Starting small/practical, making the system pay off
Created : 2005-02-20 Updated: 2005-03-03
It often takes place that university introduce expensive but useless systems. They naively have a big vision of an information system as a huge capacity to accept all the initiatives.
The points of this failure are :
The person in charge omits thinking what people really need, and take a "if we build it, people will come" approach.
The big system is hard for people to go through it all to find exactly what they need and can do. Too many functions which people rarely use hinder the user to have perspective.
The person in charge cannot afford to consider user experience because s/he tries to tackle too much in one fell swoop.
Thus, the solution is :
Start with small/practical initiatives by splitting a big/ideal project into phases, which gives us more control over the outcome and quickly demonstrate value. And it also means splitting a high risk into low risks. (A small-scale failure won't doom entire effort.)
On those successes, one layer at a time, gradually build the desired system.
By starting small/practical, we can make the system pay off.