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Everyone is a designer
In software, building the thing right is easy… identifying the right thing to build isn’t!
‘Everyone is a designer’, by Jelle Dekker
Before I started working in IT, I studied Industrial Design at the Eindhoven University of Technology. My studies aimed to research peoples’ needs, question their requests and solve underlying challenges. This approach often resulted in multiple iterations to achieve the best result.
I’m now a Bizzomate consultant, and these skills are very useful when handling our clients’ projects. Even though the consultants at Bizzomate come from very different backgrounds, I believe everyone is a designer because of the way we work.
At Bizzomate, we strive not only to build things right but to build the right things. This tagline might seem a little gimmicky, but it embraces a way of working that is far from default in IT. Simply put, when a project doesn’t go as expected, we do not point at clients for providing incorrect specifications or not explaining themselves clearly enough.
Having a project fail to meet expectations after being built to specification is one of the main reasons we stopped waterfall working. Unfortunately, utilising SCRUM does not guarantee success. If used properly, SCRUM means you can keep up with the ever-changing specifications. It signifies that different interpretations of applications, needs and wishes can be spotted at an early stage, when they can still be resolved smoothly.
Scrum can be used by developers who size different stories so that product owners can prioritise, and start building. And yes, we can still end up in a situation where we have to blame the customer for incorrect specifications, but frankly, this happens much sooner and more often.
Being a designer denotes taking a proactive role in this process, questioning user stories to find the underlying problem and challenging clients about growing their organisation together. It also implies providing insights into how the efficient use of technology can deliver solutions that previously seemed impossible. It stands for taking the responsibility to find what the right thing is and build it with the client.
We are software “architects, analysts, techies and designers” and throughout the years we’ve created a pragmatic and creative approach to identify the right problems to solve before you start with the development of the bits and bytes. No long research studies, no thick reports but 4 clear steps to success.
Are you solving the right problems, or are you making software that nobody asked for??
Get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.
Jelle Dekker – Mendix Expert @ Bizzomate
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