Posts

Showing posts from 2006

Getting Personal with Personas

Image
How do you get a large development team to make effective design and implementation choices? Often, it takes a short "walk in the shoes" of their most important audience, the user of the products or services they produce. "Our R&D staff need to spend more time in the field!", is the oft-quoted postmortem remedy. And of course while everyone is traipsing about the planet, blowing travel budgets, the clock keeps ticking as nervous sales organization wonder who will create the next value-add improvement that they can sell. Fortunately, there is a solution to the deadlock. The emerging practice of persona development has proven to be a great tool for accurately conveying a consistent set of user goals and behaviour to the implementation masses. Personas don't need to be fed, don't sleep, and will live inside of your development organization to continually help re-connect everyone with what's valuable to their users. Not using personas in your context

Requirements - a False Sense of Security

Image
The Challenge In an industry with over 35 years of software engineering experience, it's amazing that we have failed to produce any significant breakthrough that improves the ability of executing successful software projects . The brightest minds have been humbled battling the tide of anarchy that persistently undermines the progress of their complex initiatives. "Discipline and control", the gurus cry, will help curb our irresponsible creative surges. Envying their manufacturing counterparts, knowledge workers have reached out to embrace disciplines that have reduced the insanity while simultaneously eroding innovation and creativity beneath the weight of bureaucratic process and fragmented work distribution. In this protected environment, the "sigh of relief" eventually evaporates into a new level of panic, as emerging competitors run roughshod across existing markets with disruptive innovations. Successful assembly and delivery of complex artifacts is ulti

Communication Bridge: Picture my Business

Image
Each year, millions of dollars dissipate via projects that provide little residual value to their sponsors and end users. The source of the problem: an ever-widening communication gap between complex business needs and convoluted technical capabilities. Yet there is hope. One of my favourite bridging devices is a powerful visual modeling standard called Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) . Currently undergoing acceptance by the OMG , BPMN aptly crosses the chasm, clarifying business value and contextualizing technical capability through the following characteristics: Uses a common modeling language, easily understood by business and technical stakeholders Facilitates efficient process knowledge sharing for Business to Business (B2B) applications Addresses problems with previous attempts in using "software oriented" UML notation for business modeling Provides round trip engineering with XML based business processing languages like BPEL4WS Download an HTML version o

Crossing the Starting Line

Image
What does it really take to successfully launch a new business? In this extraordinary interview with Amar Bhidé , author of the book The Origin and Evolution of New Business , the editor-in-chief of Inc. Magazine draws out some incredible truths from the research done by Dr. Bhidé. Here are some highlights from the article summarizing 10 years of study that fly in the face of conventional wisdom: Most successful startups began without any innovative idea or product, with no specialized training and with relatively little capital. Critical success characteristics for entrepreneurs are: tactical creativity; adaptability and salesmanship. Successful entrepreneurs are very tolerant of ambiguity and find opportunities in uncertain "me-too" market niches, where they can offset risk to customers and other partners. The characteristics that propel a new business to initial success must shift to strategic planning and risk taking if the entrepeneur wishes to take the business from &

Open Sesame

Image
An Open Door The Internet has created radical new facilities for individuals to collaborate independent of geographical and economic constraints. Riding on the wave of this capability, is the growing phenomenon of open source development and services. This altruistic, voluntary trend is impacting the economics of software production around the globe. Although some would trivialize these attempts as insignificant, many others are jumping through the open door of opportunity. How do organizations make money from open source software? This ZDNet article summarizes how: Selling related services such as packaging and documentation Selling support services Creating custom licenses for particular customers Producing proprietary software that integrates with an open source system Of course, the product mixing strategy requires specific due diligence for an organization to ensure that they do not compromise the open-source licensing with their proprietary distribution. Here is some helpful

A Beautiful digital Mind

Image
I've long been fascinated by the effective use of Wikis to incubate and nurture research and information organically. Exposed to the power of Google search and the breadth of information on the Internet, everyone struggles with how to best interface their brain with the informational waterfall. Common approaches include: Bookmark mayhem - bookmark everything and then try to organize your bookmarks Tagging - a more flexible, generic style of bookmarking Gross capture - using cut and paste methods to copy verbatim information for future reference, hoping you can find it later. Wikis - value add contextualization to referential information in a searchable knowledge incubator. I was recently reminded of how crucially interdependent I have become on my personal Wiki in light of the number of projects that I'm juggling. I had switched to Microsoft OneNote for a couple of months, attracted to the ease of drag-and-drop capture from the Internet. Additionaly, OneNote automatically

Incubating Online

Image
One of the key challenges of facilitating business startup ideas is having an effective, low-cost virtual collaboration capability. Emerging out of the Web 2.0, AJAX enabled Internet services is an exciting number of innovative offerings. I've been using several of these sites in managing virtual communications and projects. Not only are these tools effective, but they are also free! Here are three sites I've been using: www.Airset.com Airset is a collaboration environment centered around calendaring. They provide a convenient tool to synchronize with my Palm, allowing full control over which appointments are shared based on categories. You can readily create multiple groups and easily manage merged views. The system includes the ability to selectively share contacts, to do lists and traditional discussion forum tools. The service is free with no published limitations. The system does not include any collaborative editing or filesharing capabilities. I use this system primaril

Getting Things Done with Gmail

Image
I've been long fascinated with David Allen and his " Getting Things Done " methodology. David has spent the last 20 years coaching executives on how to get their lives organized and more productive. Life in the information age requires the dual skill set of coping with an overwhelming amount of incoming data and managing a large volume of critical activity. A quote from the book sums up the challenge: A paradox has emerged in this new millennium: people have enhanced quality of life, but at the same time they are adding to their stress levels by taking on more than they have resources to handle. David's methodology, abbreviated as GTD, involves the following disciplines: collect everything explicitly, outside of your head process your inbox quickly, regularly and thoroughly decide outcomes and the next actions every time you review new information do quick actions immediately delegate, schedule or defer tasks to appropriate contexts break complex tasks into projects d

An Alternative to Anarchy

Image
Chaotic Behaviour When faced with complexity, many organizations and individuals resort to primal behavior. The queasiness of being out of control often generates these symptoms: Baby Throwing (along with the bath water). Wholesale abandonment of what was not working along with what was starting to work. The greater the sense of panic, the more frenetic the thrashing between various strategic initiatives. Each of these cycles is often accompanied with a fresh crop of executive managers. Paralysis. Lack of confidence in decision-making. A despair-ridden death march as profit margins slowly vaporize and innovative opportunities flit by ungrasped. Fascism. Charismatic leaders riding the waves of popular paranoia for personal benefit for questionable agendas. The shifting sands of complexity provide poor footholds for accountability and objective measurement. Cynicism . Change fatigue and the inability to connect with meaningful purpose often rapidly diffuses a creative workfo