Just a day! or conclave design
As you have already understood from the title, this article will focus on the conclave method of designing information systems, which allows you to create a prototype for an information system of any complexity in just one day. It sounds unbelievable, but this is true, and the practice universally confirms this statement.
Let's enter from afar: do you know how the election of the next pope is going on? Catholic cardinals gather in a special room, completely isolated from the outside world and hold secret ballots twice a day until they reach the desired goal. A successful vote in this situation is considered to be recruited by one of the applicants for the post of dad with two thirds of all votes plus one vote. Only after this the room is unlocked and the citizens are informed by white smoke about the appearance on the throne of a new legitimate pope. Such a generally brutal and medieval method was applied after one day the election of a new pope lasted 2 years and 9 months. Well, you already know all this and have seen it on TV many times. As you know, and a hundred times already seen in real life and more:
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It was the tenth month of the project. The warring parties were sluggishly fired by the changes, the third project manager wrote a letter of resignation and departure to the monastery, the designer openly freelance during working hours, as the customer was not expected to receive new payments, and the wind drove kanban plans and sprint charts from the offices. And no one saw a way out of the vicious circle: discussing edits - making edits - discussing the time of the next discussion - discussing edits to edits - discussing the number of remaining edits - discussing the timing of the remaining edits - end of the week, and start reading again.
This is really awful, almost everyone has had such projects, including even several leaders of Tagline's ratings, which means that nobody really knows what can be done with this. Therefore, now, using the example of a real case, let us consider how once we managed to revive such a sluggishly smoldering project for half a year and solve all unsolvable questions in just one day.
The task was to develop a prototype of 15-20 screens for the internal accounting system of employees. No one really understood what exactly he wanted, and the daily discussions in Skype and gigabytes of correspondence were reduced to just imitation of activity.
And one day, of course, more from despair than from a real belief in success - it was decided to gather at the office for everyone involved on a Saturday day and to make a solemn oath that no one would leave from there until a satisfactory decision was made. All those involved were saying good-bye to their families for a couple of days, picking up sandwiches, folding beds, and a pair of replaceable socks, since the search for a solution should have lasted all weekends, without interruptions for sleep and lunch, but with a few expected fights.
4 hours 37 minutes. It took 6 months for the previous torments of moving the gray squares back and forth - and suddenly 4 hours and 37 minutes - that's all. Most of the participants of the conclave did not even have time to unpack the containers with homemade meatballs and ring off their wives. Everyone just sat down and realized that it’s impossible to shut off your brain from existing problems anymore, that you could die of hunger or never see family and friends again if you continue to trick complicated questions to the opponent’s side.
Or maybe everyone understood that they were no longer rivals, but a single team locked in a room that could only survive after completing the entire quest to the end. Screen behind the screen. Button for button. Scenario for scenario. And everyone suddenly realized their responsibility for what was happening on the screen of a single laptop, where the gray squares were now moving and arrows were drawn. And everyone stopped criticizing - and began to propose, seek a solution, and even protect the representatives of the opposite side, if their decision seemed a little more logical. It seemed like magic, but suddenly everyone understood what was the secret of success. At this stage, it seems to me that besides the actually locked room with living people, the catalyzing success factors are:
These mandatory conditions can literally work wonders and allow the concise approach to liven up and instantly solve any sluggish tasks, the correspondence on which would take a few more months or even years. Today I am convinced that it is possible to create a principled prototype of any system of an extreme level of complexity in just one day, if you don’t go into insignificant detail and clarification of personal relationships.
The conclave approach is medieval methods on guard of the deadlines of 21st century projects.
Let's enter from afar: do you know how the election of the next pope is going on? Catholic cardinals gather in a special room, completely isolated from the outside world and hold secret ballots twice a day until they reach the desired goal. A successful vote in this situation is considered to be recruited by one of the applicants for the post of dad with two thirds of all votes plus one vote. Only after this the room is unlocked and the citizens are informed by white smoke about the appearance on the throne of a new legitimate pope. Such a generally brutal and medieval method was applied after one day the election of a new pope lasted 2 years and 9 months. Well, you already know all this and have seen it on TV many times. As you know, and a hundred times already seen in real life and more:
')
It was the tenth month of the project. The warring parties were sluggishly fired by the changes, the third project manager wrote a letter of resignation and departure to the monastery, the designer openly freelance during working hours, as the customer was not expected to receive new payments, and the wind drove kanban plans and sprint charts from the offices. And no one saw a way out of the vicious circle: discussing edits - making edits - discussing the time of the next discussion - discussing edits to edits - discussing the number of remaining edits - discussing the timing of the remaining edits - end of the week, and start reading again.
This is really awful, almost everyone has had such projects, including even several leaders of Tagline's ratings, which means that nobody really knows what can be done with this. Therefore, now, using the example of a real case, let us consider how once we managed to revive such a sluggishly smoldering project for half a year and solve all unsolvable questions in just one day.
The task was to develop a prototype of 15-20 screens for the internal accounting system of employees. No one really understood what exactly he wanted, and the daily discussions in Skype and gigabytes of correspondence were reduced to just imitation of activity.
And one day, of course, more from despair than from a real belief in success - it was decided to gather at the office for everyone involved on a Saturday day and to make a solemn oath that no one would leave from there until a satisfactory decision was made. All those involved were saying good-bye to their families for a couple of days, picking up sandwiches, folding beds, and a pair of replaceable socks, since the search for a solution should have lasted all weekends, without interruptions for sleep and lunch, but with a few expected fights.
4 hours 37 minutes. It took 6 months for the previous torments of moving the gray squares back and forth - and suddenly 4 hours and 37 minutes - that's all. Most of the participants of the conclave did not even have time to unpack the containers with homemade meatballs and ring off their wives. Everyone just sat down and realized that it’s impossible to shut off your brain from existing problems anymore, that you could die of hunger or never see family and friends again if you continue to trick complicated questions to the opponent’s side.
Or maybe everyone understood that they were no longer rivals, but a single team locked in a room that could only survive after completing the entire quest to the end. Screen behind the screen. Button for button. Scenario for scenario. And everyone suddenly realized their responsibility for what was happening on the screen of a single laptop, where the gray squares were now moving and arrows were drawn. And everyone stopped criticizing - and began to propose, seek a solution, and even protect the representatives of the opposite side, if their decision seemed a little more logical. It seemed like magic, but suddenly everyone understood what was the secret of success. At this stage, it seems to me that besides the actually locked room with living people, the catalyzing success factors are:
- Approach: "From large to small." First, the fundamental problem, and then the small details,
- Strict requirement from the designer not to spend a second of time on the extra drawing and placement on the grid. The picture should be extremely simple, quick to make, understandable to the audience and reflect the vision of the majority. No, the customer himself did not demand any carefully licked pictures “for design”, these are all fabrications, the brain of a normal person always wants to first understand the basic principle, and not imagine future beauty,
- The requirement from the Customer to his subordinates: "Everyone had to come to the conclave with their own prototype in their head." Which then was only required to be removed for public viewing and combined with a common summary option,
- It was necessary to place in the room one board and one laptop (not Mac), and no more smartphones and leaflets. So everyone participated in a single common cause, rather than hiding in the sink of his own vision and personal opinion,
- There should be no fridge or coffee machine inside the room.
- Outside the window there should be great weather (ideally a splashing sea), so that everyone, deep down inside, would be extremely sorry to spend all the weekends on dreary disputes and senseless rivalry for the role “And here I am, the smartest and most evil one.”
These mandatory conditions can literally work wonders and allow the concise approach to liven up and instantly solve any sluggish tasks, the correspondence on which would take a few more months or even years. Today I am convinced that it is possible to create a principled prototype of any system of an extreme level of complexity in just one day, if you don’t go into insignificant detail and clarification of personal relationships.
The conclave approach is medieval methods on guard of the deadlines of 21st century projects.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/297476/
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