Usability Not Usable? – Part 2

“People are usually not receptive to a newcomer waltzing in and telling them they’ve been doing their jobs wrong.” Usability departments exist in a number of our client organizations. Unfortunately, their organizational structural frequently instills an adversarial relationship between the project teams and usability group. The usability group is considered an outside agency – ony …

How to Stifle Teamwork

As an appetizer for an upcoming Work Better article on collaboration techniques, I’m pleased to present these team work worst practices from Ester Derby’s Software Managemet Process Improvement weblog: A clear strategy to stifle teamwork Establish two classes of membership on the team [WP NOTE: i.e. developers and testers, employees and contractors, or people with …

Instructions not Inventory

To create a to-do list reflecting your ultimate goal, we highly recommend taking the advice descibed in Recipes Instead of Lists from Nerdherding for Beginners: “A recipe will include infrastructure work and ‘planned re-work’ that might otherwise be forgotten the alternative is simpliy a list of ingredients.”

Usability Not Usable? Part 1

Conventional wisdom states that websites and other new products should be evaluated with non-tech savvy participants. With 63% of American adults accessing the Internet regularly, 83% of teens, and 20% of adults actively avoiding the online world we are a nation of tech-savvy or tech-avoidant. Conventional recruiting strategies not longer apply. Rather than pursue an …

Repeating the Same Action and Expecting a New Result?

Engagement at meetings and excitement about projects is down. A number of key people are leaving. The passion that sparked our initial conversations is waning. One of our clients is at a turning point with their organization. A number of never-been-tried-by-us suggestions were thrown around in a recent strategy session. Most of them immediately dismissed …

Daily Productivity Tips

We’re working with a number of clients to make their days more effective. One of the smallest, yet most profound changes is making each meeting a working meeting. Though powerful and effective, this technique does go against more than 96 years of conventional wisdom This technique works especially well for document review meetings – have …