You are previewing premium content. 
Getting real by wandering around
- TAGS:Insider Content, mbwa, research, Tom Peters, usability
- IT TOPICS:Careers, Desktop Apps, Development, Enterprise Apps, Management, Mobile Apps, Web Apps
Wandering around is not often associated with a high level of productivity. Wandering around with a purpose, however, is a legitimate management concept popularized in the 80s by author Tom Peters. He called it MBWA, or management by wandering around. The idea is that, by wandering around among our staff and customers, we learn things experientially that we might miss by limiting ourselves to statistics.Â
Does MBWA have a place in IT? Absolutely! I certainly advocate dealing with hard research numbers, especially when making big decisions such as the types of applications or platforms to deploy. MBWA-IT allows us, however, to observe our users working in the real-world with our applications and systems. It can provide important insights into how our users work and what their challenges and frustrations are.Â
For example, are our users taking full advantage of automated processes or do they continue to perform tasks manually? If they're continuing to perform tasks manually, is there something we can observe about their work processes that could explain their behavior? Armed with that information, we might make different decisions about the questions to ask in a research study. We might even be able to make a small change to an interface that could produce a big improvement in usability.Â
If you want to try MBWA-IT, here are some keys to ensuring it's successful:
To continue reading, register here to become an Insider
It's FREE to join
Already an Insider? Sign in
Free Insider Guide