Tom Cotton’s 8109

The shiny part of my job is working with the innovations team developing a proof of concept (POC) project. I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with this education.au innovations initiative and to have the tutelage of Mike Seyfang to guide me through the process.

The background

What’s a Proof of Concept project?
A high risk, high trust and low governance project that creates a conceptual solution for the client. Focus solely on the concept. Forget security. Forget firewalls. Forget QA etc. What is delivered is a bare-knuckled prototype which demonstrates how it could solve the issues your client deals with.The project has no limits other than Time (approx 3 months) and Resource a small team working part time within a small financial budget. Concluding each POC month is a ‘Show and Tell’ to an audience of sponsors, users and internal teams - each one being more public than the last.

What are the Project Outcomes?
Can anything of value come out of something so removed from reality? Lots! These are just a few:

• Project Outcomes:

- Innovation: new ideas and new approaches from more directed conceptual thinking.
- Better starting position - much closer to the solution suited to the user needs.
- Better position to ask really pointed questions and address issues such as accessibility, security, privacy and quality.
- Agile in response to ideas and feedback particulrly with shorter feedback times

• People Outcomes

- Invigorating creativity amongst participants
- Development of new skills
- The discussions held

• Organisational Outcomes

- Lower financial risk as the POC compared to the risk of a rigorously produced project failing.
- Marketing opportunity: showing possibly how to addressing real issues in a real way.

The experience

It’s fantastic having low levels of process being imposed on the project. There are certain roles such as technical, user, expert and project manager but it’s a group people equally contributing and debating ideas all focused on envisaging outcomes and solving problems. That is why it’s so exciting.

My role has been to manage the Proof of Concept process. Some of the work has been blogged by Nick Lothian. It’s a process that I’ve really enjoyed and as well as been challenged.
The challenging bits are more interesting so here’s some examples:

• Recently I’ve felt it difficult to keep the POC focused and moving forward. I did not ’swap caps’ from contributor to project manager. For two weeks I was not successful in balancing the ‘ideas’ discussion with the ‘make’ discussion. I should have pulled discussions back to the core questions to be answered and then tackle ‘how to make it’ straight away.
• Working the project’s part-time nature directly impacts on what and when can deliver. That said this is precisely the point of a proof of concept. Having a limited time focuses on delivering core features - dropping ‘nice to have’ ideas into a ‘carpark’ instead of developing them.

More on proof of concepts and the current POC later…