Love at first sight
I always look forward to Larry O’Brien’s list of Jolt Award finalists and winners. Over the years I have had a lot of success buying books or products that made this list.
This year I’ve obtained several books on the finalists lists and one software product - stpBA Storyboarding. It is a very unique product that ties into MS Visio to produce some great software requirements documents. As a matter of fact this tool - even though I have not fully used it in production - has already made a huge difference in a project.
One of the projects I am currently dealing with is for a large international bank. We are converting a number of old-school client-server apps to Winforms and .NET. During some of our initial JAD sessions the customers representatives expressed that they have had some bad experiences with consulting companies who did not produce good requirements docs and consequently the customer was interested in monitoring the development effort more closely. “Ideally “ said the manager ” we would like developers on-site at our Los Angeles office” .
Well. that’s a problem for me, because our business model is different from that approach. My team is dispersed across the US.
In a moment of inspiration I asked ” If I can put your concerns about the requirements to rest, will you feel better about off-site development?”. The answer was “Yes”.
I promptly ran my brand spanking new install of stpBA Storyboarding and walked the customer through the demo specs that ship with the product. The short demo was a resounding success. The customer was especially impressed with the comprehensive docs that could be produced at the end of the session with a single button click.
I will come back to this particular post in the near future when we go through the actual requirements definition process and will provide an in-depth review. But for now its safe to say this was love at first sight. For me…. for the customer… and for stpBA Storyboarding because the product won the Jolt Award.
I can’t wait to tell you more about its usage.
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