Customers buy products and services to help get jobs done. This position forms the basis for our methodology, UC. The first step in UC, building a business model, is not focused on the user requirements; rather, it is focused on the job the customer is trying to get done. From the customer’s perspective, it is the job that is the stable, long-term focal point on which value creation should be centered. Being stable and of long-term focus, the jobs can be formally modeled. So, instead of capturing user abilities such as printing a report, the job is accepted as the unit of analysis. To capture job requirements, the jobs that customers are trying to get done must be dissected and studied to determine what customers are measuring when they are judging their satisfaction with the way the job is being performed. The artifact of this detailed job analysis is the business model, the first step of UC.

To create the business model, our approach is “design within,” that is, the concerns and ideas of people in the system should be the basic fabric of the design. People work from the center (themselves) rather than from the outside (others). It is business stakeholders who build business models, assisted by the external experts.

We apply this position to providing service to our own customers: software solution providers or solution buyers. We do not provide our service for the sake of service or the needs of individual customers; rather, our goal is to help our customers get their jobs done: that is, to deliver software projects on budget, on spec, and on schedule to their customers’ satisfaction. From that perspective, we share profit-and-loss responsibilities; that is, our performance is judged by the value proposition we offer to our customers. We live by the revolutionary result of our research, which is the ability to produce faster, better, and cheaper software. Our goal is to benefit our customers with our research breakthroughs in order to serve two purposes: the purpose of science and the purpose of community self-interest.