Expectation mismatch

Quite rightly, the business community doesn’t understand the technology. The icon on a phone screen, and a few pages once the app is open – how hard can it be?

The root problem is that there are orders of magnitude differences what the user sees, compared to the vast complexity of delivering a rich user experience. We then have to layer on non-functional requirements such as security, responsiveness, smooth graphics, branding, works on all platforms and make the owner a cup of tea every morning despite it having no hardware….

You could describe the connection between tech teams and as suffering from the problems similar to “impedance mismatch” in electrical systems. This term has already been stolen to describe the mismatch between the code objects and their database schema, so using here would indicate:

• Signal reflections – part statements coming back causing misunderstandings
• Inefficiencies – the same message needs to sent again, or discussed multiple times

Constantly changing world

Given how difficult it is to create even a single facet of an application, it is easy to forget how quickly the world changes around us.

This means that when you ask a question of what the business needs next month – they often, genuinely, can’t always answer it. This is not a reflection on the business capabilities (often 😉) , this is just reality this is the challenging world we live in. What seems like a simple decision on the next step, or knowing what is required becomes hard / impossible when trying to predict three months in the future. Their understanding of their own business has to change regularly and they relearn rapidly all the time.