coneblog

We have been interviewing customers, users and management for about eight weeks now on the way to defining our Content Management System requirements. We have inventoried the content areas involved, and created Use Cases and Benefits Analyses from the interview contents. We have come to one of the most interesting parts of the project – where “Magic Happens”.

By “Magic Happens” I mean that complex, largely opaque process whereby a set of Requirements – basically a description of how the system should work – begins to take shape as a Solution.

Already I can hear the muttering in the virtual room of my listeners – “The Process is Well-Defined”; or “You are not using the proper methodology”; or “It only seems opaque because you don’t have enough of the right documentation”; or even “What is he talking about?”

I’m talking about the moment when an Analyst re-reads the Requirements, and sits down with a pad of paper, or a white board. She reads and reviews, and starts coalescing the many individual statements like “User clicks on search result link, and if he has access rights to the document, he links through and the document appears” into solution components. There is an AHA moment where the Analyst draws a circle on the white board and labels it “Document Access Control”.

Then more circles appear, and lines connecting them, and a Solution takes shape.

For me, that is a Magical Moment.

Larry Cone