Remote Working

Posted on June 6, 2010

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One of the biggest projects that I undertook at the end of last year was the Remote Working project. The brief was simple in essence: “we’ve got a team of about 12 business users who all have an interest in remote working in various guises (working from home; working when out and about; working from other offices etc) – get involved”.

Interestingly the team of business users already had some firm ideas about what they thought might be ideal technical solutions for their problems, using off-the-shelf-solutions like GoToMyPC.com to achieve connectivity to their office machines while out and about.

What’s often difficult in these situations is being able to trace your way back to the initial requirements – the question, “what do you want to be able to do?” can have many answers, and often these start with technical solutions rather than actual requirements, driving down to the original requirements is essential to make sure nothing’s missed, but at the same time you have to be careful not to make users feel like they’re jumping through hoops or covering ground they feel they’ve already covered.

After a few meetings I put together a list of requirements which I thought represented what the business users had said, and I fed this back to them to see if there were any mistakes or omissions. Once the final list had been agreed I set about grouping the requirements into “user personas”: some of the requirements related to working from home; some were about getting e-mails on mobile phones.

These personas then became the starting blocks for building four separate packages (which included a technical component too) to address the requirements put forward.

I’ll describe these personas in the next blog post on this project and I’ll describe how the personas turned into fully fledged packages which became a real success with the business users almost instantly, paving the way for future projects in which business users can collaborate with technical staff to develop real solutions.

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