Value Modeling Intro « Charlie Alfred’s Weblog. Organizations, collaborations, and technology-based systems all share some important characteristics: They are all intentional systems. In other words, they are a collection of interdependent parts with the ability to choose how to achieve many goals at one timeIn order to fulfill their intent, they need an effective overall strategy and detailed design.The intent of the system frequently is influenced by entities which fall outside of the system (aka stakeholders).In most cases, there are many such entities, and they often don’t have the same wants and priorities.A system and its stakeholders exist within a larger environment, which constraints each party’s behavior and frequently drives their intent.
A common approach to making strategy and design decisions for a system looks something like the following progression. In many cases, results from downstream process steps are used as feedback to alter upstream process steps: Vision => Objectives => Requirements => Design => Execution Why? Architecture in a Nutshell « Charlie Alfred’s Weblog. Charlie Alfred’s Weblog Architecture in a Nutshell Object-oriented programming is difficult. Ask anyone who does it for a living.
But the core concepts that form the foundation for object-oriented programming are straightforward: abstraction, encapsulation, inheritence, polymorphism, and interface contracts each can be described clearly in a sentence or two. Yet these concepts are the cornerstones of any good object-oriented program. Omit them and the foundation crumbles, and the program devolves into a brittle tangle of programming statements that are difficult to understand and harder to maintain.
Software architecture is difficult, too (although more people fancy themselves to be architects than fancy themselves as crackerjack programmers). In this article, I will mention each core architecture concept, and describe it in a short paragraph. Eight Essential Concepts Context is the setting in which solutions are experienced and value is perceived.
Value Modeling Story 1 « Charlie Alfred’s Weblog. The previous three posts discussed various aspects of value modeling, including: o How value models focus on the “why?” And “what?” Aspects of understanding a problem o The significance of objective vs. subjective perceptions of benefit, constraints, and uncertainty o How understanding differences between these subjective perceptions help us identify contexts While these statements sound nice, are they relevant in the real world? The setting for the first story is a company where I worked for eight years, left for a year, then came back. In our lines of business, consultants faced some difficult challenges: Variation Successive project engagements are rarely in the same problem domain Learning They lack sufficient time to ramp themselves up in the domain before engaging Conceptual They need to quickly discover, acquire information, and make sense of it Rapport They need to connect with their clients and communicate clearly with them Here is where the value modeling lesson comes in.
Consultant. Value Modeling Story 2 « Charlie Alfred’s Weblog. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to work with a division of a global medical products company. This division designed and manufactured equipment to treat a chronic medical condition. At that time, they sold a number of similar product lines, which they wanted to consolidate into a product family. My assignment was to evaluate the existing software architectures and assess the technical and economic feasibility of creating a common framework, which would host all the members of the combined product family.
During the assessment, I spent a significant amount of time with the technical leadership: the program manager, the software engineering manager, and hardware engineering manager. When asked questions about their products, their answers were immediate, concise, and on the mark. These questions addressed a wide range of subjects: o how the products were organized into hardware/software components o how the entire process worked – hardware, process software, and control software.
Value Propositions – More than Marketing « Charlie Alfred’s Weblog. Value Proposition. Nearly every business has at least one; many of them have several. But why do many value propositions miss the point? Let’s start with the Wikipedia web page for value propositions, which says: “In the field of marketing a customer value proposition consists of the sum total of benefits which a vendor promises that a customer will receive in return for the customer’s associated payment (or other value-transfer).”
This is straightforward enough; it strives to derive its meaning directly from the phrase itself: Value sum total of benefitsProposition which a vendor promise End of story, right? Sum Total of Benefits The first myth to be busted is that benefits are the same as value. Consider the following example. Two males, age 27 consider the benefit the policy offers. Here we have the same objective benefit, with two different subjective perceptions of value.
The second myth to be busted is sum total of benefits. “In theory, theory is the same as practice. Exercise: Objective vs. Subjective « Charlie Alfred’s Weblog. Take a moment to play a simple word association game. Look at the following table. What words or phrases would you use to label the rows and columns? The goal is for each label to capture the concept that is common to the items in its row or column? The column distinctions may be a bit more subtle than those for the rows. One possible response is shown below: The most important observation about the columns is the objective vs. subjective distinction. As a general rule, people use subjective reasoning to evaluate alternatives and make decisions. The statement highlighted above applies equally well to both individuals and groups. The problem gets more interesting when you are a provider of a product or service. Providers of products and services are forced to make tradeoff decisions.
O Sacrifice some of one feature in order to offer more of another o Sacrifice feature(s) to one group in order to offer more to another o Sacrifice feature(s) now in order to provide more later (or vice versa) Thick Value vs Thin Value. Are you adding value? Really? What kind and to whom? Does it matter as long as you’re making money? In his book, The New Capitalist Manifesto, author Umair Haque argues that it does. While a generation ago the focus among economists was shareholder value, it’s become clear that’s not enough. Net Societal Value Having a loud party at your house might be fun, but it will probably annoy the neighbors. Haque, however, takes the argument further.
For instance, telecom companies make us listen to long voicemail instructions so that we use up more minutes. The difference between such practices and polluting a river is one of degree, not of kind. There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch Thin value is nothing new. That’s made a difference. While it might seem expedient, even strategically imperative, to outsource production to third world sweat shops, bundle inferior products into a dominant operating system and pursue taste without regard to nutrition, the results can be disastrous. . - Greg.