Adopt a non-techie. Help your business team move faster

John McCaffrey, Wednesday, April 8, 2009 @ 4:00 am

I've been spending some time with our internal sales and marketing team to hash out some of our goals for the year, and it became quite clear to me that non-developers are on their computers all day long facing some of the same technical challenges we do.

Some of the tasks they have to do:

• "take the data out of the spreadsheet for last quarter and compare it to this quarter"
• "gather the bounced emails from our newsletter posting, and update our list, pulling out duplicates"
• "replace all the names and addresses from our NDA agreement each time it is sent to a new client"
• "slice and dice google ad-words and google analytics data"

So I've resolved to take some time each week to 'Adopt a non-techie', and help them spend less time 'screwing around with the computer' and more time on the most valuable tasks they do.

In the same way that developers need to be as efficient as possible with the tools they use, so do the rest of the people at your company. At Pathfinder a good number of us have attended Neal Ford's Productive Programmer talks at the NofluffJustStuff conference, which covers a series of strategies for becoming extremely efficient as a developer. For those on our team that haven't attended the presentations, they pick up the best tricks through pairing and internal developer brownbags, but now I suggest we take the same approach with our business team.

While the benefits of having two developers pair on a technical task has been covered a million times, I would say it also applies to pairing with your UI designer, QA and BA resources as well. Whenever they need to take lots of text and reformat it, search/replace, etc, they might be tackling that problem manually, when you could help them solve it with a quick script or finding the plugin they need.

A few areas you might be able to help them with:

1. Forms and mail merge in word
2. Advanced searching and replacing in word
3. Google docs now has more powerful regular expression capabilities for searching and replacing (Actually, I could do a whole post on the benefits of getting your team to use GoogleDocs, would anyone be interested in that?)
4. Building a quick survey with google forms or surveymonkey
5. General text manipulation
6. Searching through all of their emails or local documents for anything related to the 'Jelly Belly vs. M&Ms' case
7. Excel spreadsheet manipulation, charts, etc.
8. Web searching and data extraction
9. Managing and sharing bookmarks and research data with others
10. Even tools like Selenium or iMacros could help your Business team automate repetitive form filling, web searching or web site testing.

Goals (First do no harm!):

1. Find the right problem. Just like we see in Product development, sometimes the most difficult problem is also the rarest, and not the best use of your time. In fact, the greatest area of efficiency is more likely to come from something they know how to do, but could be doing faster. (Instead of saving them 30mins off of a task they do twice a year, you might find something that saves 15mins every day!)
2. Don't expect them to become a developer. The goal is to reduce the time these things get in their way, so they can focus on the higher value stuff.
3. Make it easy for them to repeat the process (let them document it in their words, or even make a screencast while you're doing it)
4. Share your successes with the rest of the team (notes and screenshots/videos up on the wiki)

Use the right tools for the job!

While its best if you can help them to become more efficient with the tools they use everyday, you may find that they are just not using the right tool for the job, or if its a one-time thing, and you need to bring your toolkit with you.  For that I recommend a usb drive with your favorite PortableApps (notepad++ is great for text editing), or my new favorite PortableUbuntu (which lets you run linux off the usb drive, while accessing the files on the windows system)

What gets in your way?

To the business folks out there, what are some of the tasks you do to manipulate data? What frustrates you or eats up a lot of your time?

Reach out to your nearest techie, I bet they can help, or post your problem here and we'll make some recommendations.

Related posts:

1. Can your Selenium do that? Testing flash/flex and silverlight in web apps with iMacros
2. Stick with ERB or move to Haml
3. Does your project have Code Ownership Culture?
4. Category and UI changes on Pathfinder blogs
5. Agile 2009: A reminder of why each team needs leadership

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