One day last week during my almost daily call to the client I was explaining some of the differences between how she would interact with the system. She stopped me and proceeded to describe how she thought it would work and, she was right. After numerous interactions with the interactive Logical Interface Module (LIM) she understood as well as I did how things would work and what was and wasn’t possible. Months earlier it had been a struggle to explain the Modernized navigation and some of the inherent characteristics of the new interface since it would be so different from what the client had used for many years.
This transformation from the old to the new can be a major challenge when bringing a whole workforce from a green screen to a modern Graphical User Interface. Breaking the old mould takes time but the new system cannot gain acceptance without this emotional detachment from the old and attachment to the new.
Is it just time? No, a rapport must be developed so that everyone is talking about the same thing rather than each trying to convince the other of their position. The old system is not some evil daemon they’ve struggled with even if it posed many challenges. The user has developed a co-dependency with it and separation takes time. I’ve seen a funeral for a system with each of the users saying goodbye as part of the transition to the new, replacement system. Developing that rapport starts with finding common experiences and working from those through to new experiences and ways of looking at the solution. A modernized system can’t act “exactly” like the old system because if it does then the sought after benefits of modernization can’t be achieved.
You know when you’ve arrived with the users when they are contributing insightful extensions or modifications. The road, however, goes through some tough terrain where “it should give us what we had” even though “what we had” was the problem. A full time resource with no other responsibilities is the only way to get the quality of validation and review and the timely response needed to keep to an aggressive project schedule. These resources are the only ones capable of quickly making the transformation and communicating it to the other stakeholders.
- Rod Brindamour
Business Analyst
