Tag: Techniques

BABOK's seven review types ordered from most formal to least, each cell marked on two questions, planned session and individual preparation by the reviewer. Pass around answers no to the first and yes to the second, exactly like the desk check.

Pass Around

Goal A pass around puts several independent reviewers in front of the same text and reports what each of them read in it. A single reading has nothing to compare …

Formal Walkthrough

Goal The formal walkthrough is a formal technique: it uses the individual review and team consolidation activities often seen in inspection, and walkthroughs, BABOK …

Two blue entry arrows each carry their goal, their question and their completion criterion: exploration asks « what should be built? », it is done when the ambiguity is gone and produces a decision; experimentation asks « does the proposed design hold? », it is done when the proposal is judged adequate or inadequate and produces a verdict. Both enter a single box, the mock-up, of zero residual value by design, carrying the five omissions the discard licenses: no architecture, no error handling, no security, no persistence, no tests. A single green arrow leaves it, the knowledge gained, written down before the destruction, and it lands in the specification. An orange arrow runs down to a drawn bin: the artefact is destroyed on the day of the session itself, a planned destruction announced from the start.

Throw-away Prototyping

Goal Throw-away prototyping settles an open question about what should be built, at the lowest cost and before the commitment. The team builds an artefact, puts it …

A prototype sits on the left. Two branches leave it in parallel, one upward and one downward. Neither leads into the other. The upper branch reaches the gate that asks what becomes of the artefact, and that gate opens onto two exits: thrown away to throw-away prototyping, grown to evolutionary prototyping. The lower branch reaches the gate that asks what someone does with the artefact, and that gate opens onto four exits: read to storyboarding, operated to paper prototyping, executed to simulation and modelled to process modelling. That last exit is drawn in grey, outside the family's band.

Prototyping

Goal Prototyping builds an early model of the final result, at a moment when correcting it still costs little. BABOK gives it four jobs: to elicit and validate needs …

A filled-in persona card: Nadia Perret, 34, self-employed, insured with a Swiss caisse-maladie. Three numbered goals with the first one in orange, her frustrations and preferred channel alongside and the research base (12 interviews, survey of 340 insured members) noted at the foot of the card.

Personas

Purpose Personas replace the private assumptions each member of a team forms about the user with a small number of documented, shared and verifiable archetypes. Each …

Paper Prototyping

Goal Paper prototyping establishes whether a chosen but not-yet-built design holds up on contact with a real user. The answer arrives in an hour, in the form of …

Vertical chain of six why/because pairs starting from 160 of 500 processed applications that missed the 30-day deadline, descending to the highlighted root cause, an accountability for regulatory monitoring that no role holds, then on to the corrective action and its three-month deadline.

Five Whys

Purpose The technique answers a single question: where to fix things so the problem stops coming back. An organisation that treats the visible effect of a failure …

The increments of an evolutionary prototype: v0, v1, v2 and then production, each one passing through stakeholder use, which defines the next; an unbroken band runs under the whole chain, the quality floor (architecture, security, data protection, tests, operations), which starts at increment zero and carries the marker "paid here". The drawing shows no bin and no cleanup step anywhere.

Evolutionary Prototyping

Goal Evolutionary prototyping exists to deliver a working solution while its requirements are still being discovered. The elicitation instrument is the real use of a …

The same project schedule network shown three times: the baseline, then the network under a scenario applied to an activity with no float, where the finish date is pushed out by eight weeks, then under a scenario applied to an activity that has four weeks of float, where the finish date does not move.

What-If Scenario Analysis

Goal What-if scenario analysis applies a named condition to the schedule and then recalculates it to measure the effect on the project's objectives. The question is …

Cumulative gains chart: the horizontal axis carries the share of the population contacted from the top of the ranking, the vertical axis the share of responses captured; the concave curve sits above the random-selection diagonal and a marker shows the cutoff retained, 50 per cent of the population for 87 per cent of the responses.

Lift chart and cumulative gains chart

Goal Both charts are built on the ordering that a per-unit score induces, a predicted probability or any rating at all, and they answer a single question: how many …

Kotter's change process

Goal Kotter's change process leads a transformation through eight stages to be cleared in order. The question it answers is one of sequence: in what order to commit …

Three panels linked by arrows. Decide and prepare: written, settled mandate, sponsor confirmed in person, invitees drawn from the stakeholder list, one or two sessions: internal first, then wider. Hold the session, in order: mandate and purpose first, people and roles, way of working, one working format, close. Leave with: mandate and criteria stated, responsibilities allocated, shared working rules, cadence and reporting rules, known risks listed, actions with a name and a date.

Kick-off meeting

Goal The kick-off meeting is the session where the project sponsor states the mandate in front of the team and the people involved, where the roles are settled and …