Playback Central: Real-time Changes and Scope Creep

Ed.: This is the second post in a series of Q+A sessions focusing specifically on playback session best practices, with our in-house expert, Kris Komassa. See our previous coverage on the first playback session here.

When you run a flow during a playback session, business people can jump right in and start suggesting additions, etc. How real-time are the changes that are made, and how often do you iterate feedback on a given flow?

It’s a difficult thing, actually, and it varies by playback. The highest priority for me is to capture any and all feedback accurately, anything that anybody blurts out or cites in the playback.

Then I like to, for anything that is able to be fixed immediately, go in and change it right then and there. First, this puts the business perspective’s mind to rest to have it displayed for them, right there in real-time. And second, we don’t have to worry about that specific piece of feedback after the fact as a lingering action item.

But the trick to it is that you don’t want the real-time revisions to turn into a long discussion of what we should and should not do. If someone’s requirement is very clear, then we’ll do it immediately in the playback, but otherwise we’ll take it offline and come back to it later – you don’t want to hi-jack the entire session if there isn’t consensus or at least a clear directive in terms of what needs to be changed.

Speaking of tasks outside of the session, how long typically do you work in between playback sessions?

As far as the loop, and how quickly we’re iterating on that, again it depends.

I like to iterate smaller changes within the small core team within a matter of a single day. We’ll loop back with the core project team and say “this is what we’ve heard, let’s recap it and figure out these changes,” and really get cracking right away.

If they’re bigger changes it will take more time of course, but the smaller changes happen very quickly. Sometimes we will take a week or 2 weeks in between sessions, but we like to get the feedback from those sessions published and out as soon as possible.

As a follow-up, how can you encourage participants to focus on practical problems associated with the business domain? And how do you keep scope creep in check?

We run into this all the time. Most important: setting expectations upfront. I’m a huge believer in setting expectations as I’ve said before, and I’m adamant about it.

I tell everyone in written form beforehand what to expect, and I reiterate those expectations when I send the calendar invite, and I reiterate it again when we begin the session itself.

I try to put it in the hands of the client as much as possible, but I’ll always level set and say “this is what you’re going to see today, this is what you’re not going to see today”. I tighten up the scope to make sure we’re all on the same page because the worst thing you can have is scope creep and scope discussion in that kind of a forum where you want it very tight and focused to show how you have progressed.

Ed.: This Q+A series on playback session best practices will continue later this week. If you have any playback-specific questions that you’d like to have answered, either as a follow-up to the content discussed here, or just in general, leave us a note in the comments!