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Location : AgileCoachCamp Wiki > CreatingDramaForClarity CreatingDramaForClarity

CreatingDramaForClarity

Roll Call
Instigator was Dennis Britton, Participating were Don Gray, Mary Gorman, and 2 others.
Purpose
I led this session today on using the reenactment of company and usage scenarios to discover, internalize, and problem solve issues with incomplete or incorrect product requirements and business processes.
Reasons for using this practice are the waste caused by a lack of understanding of business systems resulting in interruptions to the development team to add missing or correct wrong features and building the wrong product right, which still results in rejection or resentment by the users.

What happened
The example used was of a boutique coffee shop called Barefoot Coffee
This back story below was given to the participants after which they reenacted basic scenarios like hiring, supplying, training, ordering coffee, a problem scenario where a specialty "Mocha Cayenne" flavor was jamming the espresso machine. Participants had props such as real coffee cups and saucers, a drawn espresso machine on the easel pad and hand held whiteboards with drawing of a chef's hat denoting the trainer and a bag of coffee beans for the supplier.

Participants threw themselves into the roles and dove into very realistic and revealing scenarios.
Learnings
  • I tried to jot down the dialogue for posterity
but missed most of it since it went by so fast and I was facilitating
although Maybe an audio recording would help
or a more dedicated, proficient scribe.
  • Willingness to participate proven: Unfortunately they dove in too deep and I let them spend much time on details of supply management that may not have been relevant. Eventually I requested them to fast forward to the specific problem domain dealing with the jamming machine.
  • Method of achieving completeness proven: hidden process was revealed in the need to supply the trainer with the special cayenne coffee mix before training was possible
  • Thorough problem solving capability proven: Solution to jammed espresso machine was discovered when an espresso mechanic happened to stop by who was able to drill out the holes in the espresso filter. Another solution could have been to have the Cayenne supplier change the grind on the Cayenne and experiment. These discoveries were made much easier, I believe due to the reenactment of the problem.
  • Unable to record experience for later reference.
    • possibly use sequential art, comic strip format showing the scenario
    • there still needs to be a way to record and remind of this experience. I recall Amr Elssamadissy talking about evocative documents. this is what is needed here.
    • I thought about using sequential art, comic life or story boarding software like FrameForge on the mac to quickly create a series of scenes recreating the acted out scenarios and string them together according to areas of functionality.
    • Second life may be useful for this as well.
    • I thought about Videotaping
but video alone would be insufficient since it doesn't capture inner thoughts like thought bubbles might
although adding thought bubbles ala youtube is now easy.
but some get camera shy
See
http://www.frameforge3d.com/Products/
http://plasq.com/comiclife
http://secondlife.com/?v=1.1


Backstory
Domain Story There is a locally owned coffee shop called "Barefoot Coffee" in Santa Clara on Stevens Creek near Lawrence Expressway. They are your classic boutique service business. Their baristas are highly trained in the art of making teas and coffees. They even do artistic designs in the coffee. The dishes and cups are classic and unique with a European flair. The coffee and tea itself is mostly organic with some unusual, hard to find flavors. They attract a lot of creatively intelligent hip twenty somethings with some piercings and interesting hair, bohemians. The baristas have personality, but take service seriously and make sure you are satisfied with what you want. They also have an older crowd of suburban moms and dads who just have to have there coffee fix before facing the day, but they don't stay and sit like the twenty somethings and take it to go. They come because they are sick of Starbucks or politically offended by the "blockbuster" tactics of such a near monopoly. They also are attracted to the offbeat and hip style. On the supply side, the owners (it's a joint effort) go out of their way to stock unusual flavors, economically fair and environmentally favorable products. The distributors specialize in these kinds of products and have relationships with growers, suppliers and importers from around the world, mostly Africa, Caribbean and South America. They have a specialty product, meaning higher quality, higher prices, and much lower volume then the big suppliers to Starbucks and other chains. They welcome special orders and considerations up to a point. People love to work at this place. In fact, many of the baristas have other careers going at the same time. I've met actresses, artists, and musicians working there. The pay is better, they train you and most people are grateful for the delightful goods served there. There is a famous barista school where they learn the best techniques for using and maintaining the machines and making and serving awesome drinks. They must take good care of the machines or have a great maintenance contract since I've never known one of their machines to break down. The shop itself is medium sized for a coffee place. It's in a strip mall next to a Bagel shop, where some people actually bring their bagels over to eat with the great coffee but no one seems to mind. On weekend nights they have live music (singer songwriter usually) or poetry and the place is packed. The landlord seems to let them do what they want with the shop. The walls are covered with unusual art, photos that are all for sale. There are a couple couches, some bar stool seating at a ledge against one wall, cubbies with books available for reading on another that you can grab and glance as you wait in line in the morning and the rest of the seating are near-antique wooden tables and chairs.

From this story we can glean 13 possible Personae:
* 20 something customer
* suburbanite customer
* barista
* barista manager who keeps things running smoothly
* owner pair
* barista school trainer/operator
* landlord
* visiting musicians
* artists contributing decoration and selling art
* vendors or distributors supplying coffee, tea, equipment
* equipment maintenance serviceman
* growers and source suppliers
* owner/operator of bagel shop next door

Choosing Which Scenarios to Highlight
Obviously, all these personae are not equally important. In fact, what is important depends on what the project goal or problem being tackled is. I think the approach should be to model the whole organization at a very high level to start so we can see how the specific problem domain fits into the whole. It is too easy to make small changes to a subset of a system and cause unexpected disturbances in the rest of it without holistic understanding. Let's say a certain coffee flavor keeps running out of stock. Since we don't initially know why we need to look at the coffee chain of events.Problem Space:We keep running out of Mocha-Cayenne flavor and people are leaving the shop without buying.What happens:Barista notices supply of Mocha-Cayenne flavor getting low and asks manager to order more (or maybe he doesn't notice it getting too low until too late?)Owner orders flavor at next opportunity Supplier received order and processes it then ships it. Order is received by manager who puts it on shelf ready to be served up.
Barista serves it to customers but it clogs the machine and he throws it away and tries again.Tons of new people have heard how great this Mocha - Cayenne Coffee is for boosting your day and come especially for that
Newbies and Suburbanites leave when they find out they are out.
20 somethings don't care, they come to hang out and will go with a double espresso or something.

7 Relevant Personae:
  1. Barista
  2. barista manager
  3. owner
  4. impatient suburban customer
  5. newbie (a discovered and mostly unknown persona)
  6. supplier-distributor
  7. maybe the source supplier if recipe needs changing

What is useful to show:
* The world of each persona and scenario - activities, responsibilities, and perhaps values, culture, outlook, attitude to make it interesting, fun and memorable. This is generally useful, universal to any situation in and around the organization.
* The interactions between the personae, when (relevant triggering events), and how frequent. This is time consuming to go over all the business systems and must be focused on a specific purpose such as getting to know a specific system, solving a problem or changing or growing an area of involvement.

How it might be used in the organization
* problem solving - is it how the barista is using the machine with that flavor? Is it the contents of that flavor gumming up the works? Is the notification of low supply going out soon enough? Is enough being ordered? Is the supplier shipping quickly enough?
* training purposes
* like a machine diagram, if anything needs to be repaired or modified, this is the first place they look to understand how things work and who or what is involved.
Created by aikiden. Last Modification: Wednesday, 31 of March, 2010 01:25:31 CEST by aikiden.