Why going lean makes sense
Applying lean concepts to my office took some convincing. I’m sure it was nerve-wracking for a management cadre which was used to traditional software development.
The most frequent objection to “trying agile” I heard was:
What’s the point? If the programmers just did what they are meant to do in the first place, the job would already be done and we wouldn’t be sitting here in a meeting.
Fair enough. But programmers are not superhuman. They do not read minds. Nor are managers and creatives fully capable of conveying precisely what they want at every level of detail all of the time. Exceptional managers are patient, empathetic communicators who listen to their engineers more than they talk themselves. A skilled and conscientious designer has the advantage of being able to communicate through visuals, too. Mock screens showing every possible user interaction can do much to clarify to developers what exactly is meant to happen. Every single possible scenario can be anticipated and accounted for ahead of time. Such visual designers, however, are exceptional.
Lean is insurance against human fallibility
Your UX team might be the most rockin’ of rockstars, but odds are not everyone on your team acts exceptionally all of the time. It might be the case, but not every office has that luxury. By working in short development cycles, making relatively small changes while keeping overall integrity high, you protect your team from getting too far along in the project with a flaw built-in. By “flaw” I mean not only straight-up bugs, but also those technically working features which just don’t turn out to be what the product owner or client was expecting. Whatever gaps in communication might have occurred at the project’s outset can be addressed with less overall effort by your team and less overall impact on the project timeline as a whole. Solving problems becomes not that big a deal.
Lean makes solving problems simpler
I have found that no matter how hard the product owner, interaction designers, and front-end developers try to anticipate all the issues with a website or complex web app, there will also be little irritating glitches that nobody see coming. Because there’s no hard-and-fast spec sheet to follow, you’re more flexible in adapting to changing realities. It doesn’t really matter how to meet your business requirements as long as you meet them. As mentioned above, lean software development principles dictate that you should “build integrity in” to your web product. When you need to change something quickly, it doesn’t break the whole thing.
The Secret To Boosting Your Effectiveness As A Project Manager < Project Shrink Blog
Around the office I definitely do more listening than talking. By saying fewer words, it makes the words you do speak that much more interesting — so make them count!
With simple Reflective Listening techniques you can develop your communication skills:
Paraphrasing: repeat the same information, but only in different words.
Reflecting: reply with the same words, only add additional emotion to it (say it more strongly or more sad).
Questioning: ask for more information to have a better understanding.
Summarize: create a summary of the message sent.
Managing stress under a hard deadline | SadokOnline.com
So stressed out you need an extra shirt in your office drawer? I know the feeling. Here are some nice methodologies and habits to help you deal with deadline stress.
Having a deadline for a project is generally taken as a rough estimation and there is some implied flexibility that everybody in the organization secretly agrees to.
Having a hard deadline is different: if you “have to” end a project by a specific date or the whole work and investment you have done will be wasted, you are dealing with a different animal…
Here are some essential tools that can save your life
All You Need to Know about Web Design Project Planning and Process | Woobzine
Nice checklist: suitable for easy scanning and includes a helpful legend for which tasks are crucial moments (milestones) and which tasks will probably require you to spend money to get things done.
Having a keen understanding of Web Design Project Planning Process is invaluable. With a clear organization, you’ll be able to work better and more efficiently. Moreover, with this document you’ll be able to show your clients what they are paying for.
Here are the different steps of Web Design Project Planning Process.
(via butterflyx)
10 Definitive Tips for Writing Captivating Emails
For those of us who send dozens of email each day, it’s important to get into good writing habits. Worst case scenario is that your reader can tell from the tone, structure, or content of your email that this was your 50th email of the day and you were clearly not interested in communication. By getting into good habits, every email you send will seem like you wrote it at 10am after a nice, fresh cup of coffee and bagel. Click through for these helpful tips.
Emails are a great way to reach people, to keep reminding them that your site still exists and that they really should keep checking you out. After all, the people who receive your emails should already be familiar with you, they will have opted to receive emails from you, but now you have to make sure they pay attention to what you’re sending them.
But, you should keep in mind that every email list is different. You should see what works for your readers and avoid what I call the Amazon effect: just because it works for someone else doesn’t mean it’s right for you and your company.
Start with best practice and good ideas, and then tweak your processes to see what works best for your own email campaigns and keep refining your strategy.
Eight Tips on How to Manage Feature Creep | Six Revisions
Click through to the full article for elaborations on each of the eight tips. Great advice on controlling the expectations of your boss or your client.
Feature creep, also known as scope or requirement creep, refers to unforeseen requests for additions and changes that are outside the project scope. Here are eight tips and suggestions to help minimize and manage the effects of feature creep in your own projects:
1. Accept that feature creep will happen
2. Commit enough time to requirements-gathering
3. Set boundaries of what is and isn’t appropriate to revise
4. Be the devil’s advocate when changes are requested
5. Be task-oriented, not-vision oriented
6. Don’t give in to unwarranted requests simply to be on your employer’s good side
7. Research before committing
8. Don’t yourself be guilty of allowing feature creep to happen
If You Can Not Measure It, You Can Not Manage It < Project Shrink Blog
Measuring progress, if nothing else, provides a topic of discussion for team members. Three easy “ice breakers” to get team mates talking are to state how far along you’ve gotten with your tasks, what you are going to do next, and what problems you’ve been facing.
Problem number one within projects is communication. The unclear exchange of information. And this “measuring thing” is exactly a tool that can contribute to solving at least part of the problems.
The god-father of this mantra must be Tom Gilb. He is screaming to measure things within software management for decades. The eye opener for me personally, was his emphasis on the use of metrics, expressing e.g. requirements using a scale with a range associated to it. You are not going to use it just to measure and if the subject has the wrong value hit the guy who created it on the head. When I first started out, this was really my impression of how these metrics would be used.
Instead, the use of metrics can be used to manage expectations, to help formulated key users their requirements, and to facilitate decision making. Gilb created a structure, Planguage, to express the requirements to process and product in. Every element has a metric associated with it; you define what the scale is, how you are going to measure it, what the past, current and desired values within the metric are.
