Project Management 101: Creating the Right Ripple

Simple Talk » Blog Archive » Project Management 101: "Joint Application Development

Essentially, I implemented a Joint Application Development (JAD) methodology. Everyone, from testers to junior developers and interns, participated in every meeting with the client. There was no endless communication string; everyone got their knowledge first hand. The entire development team, the client and anyone who had discrete business knowledge of the problem space, assembled in a room. The goal of these meetings was to:

* Define the problem/s that the solution is expected to solve
* Define each process –think use case – in the system in exact detail
* Define screen layouts
* Walk through each process with screen shots, roll play if necessary – people will often seeing missing steps when this is done repeatedly. If a new step is added start over again
* Define a complete and specific requirements document that the solution will be based on
* Get the client and the whole team to sign-off on the requirements document

By walking through each process and clarifying every detail with the client, and the entire team, we effectively killed scope creep. The client was confident that we understood their needs. In place of vague statements such as “we need a page to create customers”, we had we had sign-off on a clear, concise requirements document of the following form:

The system will maintain a list of customers. A customer record with be defined as:
# Customer ID – System Generated
# First Name
# Last Name
# Full Address (2 address fields, city state and postal code)
# Phone Number
# Email address

Each field with the exception of Customer ID will be fully editable. A drop-down list will be used to select a state. Validations include:
# First Name – required
# Last Name – required
# Postal Code- Required, must be 5 or 9 numbers only
# Phone Number – 9 numbers only
# Email Address – valid format, no anonymous accounts (Yahoo, Hotmail, GMail etc)

You will reach the customer edit page thought a search engine that allows you to search for customers on any combination of the following fields.
# First Name
# Last Name
# Postal Code

…And so on…