Modularity/User Stories

Personas

The information below relates to personas developed for the use of the Modularity working group.

What is a Persona

Personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types that might interact with a product in different ways. They are not market segments but should be thought of as user archetypes.

Personas are useful in considering the goals, desires and limitations of users in order to guide decisions about the product. They should be based on user research and should by 1-2 page descriptions that include behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes and environment details.

There should be a primary persona defined along with secondary personas. More than one can be primary, but no more than 3 in order to keep the team focused in their design and implementation work.

Benefits of Personas

Common benefits include:

• Help the team share a common understanding of their various users groups and audiences
• Proposed designs can be guided by how well they meet the needs of certain personas
• Features can be prioritized based on how well they address the needs of one or more personas
• Provides a human “face” to the user that can help create empathy for the people represented

Personas Types

The following have been identified as the first set of personas:

• IT Executive
• IT Manager
• Business Analyst
• Enterprise System Admin
• Enterprise System Architect
• Enterprise Developer
• Enterprise DevOps and Systems of Differentiation Developer
• Enterprise DevOps Developer
• Enterprise and Independent Software Vendor Developer - Systems of Innovation
• Traditional Independent Software Vendor
• Next Gen Independent Software Vendor
• Business Operations
• Product Manager
• Student
• Educator
• Researcher

Primary personas have not yet been identified.

Detailed Information

IT Executive - David

Aligns IT initiatives with business goals

Quote

“In this competitive market, we need to be fast, efficient, and use technologies that attract developers to the company.”

Background

• BS in Computer Science
• 30 years experience
• 15 years of management experience
• Advanced analytical skills

Primary Goals

• Improve IT operations, system performance, and risk management
• Implements new systems/architecture
• Cultivates IT and business partnerships
• Sell IT solutions internally
• Selects vendors that can meet his/her challenges. Convinces c-suite peers to adopt the chosen vendor.

Pain Points

• Provide security while focusing on efficiency, mobility, innovation, and downtime
• Doing more with less budget, skills, staff, financial transparency and time
• Reducing server footprint while expanding services

IT Manager - Stan

Manages team that oversees infrastructure components

Background

• BS in Computer Science
• 15 years experience

Primary Goals

• Determine execution plans for specific IT objectives
• Select solutions for the objectives and budgets specified by IT Executive
• Make decisions for smaller, tactical purchases and influence larger purchases
• Ensures reliable, 24x7 operations of existing infrastructures
• Identifies paths to resolution when issues arise

Pain Points

• Doing more with less resources
• Getting the blame when things go wrong
• Handling staffing issues (not having people trained in the skills and capabilities required)
• Meeting regulatory and security compliance

A Day in the Life

Stan starts his day before arriving in the office by checking email and making note of any issues that have arisen over night. Anything that needs his immediate attention can be handled through email and requests to others to get started on solutions. After getting to the office, he touch base with his manager to make sure we are in sync for the day. Then he has a quick meeting with his team to make sure they know the goals and issues to be addressed that have come up over night. Most of the rest of his day is spent putting out fires, dealing with email and sitting in project meetings.

Business Analyst - Karen

Identifies the need for changing how the company works

Quote

“In my job I need to be a master multi-tasker. I love that there is constant change and that every day is different.”

Background

• BS in Business or Management
• 10 years experience
• Strong written and communication skills
• Strong analytical and conceptual skills
• Working knowledge of software development processes

Primary Goals

• Be a change agent for the company
• Successfully broker change between company stakeholders and IT
• Be on top of industry trends to know when change may be needed

Pain Points

• Managing urgencies, crises, and timelines
• Expectation that better outcomes can be achieved faster with new analysis and technology
• Difficult to achieve organizational and cultural changes necessary to implement some solutions
• An ever increasing pace of change in the marketplace

A Day in the Life

Karen starts her day by checking email and reading the latest articles from her feeds. Ideally, she can spend a few hours in the morning going through industry trend documents and identifying potential items that can be leveraged. Most days however, get full of stakeholder meetings and project meetings where she helps to keep things on track and making sure the business objectives are still going to be achieved.

In the afternoon, her goals are to write up proposal and plans. She also prefers to spend at least one hour looking through the data to support upcoming proposals and making sure that they still make sense for the business.

Enterprise System Administrator - Yvonne

Ensure current IT infrastructure works seamlessly

Quote

“What people don’t realize is that being an System Administrator is a 24/7 job. There is a constant stream of emails with requests and issues from all fronts and you really have to know how to prioritize and triage effectively to be successful at this job. It is definitely not for everyone, but I enjoy the pace and the constant challenge.”

Background

• B.S. in Computer Science
• 15 years experience
• Shell script expert
• Good at putting all the parts together

Primary Goals

• Suggest useful, secure and flexible tools that can be adopted by the organization to achieve day-to-day tasks
• Make sure upgrades and new deployments are smooth with little to no downtime
• Be a reliable source of information for co-workers and users
• Unified management of server resources
• Ability to understand resource usage across server inventory to identify underutilized resources

Pain Points

• Constant interruptions
• Having to be available 24/7 depending on the issue
• Stress due to picking the right technology
• Proliferation of various management console interfaces to have to manage

A Day in the Life

Yvonne starts her day by checking email before she even gets out of bed to make sure there were no failures overnight and there are no fires that can’t wait until she gets to the office. Once satisfied that all is well, she gets ready, takes care of her family and heads into the office. Upon arriving at the office, she makes a pot of coffee and again checks her email. Her priorities include correcting any issues that are stopping others from working and escalating anything that she cannot work on herself. Yvonne then checks in with her supervisor on the day's activities, checks on any hardware deliveries and communicates with co-workers on overall system status.

Enterprise System Architect - Kevin

Links the business mission, strategy and processes to the IT strategy

Quote

“I love my job...I am one of a few who get to work strategically with Leadership and still maintain a technological connection to the product. Exploring new technologies and innovations and figuring out how our product can benefit is one of my favorite aspects of the job. It can be very stressful and demanding, but that is how I know I am making a difference to my team, product and company.”

Background

• B.S. in Computer Science
• 25 years experience
• Expert skills in software design and testing; Agile
• Knows Java, JavaScript, C, C++, HTML5 and CSS
• Uses Eclipse IDE

Primary Goals

• To set strategic goals through collaboration with senior leadership.
• Ensure the overall integrity of the application.
• Document and communicate industry trends and a roadmap for implementing.
• High-level understanding of the entire system.
• Responsible for selecting systems and specifying deployment lifecycles and system configuration.

Pain Points

• Constantly need to sell ideas that may result in deadline changes.
• Not enough resources to keep things as current as needed.
• No authority to make things happen; always negotiating between timeline, budget and technology.
• Spend a lot of time documenting requirements, needs and trends in order to communicate to all stakeholders.

A Day in the Life

Kevin starts his day by catching up on his feeds related to security, serviceability and other industry trends to make sure he is aware of new ideas. He then has his daily standups with the dev teams and meets one on one with team members that have issues or that he needs to ask questions of.

Kevin spends the majority of his afternoon documenting the roadmap and evaluating options to determine if they meet feature requests/needs and how they fit into his strategies to meet enterprise compliance. Once a week, he meets with Senior Leadership to report on progress as well as identify any recommended changes to direction that he has. If leadership has issues with his recommendations, he needs to wrap back around and come up with other alternatives or bolster his arguments for proceeding with his original recommendation.

Enterprise Developer - Rajiv

Design and implement code

Background

• BS in Computer Science
• 8 years of experience
• Java, Javascript, CSS, MVC frameworks, github

Primary Goals

• To design and implement code
• To leverage the best tools for the job
• To complete tasks in as efficient and timely manner as possible

Pain Points

• Not having enough time to complete tasks required
• Being restricted by existing resources/tools that don’t enable the ability to deliver new functionality
• Too much bureaucracy in the organization

A Day in the Life

When Rajiv gets to the office he spends a few minutes catching up on his feeds and checking email. Then he participates in his team’s standup meeting and sets up some time with a coworker who he needs help from to complete his story. Until he can meet with him, Rajiv works on fixing bugs that have been found. Late morning, Rajiv has two project meetings to attend and then has his quick meeting to unblock his story.

After lunch, Rajiv finishes his story and starts on the next one in his backlog. Usually there are additional bugs that get filed throughout the afternoon so he reserves the last hour and half to work on those before heading home.

Enterprise DevOps Developer - Devin

Continuous integration/Continuous delivery

Quote

“Some folks think I’m a sys admin, others think I’m a coder. The truth is, I’m both and a lot more!”

Background

• B.S. in Computer Science
• 10 years experience
• Skilled in IT operations and software testing
• Specializes in Java as well as Python and Perl
• Uses Jenkins and Ansible

Primary Goals

• Ensuring that all applications migrate smoothly throughout the entire lifecycle, from the development process to production support.
• Ensuring that the automation process works efficiently among the team: developers who implement features, system administrators who manage access control, and operators who monitor the applications and servers.
• Identifying the root cause of problems in test, staging and production environments, as well as the infrastructure.

Pain Points

• Multiple tools, integration points, incompatibilities, and problems with PaaS and IaaS create many obstacles.
• When a build cannot pass the tests, a lot of time is spent looking for the team members who are responsible for the build or the specific feature that is causing a problem. This is exacerbated when he does not know the responsibilities of certain people on the team.

A Day in the Life

Devin starts his workday by checking on the status of the overnight builds. One build failed miserably, so his first order of business is to find out why. After he figures out which component appeared to cause the problem, he opens a Severity 1 ticket on that component so the responsible developer will be notified immediately. Devin gets an automated out-of-office notification from that developer, so he has to inspect and fix the code himself, and then kick-off the test of the build again.

Because of the unexpected issue, Devin arrives late to the weekly DevOps meeting with his team of developers, quality engineers, and product managers. The main topic is the decreasing availability and performance of the deployment system, so they need to plan for a more scalable and performant solution. After this, he completes his daily status report about the CI/CD pipeline to the engineering management team. Once that is sent, Devin, intermittently coordinates work among his team members in between the moments he gets to modify the scripts that orchestrate the complete deployment of development, QA, and production environments.

Enterprise DevOps Developer and Systems of Differentiation Developer - Ryan

Background

• B.S. in Computer Science
• 10 years experience
• Skilled in IT operations and software testing
• Specializes in Java as well as Python and Perl
• Uses Jenkins and Ansible

Primary Goals

• To design and implement code
• To leverage the best tools for the job
• To complete tasks in as efficient and timely manner as possible

Pain Points

• Not having enough time to complete tasks required
• Being restricted by existing resources/tools that don’t enable him to deliver new functionality
• Too much bureaucracy in the organization

Enterprise and ISV Developer - Systems of Innovation - Ben

Design and Implement Code

Primary Goals

• To design and implement code
• To leverage the best tools for the job
• To complete tasks in as efficient and timely manner as possible

Pain Points

• Not having enough time to complete tasks required
• Being restricted by existing resources/tools that don’t enable him to deliver new functionality
• Too much bureaucracy in the organization

Traditional ISV

Primary Goals

• To build, develop and sell consumer or enterprise software
• Partner with platform providers to sell more software
• Ensure customers are satisfied and their needs are being met
• Work with multiple teams including partner, customer and internal to address issues and concerns

Pain Points

• Different customers have different requirements that can be conflicting
• There is always something that needs to be corrected
• Can’t ship on a quick enough schedule to satisfy the customer base

Next-Gen ISV

Primary Goals

• To build, develop and sell consumer or enterprise software
• Partner with platform providers to sell more software
• Ensure customers are satisfied and their needs are being met
• Work with multiple teams including partner, customer and internal to address issues and concerns
• To ship apps faster
• To leverage containers and other emerging technologies as soon as possible
• Multi-modal development
• SaaS model first, then deploy in organization

Pain Points

• Different customers have different requirements that can be conflicting
• There is always something that needs to be corrected

Business Operations - Isaac

Management of the Operations Team

Background

• B.S. in Information Systems
• 8 years experience - Cloud Services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)
• Specializes in Java, Python; knows C, C++
• Expert knowledge of UNIX, LINUX and Windows

Primary Goals

• Ensuring successful day-to-day operations of the technology infrastructure and that all Service Level Agreements (SLA) with customers are met, and creating plans and providing support for instances when an SLA is compromised.
• Quickly receiving and reviewing real-time reports of critical SLA criteria: availability, system response times, security/privacy, disaster recovery time, call center resolution time, dispute mediation, and change management.
• Scheduling, budgeting, and staffing system maintenance and upgrades to ensure maximum operational performance.

Pain Points

• Technological and financial limitations make it very challenging to migrate legacy applications to the cloud

A Day in the Life

The first order of business for Isaac is to review the reports of system operations from the previous day. He’s especially interested in the availability numbers because a big software upgrade was applied to a few servers overnight. Fortunately, system availability was not affected, and the upgrade should improve the numbers for system response time, so it was a win-win for customers and Isaac, who constantly keeps his eye on the SLA commitments.

Afterwards, Isaac attends a meeting with his staff to discuss the exit strategy plan for a customer who will be leaving their service at the end of the month. A smooth transition is a must.

Isaac then has a series of meetings with the technical leads on his staff to discuss proposals for rolling out new server hardware during the next quarter. He needs to balance capacity and performance with the tight budget he’s been given for expansion, so he needs lots of details so he can evaluate and select from the multiple options on the table.

Product Manager - Pablo

Customer and industry liaison to the product and the company

Quote

“A lot of my time is spent gathering resources, coordinating various teams to agree on decisions or work to achieve customer goals. I need to spend more time distilling down ideas and driving agreement across disparate teams. My role is about working with other to build the grand plan. Improving communication, clarity on commitment and direction, would result in more timely decision making.”

Background

• B.S. in Computer Science
• 5+ years experience, including project management + software development environment
• Deliver multiple projects, cross-functionally
• Expert planner with business process definition
• Influencer in org up to SVP with more experience

Primary Goals

• Understand product’s business + UX needs
• Coordinate design, development, delivery, documentation, launch, sales enablement + requests, service, integration, support.
• To work with stakeholders, UX + Dev to transform requirements into experiences to deliver + assure all are met.
• Managing market requirements, trends, competitive landscapes, constraints, cost, models, time, scope, risks and P+L to the executive team.
• Manage customer partnerships + grow business opportunities
• Understanding company's strategic goals + reflecting those in the product

Pain Points

• Stakeholder buy in
• Delivering on time
• Visibility into cross functional statuses
• Having enough time to spend with all the team and juggling priorities
• Driving problem resolution

A Day in the Life

Pablo begins his day by checking his calendar, sees what meetings he has today. Next he reviews emails and follows up on any IMs that he may not have responded to. If any fires have occurred overnight, Pablo will jump on resolving issues or unblocking progress. He gets on a couple of customer calls and works to either gain insights or resolve issues with the customer. His day is full of meetings with co-workers, executives and conversations with customers. He is always working to coordinate and manage the products across teams and throughout the company, as well as with the customer base. This also means that Pablo occasionally touches base with some of the Sales and Customer Experience teams. He occasionally goes on site to visit customers + partners. He typically makes rounds with Development + Project Management to assure that everything is on track. Pablo says that his role requires him to wear many hats. He considers his role part visionary, traffic coordinator, technologist and communicator. “I love my job, it energizes and exhausts me, all at the same time! Have more data to provide insights and guidance would give me more time to focus on gaining deeper insights into customer + market needs, rather than focusing on if the work is going to get done.”

Student

Background

• Engineering or Computer Science student
• Multiple developer environment experience
• Plays 3D games

Primary Goals

• Needs a personal system for software classwork and personal projects
• Software class work may require particular tool chain versions
• To try out new versions of open source applications when released
• Play computer games
• Listen to music
• Interact with friends and family through social media primarily through cellphone

Educator

Background

• B.A. in Education
• 15 years in academia with different roles related to teaching and administration

Primary Goals

• Create lesson plans and make available to students, i.e., blackboard
• Keep up to date with entering grades into on-line systems for transparency with students
• Keep up with responding to emails from colleagues and students
• Create meaningful and engaging presentations

Researcher

TBD