Microsoft’s Scenario Focused Engineering (SFE)
Drive end user excitement
“Consumers influence key technology trends at home and at work and we must deliver exciting and innovative products that win customer loyalty through greatdesign” Steve Ballmer (August 3, 2009)
Consumer or the end-user is very important in defining the key trends and for that a software company should deliver innovative products to meet end-user expectations. To win customer loyalty is another reason to build product that delivers what the consumer wants. The customer wants a product which is useful, desirable and usable.
How to achieve the product desirable by the customer? Scenario Focused Engineering is the way!
So now what is the way to achieve what customer desires. Microsoft has created a process known as Scenario Focused Engineering (SFE). This approach is customer-centric and iterative approach where you observe your customer, get input from customer, write scenarios and get the requirements and define success metrics, create multiple scenarios and then you prototype and build.
Scenario Focused Engineering
The SFE steps
- Get to know your customer
- Create user scenarios and measure success
- Consider multiple solutions
- Prototype and build
The iterative approach – Scenario Focused Engineering
Scenario Focused Engineering for Microsoft Dynamics AX
While I was working as Microsoft vendor in 2013 for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, we attended 4 day workshop/course on Scenario Focused engineering arranged by our company. We were trained to apply the concepts of SFE. In March 2013, our feature of Position Budgeting in Dynamics AX 2012 was kicked-off and we followed Scenario focused engineering and successfully created the feature. Just for the record, the feature was released in the CU7 update. I am lucky to get the SFE training course and one of the few Dynamics AX professionals in Pakistan having the practical experience of Scenario Focused Engineering.
