Zen of PM - Communicating the Design

Communicating the Design

Once the design isfleshed out, it needs to be captured and communicated so that all members ofthe team share a common picture of what the team is building. In most cases,the final communicated form of the design will be a written specificationdocument (“the spec”). Key benefits to capturing a design in a high-qualityspec include:

§  A feature is not testable unless there is a clearstatement of its correct function. If there’s no spec to act as an “oracle”, orthe spec is incomplete, incorrect, or ambiguous, then there’s no testing, onlyexperimentation and argument.

§  The spec records the version of the design that hasthe widest and most explicit buy-in from all concerned: the feature team,product team management, and other stakeholders.

§  The details of the design affect far more people thanjust the developers who implement the feature and the testers who test it:there will also be translators, documentation authors, trainers, and sustainingengineers, to name a few.

§ Regulatory compliance is an increasingly important fact of life forMicrosoft, and compliance often involves making design and implementationdetails available for regulatory scrutiny.

Attention todetail and precision are the keys to writing quality specifications. The specneeds to be rich in detail, starting with the customer scenarios that motivatethe design and progressing all the way to fully describing the interfaces andactions of every aspect of the feature. Draw every dialog. Describe everyaction. Consider every word that a user might see. If you don’t do thesethings, then somebody will make these design decisions for you, probably inhaste and without the benefit of your understanding of the framing of theproblem and the subtleties of the solution. The wrong solution will beimplemented, and the documentary record will not reflect reality.

Execution:Delivering on the Value Proposition

Once you haveframed the problem and designed a solution, it’s all about execution – that is,finishing what you’ve started. To make this happen, program managers immersethemselves in the details that make a product great. This includes the detailsof scenarios, designs and specifications, customer discussions, shiproommeetings, and a myriad of little tasks and deadlines that must be attended to.Maintaining the integrity between the big picture and the small details is akey part of the program management role and great program managers know how totransition back and forth between these roles as the context requires.

Not only must youhelp usher the bits out the door, but you must also be the guardian of thevalue proposition. You must ensure that what ships are the right experiences,the right features, and the right value proposition on the right schedule. Todo this well, the best program managers adopt an “owner mentality” — they feela strong drive to make sure that the right things happen. This drive can becritical to push through artificial barriers, to adapt to changingcircumstances, and to drive the project to success.