A Man of Many Hats

Sometimes the corniest things are the best. I have an application that we're deploying for one office this weekend and we began the development for the second office this week. The second office naturally wanted to see what the first group did and the trajectory of their baseline application. Let me say that I was very reluctant in doing this because the first second I show it to them, their ideas will be shaped by what they see. Thus in my utopia, I would have been able to work with them on requirements and generate a design independent of what anyone else has done. But I wasn't going to win that argument so I relented and had a little fun along the way.

The application is essentially a workflow system built on SharePoint. My first demo was with the stakeholders and it went fairly well, but I saw that I had to keep pointing out to them the instances in which I was performing in a different role. There are 5 main roles and it is easy to get confused about which actor is performing because it was just me doing it all. Thus, for the demo that I had to deliver to all of their bosses on the second day, I went to the party store and bought a bunch of hats.

As you can see, when I switched from one role to the next in this meeting we had a completely different experience. Not only that, it was fun. The Directors all appreciated the experience and I think they came away from the meeting with a good understanding of the capabilities that we have already built, I hope they also understand that their solution could also be radically different depending on their needs.