demo feedback and next steps

[Alex-SF]

This week I demoed the OpsScorecard application to someone who manages
a large technical operations organization responsible for change
management, release, system administration, and infrastructure
support. Got lots of really good feedback.

Before the demo, I gave a short explanation about the vision of the
project and some possible initial scenarios. I brought up two possible
scenarios:
* first, a manager that has just been hired to run an existing
operation and has to get acquainted with what's being managed and how
* second, a manager that has been managing their organization but
wants to start driving improvement initiatives to improve service
levels

The demo started with the scorecard summary table, the default page
and I pointed out the standard metrics. I then moved on to the weekly
summary scorecards for the example service. From there I explained the
concept of the scoring system and what drives the scores (ie,
receipts, audits and definitions). Doing his took me through the other
main areas of the app: audits, inventory, people, receipts. Through
this latter part of the demo, I could perceive growing confusion as
there seemed to be a lot of concepts competing with the main idea of
service management scorecards. This issue was also exacerbated by the
UI itself, where several pages seemed to have more than one purpose.

I brought the demo back on track by talking about the metrics of the
summary and scorecard pages. It was at this point that exclamations
like "I don't even have half of these metrics", and "I really want to
have this information" arose. From there interest in the project grew
and discussion became a lot more enthusiastic.

Based on the feedback here were my conclusions:

1) Eliminate concepts from the application which are distracting from
the reports currently generated. This would include everything in the
Inventory section except Services.
2) Focus the UI around clear boundaries. For example, the Inventory
page is really about definitions and should not include information
about audits or activities
3) Rename "receipts" section to "Activity". This word is more clear.
4) In the Service scorecard page, remove the receipt activity timeline
5) Service management process definition should be internal to the
owning Service.
6) Remove the activity information from the Inventory/Service page
7) Revise the Activity receipts page to be organized by Service

I'll create some bugs in the tracker to represent these changes.

[Damon Edwards]

I think it would make sense to make the activity timeline be its own
fullpage report (like the spreadsheet view)

[Alex-SF]

Yeah, that's probably good along with establishing some interesting
activity metrics. I think we can do some brainstorming about how the
Activity area should shape up.

BTW, update your working copy to see some of the recent UI changes.