By Bradford Thomas, Contributing Writer 

Anyone who has survived blue-sky brainstorming sessions with potential clients knows that the most outrageous and radical ideas can sometimes prove to be the best ideas. Great ideas often cascade – coming in surges, quickly building upon and leveraging off of one another in a dynamic flow of interaction and innovation. Capturing those ideas without stifling the creative process is a huge challenge to product managers who are struggling to grasp the essential features their client really needs. Tools that offer the flexibility to accurately deliver prototype variations at a pace approaching the speed of thought can go a long way to accelerate the customer requirements step and shorten the entire product development cycle.

Take, for example, the Command Post of the Future, or CPOF, a U.S. Military program supported by DARPA to develop technology that accelerates the decision-making essential to success in life-or-death combat missions. As the software solutions spin-off of Pittsburgh-based MAYA Design, MAYA Viz, has spent the past five years developing decision support technology solutions that meets three basic military objectives:

• Increase the speed and quality of command decisions 
• Disseminate commands more effectively 
• Support a smaller, more mobile, more agile command structure

By working directly with both senior members of the military community and rank-and-file soldiers using a rapid prototyping process, MAYA Viz was able to translate these objectives into a software solution usable throughout the chain of command. Their software became known as the CPOF application, which, in turn, is built on top of the company’s CoMotion infrastructure product.

Defining requirements through storyboarding and rapid iteration 

MAYA Viz went to great lengths to learn exactly how information technology was being used during military operations and how decisions were being made based on that information. The company’s research staff even participated in military exercises and squad tactic training at the Army’s Command and General Staff College. 

As result of those exercises, MAYA Viz learned that decision-makers were spending more of their time gathering field data and listening to their fellow officers than in planning and executing decisions based on that information. And in many cases, the information they were receiving was static, failing to allow for collaboration between interested parties. 

MAYA Viz’ mission: to improve the quality, speed, and access to battle data and to provide the means for collaboration of ideas and strategies across decision makers. 
For the staff at MAYA Viz, the path to developing products for any client begins with gathering customer requirements using an iterative series of storyboards and prototypes. In the case of the CPOF, according to Dr. Werner Koepf, Chief Technology Officer for MAYA Viz, the company set out to build “a visionary prototype to give people a sense of what was possible – and to get them jazzed up about the program.” 

Here’s how it works: for each initiative, MAYA Viz draws elaborate storyboards that explain the technology concept and how it would be used. Those storyboards can, and often do, change dramatically from month to month. That’s because a test-drive by the customer can lead to radical changes in their product requirements. “A General can look at the storyboard and say I want to roll it out here and here and here,” says Dr. Koepf. “Now all of a sudden, we have a completely different user base with different tasks and data.” So the old storyboards have to be re-drawn.

Once the military users began exploring their CPOF prototype’s possibilities, they realized they could streamline their operational processes as well. So they began to adjust their procedures because they recognized that if they have real-time collaboration and information sharing, they can do things they had never dreamed of, according to Dr. Koepf. 

For instance, one MAYA Viz original storyboard depicted a Central Command into which all information was funneled and where all decisions were to be made. The ideas generated by the original storyboard led the officers to see the possibility of a more distributed command where information could move with each commander allowing collaboration to occur at any location. This represented a radical change in the military’s operational process.

These operational changes, in turn, led to more developmental changes in the technology. MAYA Viz describes this iterative dance between technology development and operational development as a “Double Helix.” Much like the sequencing process of creating DNA, “the technology spiral and the operations spiral evolve in parallel,” Dr. Koepf said. 

The Double Helix concept has allowed MAYA Viz to maintain a rapid and organic prototyping process that enables them to quickly respond to changing customer requirements.

Producing results instead of simply producing a product

Today, MAYA Viz is working with military strategists to evaluate how the integrated technologies of their Command Post of the Future application have changed the nature of tactical command and how the technology can be deployed in the field. Initial tests found that their collaboration software reduced the time it took for participants to gather data by 66%, improved situation awareness by 300%, and enabled four times as many missions to be planned, executed and analyzed as before. 

Recently, MAYA Viz took those same CPOF features and applied them to its flagship collaboration product, CoMotion. Yet without the benefit of rapid prototyping, the company would still be in the product development phase instead of providing tangible results to the client, according to Dr. Koepf. 

For most software companies, facing monthly product development cycles can be a daunting challenge. But MAYA Viz is able to meet this challenge because the company made an up-front investment in building the infrastructure that lies at the heart of the solution. Almost all the company’s applications share 90% of the same software code. The resulting robustness allows them to rapidly prototype thin applications every time a storyboard changes. “As the applications become thinner and thinner, they become more agile,” says Dr. Koepf. “As the applications become more agile, that’s when we can be wilder and more innovative with the storyboards.” 

As the Command Post of the Future experience demonstrates, rapid prototyping allows end-users to develop a feel for about 80% of a product’s capabilities, and to do it before the supplier sinks a ton of money and development time into building the wrong product – even if it had been the right product when development began.