Collaboration, not in the sense of a cohesive team willing to dive into the project together, or even a creative group capable of making spark decisions on UI/interactions, I’m talking about collaboration with the customer. Full committal from the Customer is paramount to success in .Net 3.0 projects, two-fold; I’ll get to that in a minute. I found this article on Gantthead last Monday to be particularly interesting: http://www.gantthead.com/content/articles/238587.cfm. It provides a motivating approach on participation levels from customers, and describes an interesting bit about how to find out why customers resist collaboration. I’ve seen many of the points described in real projects, and honestly, it’s tough to get customers to see and realize value that they bring to the table. Often times, the wrong stakeholders, or those that are too busy to participate on the project effectively, join the clan. Convincing the sponsor to place the correct, accountable bodies on the project is key, but getting those bodies to adopt collaboration is a challenge. Another dilemma I’ve found is the lack of participation during review cycles. I can see the value of dedicating more time up front to teach the stakeholders the value of collaboration as opposed to he who is made available only to answer questions as requested. This is certainly not a collaborative project as the article suggests.

Back to WPF projects – .Net 3.0’s presentation layer is abounding with possibilities. I don’t feel that a lot of customers fully understand or realize the value of collaboration on this platform. It’s a very hands-on, touch feely, truly out of the box, paradigm shift provided on UI, UX, and interactivity. Too often, we’re left to define and describe this information because 1) customers are overwhelmed by the vastness of the platform’s capabilities, 2) customers saw something they liked at an event recently and are hard pressed to get it regardless of the risks, and 3) customers simply don’t realize what a value proposition their business and data expertise bring to the project. I think more interesting UI and interactions are on the horizon when customers intend to collaborate with us and actually follow through and deliver on that while we build rich applications together.