I must confess that, earlier in my career, it always made me anxious to show the end user any incomplete work. As a consultant, it seemed like a silly opportunity to invite scope changes, unwelcome feedback, and basically a drain on my time and energy.
It was many years later that I developed the skin and the stamina to enjoy performing demos of partially built systems to customers.
Duh. The most important piece of the implementation process is the end user. Why hide the stuff from them?
Yes, this is a shameless paraphrase of a fabulous thought:
The customer is the most important part of the production process
– W. Edwards Deming
Today, I am absolutely thrilled showing the progress and the vision being built. Why?
REASON #1
Because nobody really knows what they want (or do not want) until they see it. And that is that. I find this especially true in large enterprise systems, when discussions become extremely abstract at the end of the sales process. As the customer and vendor teams plunge to close the deal, a myriad of contractual details absorbs everybody. The memories of the demos and the recall of items that generated the initial excitement becomes muddled.
REASON #2
Because if we missed the boat, then it is better to find out as soon as possible. It is now my habit to find one or two difficult topics to discuss at the end of every demo. By difficult I do not mean technically difficult, but topics I strongly suspect will bring up a gap in expectations. For example, I had to show the actual steps a user will go through to update actual sales. Technically the step was just to ‘upload a file’, but there was some major data massaging to be performed manually before the upload. Showing early the planned end-user experience brought up the unpleasant discussion to the forefront.
My takeaway? Just show everything you are doing. Keep no secrets, be genuine. And I am not talking about the usual Agile sprint demos. These demos are narrow and heavily staged to check-off a subset of progress. I mean whole-system demos, like a full walkthrough of a building under construction. Invite your end users to touch the system. Setup one-on-one time with them. Make yourself available. If you are the leader of a large system implementation, being completely open and transparent about what is being built or not will be vital to the health of the project. You will always be found out.