Open Stack

Hi Jeff,

Do you think that it makes sense to have another onsite to work through our short term goals as a team?  I would propose Austin because of its proximity to a number of the team members from Rackspace, IBM and HP.

The reason I ask is that it felt like the group was able to complete a significant amount of work when they were sort of locked in a room together…

Piet





From: Jeffrey A Calcaterra <jacalcat at us.ibm.com<mailto:jacalcat at us.ibm.com>>
Date: Sunday, October 12, 2014 at 11:31 AM
To: "openstack-personas at lists.openstack.org<mailto:openstack-personas at lists.openstack.org>" <openstack-personas at lists.openstack.org<mailto:openstack-personas at lists.openstack.org>>
Subject: [Openstack-personas] Proposal for personas framework

All,

I'm sorry about the delay in getting this out. This is a follow-up to the discussion at the personas meeting last Wednesday. To be honest, I am swamped and writing this down forced me to think through a lot of details.

Earlier this year, I proposed using companies and later ecosystems (which can contain multiple companies) to provide context to our personas. I proposed this because the goals of the personas are going to dependent on their job responsibilities. A cloud administrator at a large bank running a production environment is going to do different things than a cloud administrator at a cloud service provider or a small test and development cloud or a research cloud. In an enterprise, much of what users do is determined by their job, IT policies and management, and in a research cloud, their policies will likely be much less formal.

So does this mean we need to interview enough customers to create 25+ personas? No.

The goal is to make our assumptions clear about the kinds of companies that are out there and have a context to place our interviewees. We can fill in the ones that we already have data for and use them as a way to focus recruiting, but we would only explicitly recruit for the ones that either we as a group or our companies think are important. And for data we could use what we have, what we have from our own proprietary work and target new interviews with our own or new customers. We would then need to come together with other teams who share the same users and create personas that make sense (for example, IBM, HP & Red Hat all probably have many customers that look like CNBB Securities and we could work on those personas together). For the proprietary data, we would each be responsible for scrubbing it of anything confidential or that should not be otherwise made public.

What we have as personas and ecosystems are not set in stone. I came up with a set of these derived from the personas and what I know about the industry and we've expanded these based on discussions with the other team members. We can add to or combine these as needed and they will change over time (for example, we would hope that CNBB Securities will be using OpenStack broadly in a year or two).

I think everyone was OK with this general approach.

So I think the next steps would be:

Short term

1. Fill in the persona, company and ecosystem placeholders with whatever you know based on your interviews-even one datapoint is something that we should share-and I think as long as we are honest about the datasources, then I think that is OK.

2. Look at the ecosystems I created and the roles. Are we missing any key ones that you are aware of? Add them and make a note by clicking the Make a comment link.

3. Choose ecosystems where you have some need or expertise: Large Cloud Service Provider sounds like Rackspace and Aminah has agreed to help flesh out TBD Company (Enterprise using OpenStack). I suspect Red Hat, HP and IBM all have customers like CNBB securities, and probably the Medium-Sized IT service provider providing Cloud Services. Hopefully, somebody has some more info about the university one or maybe we can get that from the community. Put what you know about your ecosystems and work with the other team members on fleshing it out. We need to get rid of all the TBDs before we start making this more widely publicized.

When we do our next wave of interviews

1. Recruit from those ecosystems. We can focus these on whichever roles we choose as a team. And different team members can choose whatever ecosystems make sense. We could get data internally, from our own customers or the community.

2. Use the companies as part of the personas interview and validate those with the interviewees. We could also ask interviewees if the personas that we have sound right for their environment.

Longer term

1. Target the Summit after Paris to have something we want to present the community.

2. Intersect with any efforts trying to define "the user" and work with them to validate, expand and adopt our users.

3. In the meantime, try to instill as a best practice including personas or ecosystems as part of the Blueprints process. As part of presenting to the broader community, it would be great to have some proof points about the value of personas.

If this sounds good, then let's get to work. If not, please send your feedback to the mailing list. We can also discuss at the next meeting.

Jeff

Jeff Calcaterra
IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack User Experience Design and Research
STG UI Patent Board Chair
email: jacalcat at us.ibm.com<mailto:jacalcat at us.ibm.com>