Why is end to end so hard?

These are tough economic times. We notice it at home. We notice it at work. In business, we’re all focussing on costs. And we all have targets. The big risk with an objective led and target based reward approach is that we miss the bigger picture. This can be particularly damaging in the intranet space, where developers of online services become very focussed on their own objectives, usually at the expense of the user. In this insular world, there is a danger they will think the work is done and objective achieved when the application is switched on. It doesn’t seem to matter that it’s inaccessible, unusable, and results in the user having to invest huge amounts of time being trained or trying to find their way round a poorly designed interface.

So, instead of individually focussed targets, we should be looking at team targets that take an end to end view. The measurement should start at the point the customer or sponsor has an idea, and follow right through to the moment when the user becomes happy and competent with the system. That way things will get joined up and we’ll shorten production cycles.