The raw problem reports may have to be rewritten onto PostIts, which is tedious. Similarly, items and structures generated during the emergent process have to be transcribed into a form suitable for the final report. Another disadvantage is that the group has to be convened at a common location, which could be difficult if its members are located across different sites. Working around these problems takes extra time and effort, which could be enough to dissuade practitioners from using this technique when they are on tight schedules. We are creating a prototype designed to address these limitations while still providing similar opportunities to a paper-based approach.
Elements are easy to manipulate.
Visual cues hinting at the emergent structures are easy to create and modify in a computational environment. The structures that are created become the structure for the final report. To make it easier to get the raw problem reports into the system, we provide a separate program that allows evaluators to record and categorize problems during the evaluation. The output of this program is the input to our prototype. The prototype is also groupware, which means that it can be used in a participatory process, even if all the participants are not present.