Making Green Threads Work for You
Investment in a green threads program is not a one-time thing—it's a culture change. To make real progress on product integration, the threads should be updated regularly to reflect new product releases and emerging technologies. The green threads team should be constantly assessing new product milestones to look for issues that have been resolved and new ones that might have been created. Not only does this iteration drive future progress, but it also provides necessary validation of green threads work. A green threads effort is also not without its share of organizational difficulties. By definition, cross-product interactions are rarely owned by any single development team and building the necessary support to get changes into your company's code will inevitably run into the question, "What's in it for me?" Indeed, it takes a special kind of team to agree to work for the greater good of the customer and the company as a whole when doing so means time and money spent with no obvious, immediate, or direct return for the local team. Really, the message here is, "Think globally, act locally." Like the environmental movement that coined the phrase, software integration raises the kinds of problems that require individuals and groups to make local changes and commitments that collectively result in significant global improvements.
The returns, direct or otherwise, do exist. Green threads create a rare forum for technical leaders to approach design and development from a customer perspective instead of an architectural one and to understand their products' contributions to the overall picture. The tactical recommendations they make measurably improve product quality and increase customer satisfaction. The contribution they can offer to strategic vision is unique, customer-centric, and critically, brand- and product-neutral. Even the documents themselves are valuable assets; we have found within IBM that green threads documents find their way into development and usability test plans, product documentation, and sales materials because their cross-product focus is one rarely found through other channels. Finally, they create, implicitly, a team within your organization that is well versed with a broad product set, deeply connected to development leadership, and able to comment credibly on customer issues and expectations.
It's not difficult to get people to agree that cross-product interactions are broken and to identify the root causes. It is far more challenging to find ways to introduce concrete change into the development process to improve the situation. The IBM green threads process is still relatively young and we continue to revise and update it to make it more efficient, more credible, and more effective. In some sense though, it is already a success. Development leaders are including green threads in their product planning and brand executives are including them in their strategic messages. With each iteration, if we continue to do our jobs right, the real beneficiaries will be our customers.
|
Green Threads Are Not Use Cases
It is tempting to see green threads simply as rebranded use cases, but to do so is to misunderstand the value of a green threads effort. Like use cases, green threads focus on a customer problem or requirement, and thus approach software design and development from a customer-centric, rather than technology-centric, viewpoint. Like use cases, green threads are concerned with the user roles involved in a workflow, and the sequence of events that takes place; both techniques document findings in a script-like format. Fundamentally, though, use cases are a tool for new big-bang design. They are an attempt to exhaustively define and model the anticipated paths through a yet-to-be-developed product and usually constrain themselves to a single application. Green threads, by contrast, are a pragmatic exercise in generating incremental improvements to existing products. They are deliberately nonexhaustive, forcing an organization to identify their key priorities, and they are explicitly cross-product. Green threads are also centrally about the forum that is created and the conversations that forum enables; this is not an essential component of a use case modeling exercise. Green threads are not intended in any way to supplant the concept of the use case; use case modeling is a positive, fruitful mechanism for building products that meet customers' technology needs. The green threads process helps those products integrate into a product set that solves customer problems.
—J.N. |
