So, I’ve made it to almost 6 weeks of the apprenticeship here at Pernix. I’ve gotta say, it’s been quite an awesome experience in lots of aspects, such as technical knowledge, real-life experience and learning about the process of creating a new project.
For this post, I’m going to make an emphasis on the last point, because I was involved in the requirements recopilation for a project the business is about to start. I was first approached by the coordinator of Pernix and asked me if I knew what Inception Workshops were. I answered no, I didn’t know what they were, honestly, so he told me he was going to send me an email with a book about it. But that wasn’t everything. He then told me that a friend of his needed help with a new idea he had, and that me and another colleague were going to receive him and recopilate all the requirements by making an inception workshop. The coordinator told me that this meeting would take place in two days and that it would be very important for me to have the book read by then.
I was a bit anxious because I couldn’t just go to the inception without knowing what it was about and because, unfortunately, I have never been much of a reader, but that’s something I’ve been trying to fix. Reading is great, it opens your mind to lots of new and different things and it also helps you relax and forget about other things. But that’s not really the point here. Sorry for that. The point is that I had to read a book in less than two days and I thought it was a huge book. When I sat down and started reading, I noticed it wasn’t very long and the best thing was, I got really interested. Inception workshops are the “agile way” of recopilating requirements for new projects, but it goes a little bit further than that.
Generally, requirements recopilation is done with a couple of analysts and the stakeholders that need the software. During Inception Workshops, the effort goes a little bit longer since both parties get together in a special environment and the gathering is made with both analysts and developers from the development team and stakeholders and users of the contracting team. Why is this helpful and better than the traditional way? Because much more points of view are taken into consideration, specially the user point of view, and mostly because it helps all of the involved people determine the why of the project.
To explain what these workshops are about, I’ll be using Enrique Comba’s book about Inception workshops as reference. They are a set of acitivities designed to help the users and stakeholders define the idea better (specially if they don’t have it 100% clear) and to also shape it to be a much more realistic one by taking into consideration the developers’ point of view and budget restrictions. They’re also useful to make the contracting and development team bond, to help the developer team decide if it’s a good idea to embark into the project and to determine difficulties the project may have.
A complete Inception Workshop consists of two full days filled with activities for the people involved in the project, but the actual duration of the workshop may vary. Very long projects may require the inception to be a little bit longer, while small projects probably need less than two days.
As I mentioned before, Inception Workshops are composed of activities. But before I get into that topic, I’ll explain a little bit about factors that may seem a bit irrelevant, but that have actually a big impact on the quality of the inception.
The first factor is the place. It should be large enough for participants to fit easily without crowding the place. The idea of a good place is for people to be comfortable enough to be concentrated and creative. If the place is small and it gets crowded, people may get annoyed without enough space, thus limiting their productivity and creative outcome. Another aspect of the place is the lightning. Comba says that if the room has no natural light, chances are people will get tired quicker. Something else, and this caught my attention a lot when I read it, is the height of the ceiling. The kind of ceiling is determined by whatever is needed. If people need to concentrate, it’s better for a small ceiling, but if people need to be creative, it’s better to have a high ceiling or going outdoors if possible. There’s a lot more aspects to take into consideration such as how to use the walls of the room, how to sit the team, among others.
The second factor is the moderator or facilitator of the inception. A big group of people hardly will control itself, so someone is needed to moderate and control the activity. This means he or she holds lots of responsibility for making the inception workshop successful. This person must not express his point of view towards the project to the team, he must set an environment where everyone can share their thoughts and to control those people who talk too much. Another aspect he’s responsible of, is explaining the activities to the group and he must control time so the workshop doesn’t take much longer than what it was expected to last.
Now that these two aspects are clear, I can now explain what activities inceptions tend to have. Why did I write tend instead of must? Because they may vary. Not all inceptions must be the same or follow the same flow. Some activities can be left out in order to focus more on other activities that are considered more relevant or to shorten the time of the inception.
Comba lists the typical inception workshop as follows:
Day One
Who is in the room? 30 minutes
The Rules of the Game 30 minutes
Why are we here? 15 minutes
Create an Elevator Pitch 20 minutes
Create a Product Box 1 hour
Create a Not list 40 minutes
Meet your Community 1 hour
What keeps you awake at night 2 hours
Day Two
Show the solution 4 hours
What’s going to give 1 hour
What’s going to take 1 hour
Wrap up 15 minutes
That’s a lot of activities, right? I thought so the first time I saw it, but they all have a purpose and help everyone understanding everything better. You will see the logic of everything and see why they’re all necessary by getting into details for every one of them.
Who is in the room
This activity is almost self-explanatory. It’s the first activity and every person takes some time to introduce themselves. You could take different approaches for this activity, but I liked a lot the way Comba explains it in his book. He recommends that everyone should get together in pairs. Then, each person has to interview his pair to get his name, his contact information, his likes, dislikes and then draw a picture of the other person. They should write all of this down in a piece of paper. After everyone is done interviewing, they should present to the rest of the group the person they interviewed. When the presentations are over, take all of the papers and post them on the wall so everyone can see them.
Rules of the game
The purpose of this activity is to create a set of rules in order for the team to follow them and be more creative. Please note that this activity is not for the moderator to present the rules, on the contrary. The whole idea is for the entire team to define the rules. This is because they’re more prone to follow them when they created and agreed to them. So, to define them, Comba recommends making groups of four, so they can discuss the rules between themselves and then the whole group discusses them and votes on them. The facilitator can also help recommend rules based on his or her experience.
Why are we here?
As I mentioned before, one of the advantages of making an Inception Workshop is to get a better insight on the why of the project. The poing of this activity is that the customer explains the idea or the global vision of the project. It’s advised to have a Questions & Answers time after the explanation.
Elevator pitch
When I first saw the name of this activity I said to myself: “What is an elevator pitch?” Since I’m not a native english speaker, I tried to translate the term, but the literal translation made no sense whatsoever. Even now I can’t think of an accurate translation for this. So, what is an elevator pitch? An elevator pitch is a very quick but informative enough speech (one that you would give on an elevator trip) about the project. It now makes sense, right?
In order to make the perfect elevator pitch for your project, start by handing a template of how the elevator pitch should be. Comba’s template is the following:
For ... target customer
who ... statement of need/opportunity
the ... product name
is a ... product category
that ... key benefit, compelling reason to buy.
Unlike ... primary competitive alternative.
our product ... statement of primary differentiation
Tell the group to make groups of 4 and then tell them to create their version of the elevator pitch. When everyone is done, every group should present their version of the pitch to the rest of the group and then discuss each one’s strong and weak points. After this, the entire group should create the final elevator pitch.
Design a product box
In this activity, the group is going to create a product box for the product, a slogan and some benefits, in groups of no more than four. Once they’re done, everyone has to present their version to the group. After this, discuss the findings of the activity. This activity helps the group to highlight the benefits of the project or idea.
Create a NOT list
This a fundamental activity. When someone has a new idea, it’s very easy to start adding and adding features. This is not only unrealistic, but the scope gets out of hands. This activity focuses on analyzing all of these ideas and features and defining whether they’re in or out of the scope of the final project. A good approach to do this is by pasting post-its with the feature in a wall space that indicate if they’re in or out of the scope. Then you should discuss the findings and talk about how they change the direction of the project.
Meet your community
When creating a new project, lots of people will be involved, directly or indirectly. Knowing who these people are, how they get affected and how could they impact the project is crucial to achieve success in the project. This activity is about creating user persona documents that describe the characteristics of those people involved. This is achieved again in groups, and the groups should describe the people’s needs and desires of the community involved in the project or idea. Once this is done, they should present it to the rest of the group and then discuss the findings.
What keeps you up at night
It is no secret that every project or new idea has risks. We all know they’re always there, but sometimes don’t want to talk about it. Nevertheless, that’s something necessary and important to talk about and discuss. In this activity every person is going to write down their fears in a piece of paper or post-its, in order to paste them in the wall later. Once everyone is done, discuss about the fears the group has. It’s important to talk about their impact, their importance and how to mitigate or avoid that problem.
Show the solution
This is one big activity, that is split into 4 activities. The first one is Give your app some personality. This is a fun activity because the group is going to treat the project as if it were a person. Will the app look crazy and colorful like a clown or will it be simple and elegant? In here you’ll define the most important attributes of the project or application that characterize it.
The other activity is Let’s make it flow. In here the whole group is going to define how will the users interact with the app (application flow and not screen designs). For this task, group’s won’t be made and everyone is going to participate on deciding the flow.
The next activity is Wireframing. In this activity the group is going to create sketches for some of the screens of the application. This should be made in pairs.
The last activity is Story mapping. For this activity the group is going to define some features they envision for the product. Then, these features will be mapped to the flow and see how they relate to each other. Once all features are defined, the group will define the order of implementation of the stories in a story map.
What’s going to give
Every project requires dedication and compromise. In this activity, the group makes sure that everyone involved is on board for the project and all the responsibility that it implies. For this, the group is going to define which constraints (scope, budget, time, ease of use, quality) are more important from 1 to 5.
What’s going to take
At this stage, the inception is almost over, but there are still some loose ends to tie. These are: the developing team, the decision-maker, the price and the time it will take to develop the project. The group will discuss and decide all of this together.
Wrap up
This is a summary of everything that happened in the inception, everything you discussed and decided together. Also it’s a great moment to explain the group what is going to happen next.
My experience
As you saw, Inception Workshops are pretty extensive and they look very cool. The set of activities really helps the project stakeholders and developers to get a clearer view of the project, thus making a better product and achieving better results. Even though it’s almost impossible to make an inception workshop for every project, some approaches can be used for smaller gatherings with new clients.
My experience was exactly that. I didn’t went to a big two-day inception workshop, but we made a small one with some essential actvities shown here. It was the first time I get involved into a real-life software project and I was really happy about that. My career choice emphasizes in this kind of activities rather than actual development, so it was a very important experience for my professional carreer. In my opinion, I think I did good during the workshop, and it helped both us (developing team) and customer to understand the idea better and to define the scope of the project. On top of that, the idea is really innovative and very helpful for lots of people. I have very high expectations of this project and I know that the team will make it an amazing success.
Another thing I liked about this topic, is that if you sit down and analyze day one as shown in this post, it has almost nothing to do with computers directly. This means that those activities can be used for almost every project of any kind. Doing that would help the group to get a clearer picture of the idea and the project and the technical activities for that area can be done easier.
If you liked this post and got interested into the Inception Workshops, I really recommend buying Enrique Comba’s book Inceptions Starting a Software Project. You can find it here. It’s definitely worth the money.
I’m going to end this post with this quote about project management that relates to the workshops. By not making a workshop, a development team might not understand the idea clearly and that may lead to failure.
No matter how good the team or how efficient the methodology, if we’re not solving the right problem, the project fails.
Woody Williams
From College To Life 