Engineering Project Management

4Understanding Your Users and Your Other Stakeholders

We introduce the two coordinate systems of value, and we also discuss how we engineer the user experience. Engineering projects often create products and/or services that never existed before. Under these circumstances, it is easy to lose sight of what aspects of the new item are essential, and which are less so. We solve this dilemma by rigorous and continuous focus on our eventual users and customers. What are they trying to accomplish? How do they do it now? What are the shortfalls? What are their needs and desires? At the same time, our degrees of engineering freedom are usually entirely within the technical domain: choices about materials, parts, algorithms, mechanical structures, and so forth. In this chapter, you will learn how to understand your users, how to relate that understanding of your user to the engineering choices that are your degrees of design freedom. We then extend this focus on our users to all “stakeholders” of our project. We end the chapter with a discussion of how to use good engineering and good management to achieve a compelling and effective experience for your users and your customers when they operate your system, through what we call the user experience.

4.1 The Four Steps to Understanding Your Users and Your Other Stakeholders

In Chapters 1 and 2, we introduced the idea of our engineering project having users and other stakeholders. In this chapter, we go into the actual details. Who ...