Communicating with the customer

Over a number of years I have been working with a number of different customers while planning, designing and implementing systems.

 

Normally these customers have been people with great skills in their work, but with little or no experience in describing software systems.

 

In the process we have been using a number of different tools to try to communicate better with the customers. What I have often noted is that if you try to tell the customer that “we are using use-cases as a method of describing what the software should do” or “we are going to develop a requirement specification to describe how the system is going to work” the customer often seems to be distracted by the terms used. The customers is often willing or even interested in using the methods suggested, but often it seems to meet practical issues when trying to actually do this.

 

For me it seems as just introducing these terms and methods by names in an early process will by itself often cause the customer to feel unsecure or unfamiliar with the techniques and methods used when describing a system.

Due to this I think that you not necessarily should introduce naming for stuff in the early stages of a project. If you for example want to discuss and show the customer a use case diagram you should just show it to the user and discuss the content of the diagram, what the arrows means and so on.

 

Then, when the customer after some time actually discovers that the given type of diagram is coming up again-and-again you may fulfill his felt need of giving the diagram some name, for example “use-case-diagram” ;-)

 

My point here is that, when working with people that is not in the industry, we should and must use our tools (their good tools) by we should also be very careful about how we approaches the customer when discussing the issues at hand. I think it is important to keep the focus on the issues that the customer is familiar with and avoid introducing terms and words that adds confusion to the communication.