3Q3M Episode 7— Business Consultation with Gary Passero
In the seventh episode of our video series 3 Questions in 3 Minutes (or 3Q3M), RoleModel Software’s marketing director, Jamey Meeker, and RoleModel’s Software Craftsman Gary Passero discuss why business consultation is so important to our process at RoleModel.
Join Gary and Jamey as they answer three questions that will give you an inside look at how we prioritize consultation and why it makes a difference on a project.
Why is business consultation crucial at RoleModel Software?
Everyone can agree that custom software can be expensive.
But we want to make ensure it’s not more expensive than it has to be, relative to your needs.
Figuring out what to build based on what is adding the most immediate and applicable value is the key, and it’s not enough to expect the client to bring forward an exact list of requirements.
We have to discover together what you need to make you successful. That’s business consultation in a nutshell.
What does the process of business consultation look like as you develop software?
At a low level, it’s about conversation, collaboration, and discussion.
To accomplish that, ideally we would have all the decision-makers in the room and on the topic as often as possible. Of course, that can’t happen every single day, so we rely on the product owner, put forward by the client, who we work with daily.
To be effective, the product owner is given the responsibility to drive the vision and also to make decisions on which features should be included in the current version and which can be backlogged.
Can you give an example from your experience?
Gary highlighted a recent project where his team was working with a client to replace a legacy system.
There was a feature that was a part of the system that, in the minds of nearly everyone in their organization, needed to also be a part of the new system.
Gary noted that the need for this feature didn’t make a lot of sense to him, so he pulled the client in to talk about their current workflow and the “Why” for the feature they were asking for.
After this constructive conversation, the client realized that the feature doesn't make any sense for their new system. Based on the way their workflow will already be changing, it alleviated the need.
Rather than going and building it because they asked for it out of the gate, … the conversation produced “wait, we can save money!” from building a feature we don’t need and spend it on … what does add value.
It turned out the feature was actually just a way for the client to sidestep a bug in their legacy system, and as long as that bug was fixed in the new system, it would be completely unnecessary.
Check out the last episode of 3Q3M where Software Craftsman John Calvin Young talks about what a craftsman is and why they are well-equipped to lead projects at RoleModel Software.
