Recently I was told of a Blue Chip company whose IT organisation, in the guise of cost cutting, has recently disbanded its QA function. From now on, testing will be conducted by the developers themselves. Since when have developers relished the role of testing? It is inevitable that this cost cutting solution [...]

Posted in Banking, Customer Experience, Work, innovation No Comments »

In the current market conditions the easy and obvious thing to do when turning to cost cutting is to wield the knife heavily on IT. New projects get culled, recruitment freezes and contractors get laid off as IT spend shrinks. This is a knee-jerk reaction and rarely in the long term interests of [...]

Posted in Work, innovation 2 Comments »

We recently completed writing a response to an RFP. It weighed in at just under 100 pages with almost 34,000 words. OK, so there was a lot of copying and pasting going on, but that is not an insignificant amount of effort. Multiply that by the number of suppliers who were invited [...]

Posted in Agile, Methodology, Work, innovation, project management 2 Comments »

In their paper Content preparation for cross-cultural e-commerce: a review and a model, Liao et al. conclude that (1) Westerners pay more attention to information about product components or contents than East Asians and (2) East Asians pay more attention to information about price… than westerners. This is in the context of eCommerce in [...]

Posted in Customer Experience, Hong Kong, interaction design No Comments »