Experts in the field of assessment speak out: Eerk Hofmeester My name is Eerk Hofmeester, product owner at Optimum Assessment. I have been involved in digital testing and learning for eight years. However, I have been helping to realise customer wishes for 38 years. Over the years, I have held various roles. Designer, functional and process architect, business analyst and now product owner. In this latter role, I translate customer wishes into innovations and improvements to our assessment platform. The most important goal? To deliver as much value as possible to our customers! What has the most customer value? Optimum Assessment aims to ultimate testing experience and thus optimally tailor its platform to the needs of all its users. However, as developers of our own platform, we do not have infinite capacity. We cannot implement all improvements at once and must make choices and prioritise. As product owner, I help our organisation determine these priorities based on the highest possible value for as many of our customers as possible. How? By knowing in detail what our customers need. Co-creation: product development for and with the customer When I say ‘customer’, I always mean the end user. That is, of course, to begin with, the candidate who wants to take an important test in a pleasant manner and without any obstacles. But also consider the item and test constructor who wants to make high-quality wish to create tests. Then there is the psychometrist who based on the data wishes to improve the quality of the tests and individual items based on tests that have been taken. Finally, the regulator requires information about the orderly conduct of a test or examination. The dashboard of Optimum Supervisor provides real-time information for these purposes. Optimum Assessment's knowledge and years of experience in the testing domain help us make choices in all these scenarios. However, experience has taught us that only when the end user actually uses a new function can we determine whether it is what he or she needs. Problem description leading to new insights That is why we involve users in the development process as early as possible. In fact, before a single line of code is written, we already discuss a new option extensively with our users. Is it really necessary? How does it work in practice? Where does it actually hurt? The latter may sound strange, but I often see that it is precisely when describing the current problems that new insights arise that may lead us to do things very differently than we had planned. Once the initial sketches and ideas have been developed, we go back to those users. Is this what you meant? Would this work? What could be improved? Etc. Continuous feedback Only then do our development teams get to work, building a new feature step by step. We also share the intermediate steps with our customers, who can actually use them. At Optimum Assessment we work using an agile methodology. This gives us continuous feedback on whether we are on the right track and allows us to make adjustments if necessary. The fact that this sometimes leads to a different end result than originally planned is actually a positive thing. Apparently, that result is more in line with what users want and delivers more value than the original plan. Product development cycle Of course, the work does not stop there. Our testing platform assists large groups of users in creating, administering, assessing, and improving tests. In practice, even the smallest imperfections come to light. We therefore continue to listen to user feedback on areas that could be improved, made easier, faster, or more convenient, and incorporate this feedback into the next version. This completes the product development cycle!
