Tales From the Trenches

Eric Snyder: With this story, everyone knows the importance of buy-in, but it really highlights the importance of understanding your audience. So where the story goes when I first started one of the jobs, I did my typical discovery phase, you know, I met with all the different stakeholders and all the people that I would be working with directly and indirectly and I got to realize that most of their problems, at least most of the low-through problems all stemmed from the same thing which was the inability to get any data. One physician actually described it as he was missing out two days a week with his kids because he would sit there at night, manually transcribing data from his EHR over to whatever it is that he was doing.

So, when I first started out, the first project that I did was to correct this, and I made a gigantic dashboard with everything that anyone could want, so that the cell serves, people could log into a website and just pull down whatever data that they were looking to get and I ended up presenting this at a big faculty meeting there over 100 people, and it was really well received. Everyone is talking about how I finally solved all these problems and all these things. 

So, I go back to the office with a big head, and I sit down, I turn on auditing, and I wait a week. Well, at the end of that week, I looked and there were a few people who used it, but basically no one was using it, so I went back out and I talked to everyone again, and everyone said they had the same problem, they couldn't get data, and they couldn't get anything that they needed. and I would say, but I made you this dashboard, you could get it. And the problem was that I didn't understand the audience, it was too big. 

Therefore, it was exactly what I would have wanted, but not what they would have wanted. There were 100 different filters, and they would have had to click all through all these things. It was just too much. So, I ended up going back and fixing that, and I sort of talked about how I solved those problems as well, and some of the classes that I teach, but yeah, so this is pretty much my story about understanding the audience.