The formal definition of Project Management is to ensure delivery to a schedule and a budget, but the beating heart of project management (small P, small M) is to repeatedly and effectively look at What you need to do, Who are involved, and When the next actions will play out.
‘What’ are the next activities at hand, the tasks your team members need to do, the design challenge to be addressed, the phone calls to be made and suchlike. ‘Who’ concerns the people carrying out the tasks, the stakeholders who need to hear the decisions and updates, the downstream people who will be affected, the partners who need impressing or supporting, and so on. ‘When’ is a blow-by-blow of how this plays out in real time and includes when conversations, actions and deliveries all take place, with an eye on which ones are dependent or parallel with each other and how they fit into a work day in a very real, pragmatic way.
There’s no neat checklist to help you through this, or step-by-step process that does the thinking for you. The only way to really ‘manage’ a project is to be repeatedly thinking through the Who-What-When from all angles and making this method a part of your team’s DNA.
Filed under: general , Add new tag, dna, method, project management, teams
I’ve found myself developing a design mantra of Less Is More on pretty much every level of user experience work – the amount of content or functionality presented on screen, the embellishments in a design, the complexity of animation, the message conveyed by creative, the language in the copy, the steps you have to work through, … etc.
Unfortunately delivering on Less Is More takes a lot of effort, and most people want to go the easy route of adding more. Usually that seems to be because the more you have, the more there is to please all comers and cover your bases. However it has been proven through research that customers want less choices which are better targeted at them, and this signal-to-noise issue seems to work on all levels.
The other reason I’ve noticed people avoid less-is-more is that when you strip away the extras, you’ll notice that all that stuff was hiding flaws in the basic quality of what you were creating. Now the rough edges on the essential features come leaping out, and it’s evident that you need to put more effort into smoothing them and finessing them.
It’s this combination of stripping down to the good stuff, and then working on the finesse of the solution, that really delivers great UX design. You can see this in the iPhone and other successes of Apple design where they’ve kept it minimal and concentrated on the polish and sophistication… and ultimately what delights people about the experience.
Filed under: creative delivery, style
ROWE (Results-only Work Environment) is an idea by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson which they developed to great success at Best Buy. I’m very excited about their new book which is due out next month, and the nuggets within about how they transformed a typical 9-to-5 office environment into a work-life-balance miracle. The reason I’m so excited is that they have apparently delivered on an idea I’ve been throwing around for a couple of years – basically that if you focus on the work people are doing rather than the hours they are putting in, you’ll get a more productive and motivated work force. Not to mention that you’ll weed out the duds who don’t do much but are very good at playing the system. In principal it sounds easy and obvious – give people flexibility and tools to work wherever and however suits them best – set up management systems that focus on the quality and timeliness of work done – run a programme to educate everyone on the new scheme. The benefits are clear for anyone that has kids, a social calendar or anything else going on outside of work. The difficulties that I can see are about cultural shifts. If person A likes to work weekends but person B resolutely doesn’t, how are their work times going to mesh? When you have whole teams of people working that way, the logistics of any work process must get tricky. Also how to stop people from slipping back into old habits. I’ve found my teams (and pretty much everyone) to be inclined to slip into old habits and do the easy/familiar thing regardless of whether it’s right… These can be tough challenges. Well a mont or so from now we’ll see what solutions Cali and Jody have.
Filed under: general , cali and jody, ROWE, work-life-balance
I’m at a conference this week and I’m struck by what an old fashioned format the presentation is. In these times of blogging, social networking and open source content, someone standing up on stage in front of a passive audience seems undynamic and falling short of exploiting the potential offered by the minds in the room. It makes me wonder what the presentation 2.0 would be and how you could engage all conference attendees in discussion and collaboration instead of a one-way flow of information. Panels and lunch topics are probably the closest and best examples I’ve seen elsewhere, but there most be a format that goes further still. I’m also thinking of the infamous interview/presentation at TED where the audience ran their own critique during the session on Twitter. Perhaps we should make that audience response the rule rather than the exception.
Filed under: conference, presentation
Someone from our accounts department approached me about a process change the other day. It concerned how we manage invoices and it was a little painful working the conversation round to a good solution that benefited everyone. Why? Because it started with ‘here’s how I want you to change things’. When you’re dealing with peers it’s a guaranteed bad route to a solution. Anyone who wants to give me a solution without understanding the workings of my team is unlikely to really hit the mark first time. They’re probably in a mindset about what they want me or my team to do rather than the real objective – which is what they want to get out of us.
When it concerns day-to-day work interactions it’s an annoyance, but when this occurs within a creative process the damage is palpable. A structured team of web creatives will consist of people who are expert in a field – interaction design, information architecture, copy writing or whatever, and when a person is trying to force a solution on these experts, the process grinds to a halt. Egos flare, resentments build, perfectly good ideas get ignored or never discussed. So here’s my first golden rule of managing creative teams -don’t talk solutions with experts, just talk problems. This way they can be empowered to use their expertise in getting the best result. By all means tell them if their ideas could be better and need more work, but don’t try to hand them solutions.
Filed under: creative delivery , solutioning, teams, web
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