Sprint 3: SMEs@Work/India

Above you see subject matter experts (SME) Adrienne Miller, Duncan Bolton and Jason Crichton discussing a new ZIMS Screen with Rajneesh Bhatnagar, the UI expert who creates the first draft of ZIMS screens.

Jason brings aquarium expertise into ZIMS development, Duncan offers deep knowledge from the curator’s point of view and Adrienne calls on her many years as a registrar. ZIMS is multi-faceted software that serves the needs of the zoo and aquarium industry in a far wider way than ISIS legacy software, so we have engaged SMEs with a wide array of backgrounds.

In a general sense, software must speak two languages at the same time. One language is technical: the language developers speak as they construct ZIMS. Users will never see or hear this language, but it is clearly critical to ZIMS working right. The other language is what we sometimes call “zooquarium.” It is the language you use all day in your work. It is unique from the language spoken in the accounting industry or investment world, or fundraising or law, or hundreds of other industries that have their own professional business software.

In an environment containing about fifty developers in India and Minnesota, each writing the technical code for parts of ZIMS, the SMEs are your representatives watching for ways that ZIMS does or does not work well for you. It’s an environment with a natural tension: the SMEs don’t speak software language, so they must continuously check that what they have said is heard correctly by those who don’t speak zooquarium. At the same time the SMEs must be comfortable with the fact that not all ideas they have can fit the rules for solid software development. So there is a natural tension in this process, as there is in any collaboration.

Here is the screen they are looking at – a screen having to do with census taking. Ragneesh creates a mock up with questions and comments and the SMEs help him work toward the next draft. (We'll offer a more detailed description of this process in the next ZIMS podcast.)

This quick and efficient interplay between the SMEs and the development team is the reason we decided to locate SMEs in India. (Who are the SMES again?)

New ZIMS Screens = HAPPY

We are beginning to show the new ZIMS screens around, to gather reactions and feedback. Last week Elisabeth Hunt, ISIS Director of Training and Support, conducted a 40-minute WebEx demonstration of ZIMS to 60 staff from ZIMS Early Adopter institutions. The reactions have been enthusiastic! Click here to read them.

Click here to see one of the new ZIMS screens. It’s a picture of the “Add Basic Information” Taxonomy screen. If you look at the left-hand menu on the ZIMS screen, you’ll see one of the coolest design features. Each blue button opens a "drop down" menu when clicked, making navigation within an area very easy. We’ll tell you more about this feature as well as “The Beauty of Tabs” in our next video podcast. And yes, we know it’s geeky to be so excited about all of this. But that’s who we are! (To view past ZIMS Podcasts, click here)

The screens we can show at this early stage are, frankly, not all that interesting to most people because they are ones used by ZIMS administrators in institutions, not by people who are generally working directly with animals. But the design elements (the UI or “User Interface”) are consistent throughout ZIMS whether you are entering the address of a zoo or a new Sun Bear into your collection.

New ZIMS Podcast: Risk

Any large project ought to have a risk identification and mitigation plan – the attempt to see (and prevent) everything that could go wrong.

This video podcast takes you on a seven-minute exploration of some of the ways we are managing risk in the ZIMS project.

You can watch the video by clicking the "play"arrow inside the screen below. Or to watch it in a slightly bigger format, see it on You Tube by clicking here.