationship They they jump in immediately and fix the bug and their results are hoping for to see in six month They materialize in only four months And we just go super happy and they're considering another project to expand on the existing website. It is built So in universe two, there's a stronger by seller relationship There's better use of money. There's higher success rate And there's higher satisfaction four parties involved. So the question for me to you is Which universe do you want to live in? So The steps we need to take How do we make this happen? Well, first of all, I'm proposing a new dictionary In the new dictionary cost is replaced with the word investment Requirements are replaced with results The plan is replaced by learning And control is replaced by trust these constitute The fourfold the fourfold changes earlier You see the parties intended results There's agreement how to measure success The project is considered an investment and it will be a learning experience for all parties involved But to do that, we need to start with goals first of all before you start thinking about how the website could potentially be built All right, so the customer says we need a better website You ask Why? It's really hard to find out who we are and there's no way to post comments and feel involved. You ask why? They say a big share of our customers want to feel involved. You ask why? We need to reach those customers in order to channel more sales to our site That's a million dollar answer That's where the money is Follow the trail to the money. All right. So we got a money answer. All right. This is something we can work with All right, the next question is how many users do you need? So what we do is that we define a we define a we define a goal We design a design a scale a meter a way to measure it and we can look at the order list on the e-commerce site We set a benchmark. What is it at now? What is the constraint? What is the lowest we can potentially accept but and what is our target? So we're seeing 3000 users per month right now We need at least 5000 to break even and we want to reach we want to reach 7 000. Oh, so five that should say 7 000 By when next question in six months And the customer says we can tolerate higher costs operations costs for a while So we had another milestone that involves that too. So we know that while we're reaching these goals We can also accept higher operational costs for a while But I also want to reduce them as soon as possible. So the next milestone will be about Adding even more customers, but also reducing the operational costs So now we have two milestones like this And then he has a customer. What are these results worth to you? And the customer is good question. This tells me how much I want to budget for this project When the customers decided how much worth them you go on to draw the the impact map So in the center, we put the the goal 7 000 orders per month You do this for each of the each of the each of the goals you have Why are you doing this? Then you focus on the impact the the the actors who will help us then the impacts How will they help us and what do we need to do for them to be able to do that? And you think again, who else could be Help us create this impact Well apart from customers, you could involve friends of customers or repeat customers And they all need different deliverables Customers need to be able to place orders and tell friends And in order to decide which ones you want to go for later we can use like voting So you can write all these in a whiteboard and then people get some golden stars And they can put the stars on the ones they believe to be Most important or lowest hanging fruit and so on And don't get stuck on thinking that these are software some of the things might be done manually It could be like a one-two time thing. It could be sending out an email So don't this is not just about software it involves everyone It's not just something that developers to everyone in the meeting can contribute so Finally, we can see the the concrete deliverables here And Now we have something to look for backlog. We need to implement the former project recommendations and a facebook like share function So these impact maps they visualize deliverables and assumptions and link into business goals And that helps you justify every feature and every deliverable you do in terms of the business effect And The simplified impact map could look like this and the the milestones are to the bottom left and the and the And the actual map to the top right The impact map also allows continuous learning So after about after six prints by the time you worked on on milestone two You expect to start to see the results of milestone one of materializing, you know And then you can look at this the data you have and say are we achieving our key targets? No, we're not What of our assumptions are wrong and then you go back to your map and see what your assumptions are and you validate those so My recommendation to you is the next time you start a project you have to ask a few questions You should ask Why do we want to why why do why do we or why do you want to invest in this project? And that will tell you the the goals the milestones the investment and results Who needs to act for the goals to be achieved and that will tell you who the actors and the personas are How would the actor actors contribute? How would the actions contribute to the goal? That will tell the impacts and the users needs And finally, what will the actors do to create impact? And then you get the deliverables features and the actual backlog Um, if you want to learn more about this, there are two books. I can highly recommend both by Gorka Adzic impact mapping and specification by example and links to the books and More articles are available on my website on that URL. Thank you All right. We got about 10 15 minutes for questions. So there are microphones here if you want to if anyone has any questions um Yeah, I've been kind of coming to the same realization that you need to turn The way projects get started around from how much is this going to cost to how much is this going to generate? And also the the other thing that's kind of crystallizing for me this dribble con is that This works a lot better when the person you're talking to is not a project manager, but a product owner Because imaginer doesn't care how much it's going to generate They have a budget and they have a set of goals to achieve, you know a set of boxes to take whereas a product owner Cares about the result rather than boxes. Do you find that's you've got the same thinking or My talking rubbish. I ideally the product owner is it's it's um It's committed to the business goals So you have you don't have that dichotomy there to deal with ideally Yes, how do we stop the project managers? Uh By You know, but I would say by by making them talk to talk to the stakeholders The people that are investing in the product they're putting the money All right, so that's what happens roles like I hear people say this thing to get it The project manager role is stand stand between Um between the the executive sponsors and the team and no one should talk except through the the project manager And project manager will take the team from the executive sponsors and vice versa and translate that's bullshit. Yeah That doesn't work Okay, so that's what I was going to say how What happens then is that the stakeholders or the you know, the hippos start saying oh, I haven't got time for this I applied the project I think drawing this kind of impact map together. Yeah with the executive sponsors It's a great way to get this question going and make people understand each other and talk in a common language I think it's a great way and involve everyone Uh, and I'm not everyone like like you can't do it effectively more than five seven people, you know But but enough to to establish that kind of trust Cool. Thanks Welcome Hey, Mike Yeah, and the point here is that if you if you focus on trying out a few of these assumptions in the effect map in this form of a What in lean started called a minimum viable product is essentially a subset of features Which is usable but enough to make sure that your assumption about the market about the end users is correct You build students spending more time than you have to to get that out there and see if you see the effect And then you're really hard on yourself. You don't see the results. You're hoping for rethink Uh, so I think I think you can I think you can really easily fail fast working this way because you actually outline your assumption So clearly I would talk about trying to create learning as soon as possible trying to get knowledge as soon as possible because I mean, I mean The word just like Mike said here like the word the word failure is is stigmatized in a lot of countries So I would also avoid that depends on who you're talking to and what what what what kind of what kind of meaning they put into the word But try to talk about learning trying to do to as late as possible to figure out if you're on the right path or not I was a little bit late coming in so I hope you didn't already answer this question but I wondered if you could talk about Convincing internal business structures to use this type of methodology and what would you say to Europe's fixed bid problem Because this is a big departure from that It's it's the exact opposite of that. So what's your one? Sentence pitch to say This is better than that I would use I think I think the the evidence the statistic we have I think it speaks for itself It's just the people haven't connected the dots yet. I haven't seen the project successful are driven by business goals and not by fulfilling requirements That's what I would that's what I would say and I would also invite them to this kind of impact mapping exercise It's an eye-opener for a lot of people. We'll send them a link to your presentation So the other follow-up question to that is then if your you know hierarchy is saying well We only do fixed bid because that's all the market will allow Is there a way to say you're wrong without being a jerk?  I mean stand up for to believe in you know I'm not saying this is easy I know a lot of us are in that kind of situation And the problem is I talked to I was talking to a company operates in in Romania And they have a much lower labor cost than we have in in west europe And if you're operating a local market say you're operating in france and you sell to french companies You cannot you cannot win a fixed price bid with these companies because company would have the labor cost in In india somewhere where where it's much cheaper to live They can essentially they can do a fixed bid and then you can add like a 50 60 percent like safety margin on top of that So you can take a fixed bid with with risk in very little and they can still outbid you in terms of price So we can't work this way We can't compete if when when companies start outsourcing and it started turning to The companies that are based where living costs are cheaper So we need to start to think value-based when talk to a customer value-based consulting That because that puts all of us on an even even playing field Well, um, that's a very good. That's a very good dimension. I didn't mention that but split testing a b testing You create two versions of the website and you try them different different audiences And then you see if see which one actually help you get closer to your goal That's a great way to Determine if you're on the right path and by doing a lot of building these prototypes fast And and and these two versions you can actually get you can really get really far in a very short time I would use that in combination with detail statistics Like not just go analytics, but even have reporting inside the software itself So you can much more easily follow what people are doing and try to understand users behavior And like I said, you can't ask people what they want like that's you know, there's a book by By alan cooper called the inmates around the asylum about the idea they can ask the end users what they want They want you have to observe them and see what they do All right, we got four more minutes Hi as a answer to the one answer for the fixed bit question that we have done in exo is that We split the requirements or the the What we agree with the constant backlog the must have Should have a nice have and then we cave that the that with this amount of money We will guarantee that you will get the must haves all And then the rest if it's possible So in a sense we give them a discount and upper limit And then later when they found that this works for the first project They typically then don't don't talk about the upper limit the next project Yeah Yeah, and then that's a great way that's a great way to prioritize your features And if you can even link the appreciation to how they contribute towards achieving the business goal They set up then it even better Be the voice of contrarians again follow up I find mosco completely unhelpful because everything ends up as must You get 75 of the project as must. Yeah, I know. So I actually just go there's like now and No That's it. There's two priorities. We do now and then we'll we'll see But that might that might be that that might be one of the hardest problems like people They have to have everything now and they can't make any But then they're thinking wrong and you have to educate them.  All right. Thank you so much for coming


The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a drastic increase in the number of malaria cases in Ghana, particularly in the pediatric population. In 2020, there was a decrease in the overall number of malaria cases, however, there was also a higher incidence of cerebral malaria and deaths due to malaria. Additionally, the average length of stay in the hospital was significantly shorter than previous years. This article was authored by Werner and Orish, Kennedy Akake, Sylvester Y. Lockbow, and others.