The Three Immutable Laws of Rapid Prototyping

Rapid prototyping is the heart of Agile BI. When business users can “kick the tires” of a scaled-down working solution early in the development process, they are more likely to share good ideas that will improve future iterations of the solution and, ultimately, enthusiastically adopt it.

In our experience, rapid prototyping in business intelligence is subject to three immutable laws, and Consensus is designed to help organizations take full advantage of them:

1.  The Agile Law of Prototype Malleability: The value of a prototype is directly proportional to how easy it is to modify. If it takes effort to change a prototype in response to user feedback, then fewer prototyping iterations will be undertaken and the value of the prototyping effort diminishes. Prototype generation in Consensus requires only a few clicks and a few minutes. Valuable feedback from business representatives can then be incorporated in Consensus and a new prototype can be generated with the same small effort. This approach allows for multiple iterations to occur during a single meeting. Compare that to traditional approaches which require long waits between major “releases.”

2. The Agile Law of Prototype Commutability: A prototype is only as valuable as it is representative of the end solution. Users do not need the extra challenge of imagining what given functionality will look like in their standard tool. Creating a prototype in the BI platform already in place for users, giving them an opportunity to interact with the prototype in the same way they will interact with the end solution. The prototype has all the functionality of the end solution, including standard functionality provided by the BI tool (like save as PDF and export to Excel). Thus, they will be able to articulate exactly what works and which features need improvement. After a few iterations, if your users tell you they are happy with the prototype in Cognos or Business Objects, you can be confident they will be happy with the end solution in Cognos or Business Objects. And the confidence levels of the business sponsors and the BI delivery team increase dramatically.

3. The Agile Law of Prototype Lucidity: A prototype is only as valuable as the new insights it brings to what ultimately needs to be built. Prototypes created with Consensus allow delivery teams to gain a new perspective and keener understanding on requirements, and provide business users an opportunity to see that some of their ideas may have been strong in theory, but aren’t necessary in practice.

These three prototyping laws are critical guardrails to ensuring that your Agile BI delivery approach delivers all the quality and rigor that users expect.