Re: Not sure who I'm looking for...

[Sonja Waller <swaller_2000 -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

Dick, I am not sure what your role is. Are you the
project manager or tech writer or developer? You said
you captured the functional requirements. Are you a
business analyst? 
--- Dick Margulis <margulisd -at- comcast -dot- net> wrote:

> This is not a job posting. I wouldn't wish this job
> on a friend, and I 
> consider all of you friends--almost all, anyway.
> What I'm looking for is 
> help in crafting a job description that I will post
> elsewhere.
> 
> Here's the situation:
> 
> I have a client-from-hell who nonetheless pays well;
> so I keep doing 
> stuff for her. The current challenge is that she
> (big-right-brain, 
> non-linear, writing-challenged person that she is)
> is the SME for a 
> software product she has conceived and is trying to
> extrude from her 
> head onto paper, so it can be developed. She is in
> LA, I am in New 
> Haven, and I can hear her waving her hands over the
> phone. She's not 
> really an email person.
> 
> I've captured as many of the functional requirements
> as I can. However 
> the business logic layer is a highly complex expert
> system.
> 
> At one point a few years ago, someone the client
> hired did some 
> flowcharts to try to represent the logic of the
> system. I'm not 
> convinced either that a logic flowchart is the best
> way to represent the 
> system or to communicate it to today's developers.
> But I'm also not sure 
> that it isn't.
> 
> I know we've had many threads on other ways of
> representing systems 
> graphically, varying with the frame of
> reference--UML(?), DFD, etc. I'm 
> not adept at any of them, and there's the
> hand-waving thing and the 
> client-from-hell personality thing that also
> mitigate against my doing 
> this part of the job myself.
> 
> So I know I need to find someone who is patient and
> skilled at 
> extracting information from a difficult SME and who
> can work 
> face-to-face with her in LA for the several days it
> will take to extract 
> the information from her. But what I don't know is
> what technical skills 
> I'm looking for in terms of the best way to
> represent an expert system.
> 
> To clarify, this is for a functional spec, not a
> design spec. So the 
> idea is to represent the needed logic at an abstract
> level, not to 
> specify the design of the system to implement it.
> 
> Any suggestions?
> 
> Dick
> 
>
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Sincerely, 
Sonja 
 
Skillful speech not only means that we pay attention to the words we speak and to their tone, but also requires that our words reflect compassion and concern for others, and that they help and heal, rather than wound and destroy.








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