Tim Thorp Training & Consulting » analysis http://www.timthorp.com technology made simple. Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:45:17 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Initial Design Meetings http://www.timthorp.com/webdev/initial-design-meetings http://www.timthorp.com/webdev/initial-design-meetings#comments Fri, 01 Feb 2008 12:53:18 +0000 admin http://www.timthorp.com/webdev/initial-design-meetings So, I’m at a meeting with a fellow office worker that wants a new system and I’m struck by how difficult it is for an internal client to talk about what they want. It’s not that they feel intrusive with making demands, but there’s just no common language. For example, working at a university, I wouldn’t expect a dean to ask me if I would be willing to make a web 2.0 system with a relational database backend and ajax form controls. What I am finding is that I have to understand their work in order to build a system.

This might be a stretch, but I love analogies, so I’ll give it a shot. I think the meetings are similar to what would happen if a person who never had seen a modern kitchen wanted one. He would say,

“I wonder if there is any way that I could cut my food components and heat them over a hot element”

“It would be really neat if there were a place to clean the cooking devices including a mechanism for the removal of waste material”

Of course there’s a way to do that, it’s called an oven and a sink. With programming, the capacity is there to do anything that you have seen on the web, but if the functional owner and the developer can’t talk clearly about what is wanted, I think the risk of misunderstanding could lead to a significant miscalculation such as an incorrect data model and there is no amount of AJAX that can clean that up.

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