While teaching my Project Management course, I discusses a few monitoring tools like Standard Task Units, and mentioned that (unfortunately) I don't know any good software tool to create and maintain those diagrams. A few participants joked (sort of :-) about adapting one of the company's tools to draw those diagrams. Although we weren't serious about that (I guess :-)), this would have had a significant impact on the company: it would have turned all the
developers into
users, although peculiar users. This
does make a difference, because it's an interesting way to remove a conceptual barrier; "thinking like users" is much much easier when
we are users :-).
A few years ago we used to say
eat your own dog food to encourage companies to use their own products. Judging by what I see every day, I guess that wasn't really appealing :-). For more on the origin of that term, see the
Wikipedia.
