always hard to discuss "things" without specific examples. are we
talking about year-long projects with 20 people? or decade-long projects
with 2000 people? at any rate, even the latter can be broken down into
small chunks of reasonably-sized sub-projects. in other words, in some
sense these ideas are/should be scalable...

do you find product owners have vision that spill beyond the purpose and
needs of the system into disciplines like usability? architecture?
maintainability? extensibility?

my experience has been one of working closely to collaborate as a
partner with product owners or the "customer(s)" to blend their wants
and desires into aspects of software design and usability that can then
be conveyed. "two heads are better than one" comes to mind. setting the
vision, conveying it to the team, allowing good ideas from any quarter,
at any level in the project, at any time; but also staunchly defending
the vision as needed. (but for sure it would strike me as madness to
involve "hundreds of people" to come up with the initial high-level
vision -- sounds too much like design by consensus ;-\)

As far as grokking... yeah, it requires constant repetition. "If I had a
nickel for every time..." I write it frequently. I say it in scrums
often. It is all over the wiki, whether you start from the "project
vision/overview" pages, the FAQ pages, or the page titled " Grokking
<product name>" and the subsection: "Grokking <product name> in a
Flash!" with the quick links of "What", "How", and "When."

The wiki is also a very useful place where i keep discussions,
brainstorming, etc. New people come onto the project and may have "a
great new idea" -- like the other 5 before. So a kind discussion and a
wiki link can direct them to a wealth of corporate memory and explain
why we may have considered that good idea, but chose a different path.

nonetheless, it is no small feat to carry a torch of a vision...
requires continuous championing, occasional foot stomping, and lots of
repetition, in my humble experience.

jon
blog: http://technicaldebt.com



Scott Preece said the following on 5/11/08 8:17 PM:
> I think this notion is too narrow. Sure, in many situations this kind
> of collaborative vision-building can be great. On the other hand, some
> projects are way too big to have everybody involved participate in
> creating the vision. When you're building a consumer product, for
> instance, with hundreds of people involved acorss a wide range of
> disciplines, the vision has to come from the product owners - the ones
> who know the market and the customers for the product. Their problem
> is to convey that vision to the teams that will implement it - UI
> people, ID people, electronics people, software people, etc.
>
> scott
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: William Pietri <william@...>
> To: agile-usability@yahoogroups.com
> Sent: Sunday, May 11, 2008 10:34:13 AM
> Subject: Re: [agile-usability] Re: The Role of Vision
>
> aacockburn wrote:
> > In my fairly limited experience, in software and outside, it is
> > incredibly terribly difficult for the visionary to get the other
> > people to grok what he/she has in mind at all. The rest of the people
> > go along continually not seeing what the lead person has in mind,
> > sometimes forever. [...]
> >
> > So this leads to the question or thought about how often, or how at
> > all, the vision-keeper manages to get the vision transferred to the
> > rest of the team.
> >
>
> The common thread in my experiences is of collaboratively created shared
> vision. One person may be the start of things, and is often the source
> of the emotional energy that gets people excited about something new and
> keeps them excited about going ever further. But I've never seen a
> situation where people would say, "we have his vision"; they say "we
> have our vision".
>
> So I think if the question is how a vision-keeper can get their vision
> transferred to a bunch of followers, I suspect that can't be done. To
> me, a productive vision isn't a static thing; it's an active, creative
> process of interpreting and changing the world.
>
> If people are taking all their direction from the top, then I think
> that's inevitably passive. It's only when they are invited to share in
> the creative process that I think we engage the parts of their mind used
> in having a vision. Then then the shared vision comes through frequent
> detection and amicable resolution of creative differences.
>
> I think everybody has that creative capacity, even if it has been
> suppressed in a lot of people. See Johnstone's "Impro" for a strong
> argument for that.
>
> William
>
>
>