What the customer really needed
I had a single computer programming class in high school in the 80’s. On the first day, the teacher handed out a badly xeroxed version of this image. Welcome to software development!
In case you’ve never been party to a software life cycle, here’s a blow-by-blow. (Explaining the joke kills it, so you engineers should read no further.)
- How the customer explained it. The customer usually has no clue what he really needs. He thinks he does, but he can also think of extra features he’ll never use. He’ll demand them up front, because he’s afraid he won’t get them added later.
- How the project leader understood it. The guy in charge of the project usually gets some critical detail wrong. It’s often wrong in a way that makes it useless, but it snowballs from there into comedy.
- How the analyst designed it. The analyst has to decide how to fix the leader’s misunderstanding of the project. A common “fix” is to break something else to work with our existing design.
- How the programmer wrote it. Programmers are notorious for not understanding the essential features of a project. They implement things quite literally, sometimes.
- How the business consultant described it. Marketing folks are the engineers’ nightmares. They sell the customer on the glowing, cushy features of this project, paying no attention to the truth or practicality of the situation.
- How the project was documented. Documentation is usually an afterthought, or an I-thought. As in, I thought someone else was writing it.
- What operations installed. Sometimes we spend months getting certain features to work, only to find out later that those features were never installed at the customer site because A) they didn’t work, B) the installer didn’t understand how it worked, or C) someone was afraid the fixes were no good.
- How the customer was billed. Yeah, software is expensive. We get to charge for all our clueless machinations.
- How it was supported. “Is this feature causing the customer to call tech support? Perhaps we should remove it.” Eventually, you end up with the basic stub of the project.
- What the customer really needed. It would be so much easier if we could ever get to this simple starting point. But we never do…
April 4th, 2007 at 4:39 am
Hi there,
this cartoon is really fantastic, I love it. I teach project management and if you were the original creator of this cartoon, I would be flattered if you would kindly allow me to use it during my training sessions.
I would only need to know who you are to properly name my sources, or if you could tell me who is the original cartoonist I could ask him/her the same.
Really, this is the best way I could ever find to introduce my students into this great world of project management.
Many thanks,
Sincerely,
Steve
September 24th, 2007 at 5:12 am
[…] Maybe you already know this cartoon - but Phil made a nicer version of it. Read it and laugh. Read it again, and give it some thought, if you represent one of the links in the chain. […]
September 24th, 2007 at 9:17 am
Just to be clear, I found this updated version of the cartoon on the internet somewhere. I didn’t create it. Sorry for the lack of proper attribution.
October 8th, 2007 at 5:42 am
ah ah ah.. superb..
May 8th, 2008 at 8:11 am
This sort of thing never happens in our company.
D. Ogdy,
Business Consultant
June 4th, 2008 at 1:11 am
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