How do you get non-technical folks to appreciate a non-UI problem?

Question

Suppose you're working on an enterprise project in which you have to get management signoff in order for you to develop a new feature set. Usually your management has no problem signing off on some bright shiny new UI feature. Unfortunately they have a hard time appreciating some behind-the-scenes issues that are crucial to the application's well-being such as transactions, data integrity, workflow routing, configurability, security, etc. Since they're non-technical and these issues are not immediately visible, it's not obvious to them that this is crucial.

How have you convinced them that these infrastructural issues have to be dealt with and that it is important to their business process?

Answer 1

Same thing folks have been doing for thousands of years: draw pictures. Diagram the problems, use visual metaphors familiar to your audience, drag the problem into their territory.

Assuming they're not being intentionally obtuse...

Answer 2

Robustness. When it comes down to it, you need to talk their language, which is how it affects their bottom line. If its a security or correctness issue, you need to tell them that customers aren't going to want incorrectly acting products, no matter how nice they look.

Answer 3

A big +1 for analogies and metaphors. If possible, find one that will resonate with the personal interests of your audience (if it's 1-2 people). For general metaphors, I often find myself using commuter traffic or subways, for some reason.

e.g. We are currently migrating an app from an OODB to Postgres/Hibernate: the bulk of this work is done in Release '4'. Many domain experts have been asking why there are so few user-facing features in R4. I regularly tell them that we have been 'tearing up the city to put in a subway. It is very expensive and undeniably risky, but once it is done, the benefits in R5+ will be astounding, truly.' The true conversation is more involved, but I can return to this theme again and again, well after R4. Months from now, I hope to say "You asked for X and it is now very easy -- precisely because you let us put in that subway back in R4".

Answer 4

The surest way to get upper level management to buy off on development work is to present it in a quantifiable way. Ideally this quantifiable measure is in $$. You need to explain to them the consequences of skimping on data integrity, security, transactions, etc. and how that will affect the customer\user community and eventually the bottom line. You should be careful in these situations because sometimes management expects these non-functional requirements to "just work." If this is the case, you should either estimate high and work on these items alongside the visible UI work (ignorance is bliss) or you need to document these areas of need as you communicate with management so if things do go bad as you anticipate, it's not your job that is on the line.

Answer 5

Unfortunately, it usually takes a disaster or two before this stuff gets the attention it deserves.

It really depends what your management is like, but I've had luck with good old honest-to-goodness fearmongering. If you go through a couple of disaster scenarios, and point out someone's going to get blamed if they occur, that can be enough to make their arsecovering instincts kick in and finally pay attention :)

Answer 6

I'm battling with essentially the same kind of situation. Whether it is sign-off by management or acceptance by a user/sponsor, the problem remains one of different vocabularies, priorities and perspectives. I asked a simmilar question here.

I also got diverse answers, tantalizingly close to useful, but not quite definitive enough. Browsing and searching SO using relevant keywords led me to find usable insights in various answers spread out over many unrelated questions. To find and extract these gems led me to pose this question on site-mining.

It would have been useful to be able to flag the various answers and see them all in a single list, but alas, that functionality is not yet available in SO. I suggested it on uservoice.

Hope you find something you can use from the references I gave.

Answer 7

Car analogies.

Everybody knows that 'system' and it's sufficiently complex to depict the dire situation.

Answer 8

Every craft has its unsexy sides. Things that HAVE to be done, but nobody notices them directly. In a grocery store somebody has to organize how and when to fill the grocery shelves so they always look fresh. In a laundry you need somebody who thinks about how the processes should be optimized so that the customer gets his clothes in time.

The tricky part is: The customer won't notice when these subtle things have been done right UNTIL HE NOTICES THEY ARE MISSING! Like when the laundry is not ready on time but two days late, or the veggies in the super market have brown spots and look terrible.

Same goes for IT. You don't notice good transactions until your major customer knocks on your door and tells you that an important and expensive project has failed because the database entries of your product were mysteriously mixed up. You don't notice good security until customer credit card information shows up in Elbonia (and soon after word is in the national newspapers warning customers of your company).

The thing you really have to hammer in again and again and again is that software is NOT static. It has to be cared for even after its initial development phase is over. It is not just a product you buy once and forget about. Every car manufacturer knows that services is of prime importance to the products they build, simply because things WILL occur that have to be fixed and improved. It's the same with software.

So make a presentation, visualize, verbalize, translate your technical information into benefits. Business people don't care about your wish for code aesthetics in a refactoring project, but they WILL understand that your changes will help the product to become more reliable, gain a better reputation and reduce the amount of future service requests. Make them understand by showing them the benefits!

Answer 9

The right kind of countering question is the secret.

• Is it okay to crash every 5 web pages?
• Do we have to protect the credit card numbers?
• Is is okay to have to pay contractors to deploy a patch every weekend?
• Did you want it now or did you want it to work?

Answer 10

I like the idea of Technical Debt, because it enables technical issues to be translated (albeit loosely) into money issues -- and money is something most managers do understand.

Although the idea of technical debt was originally applied to architectural issues, it can be used more broadly for any type of situation where there is pressure to take a shortcut -- that is, go into technical debt -- rather than do it right the first time. (Doing it right is the equivalent to saving up to buy something -- it takes time -- rather than buying it on credit and going into debt.)

Just as debts can be good (e.g. home loans) and bad (e.g. credit cards), so technical debt can be good and bad. I won't try to characterise the differences completely, but good technical debt can be tracked accurately, so that you know how much in debt you are.

So, try to explain your important, non-UI problem in terms of technical debt, and the cost of not fixing it in terms of paying interest on that debt.