..CIOs will be expected to become more and more strategic, delivering greater productivity gains while at the same time ruthlessly cutting costs. There will be a heightened debate about the role of IT in the enterprise. (ComputerWorld)
OK, so we can either spend months writing documents before a line of code is written. Do some [...]

Posted in Agile No Comments »

To the development team ‘change’ relates to scope and requirements within the project, but change runs far deeper than that.
A question that I am often asked is how do you manage business change on agile projects. Release regular and often is an often quoted mantra, but what does that mean to the business where [...]

Posted in Agile, Design, Methodology, Uncategorized, Work, interaction design, project management No Comments »

Here’s a presentation I gave a while ago to a bunch of senior execs, introducing the concepts of lean and agile to software development.  Many of the slides are taken from a presentation given by Richard Durnall which can be found on the ThoughtWorks website [pdf].  If nothing else, the slides about the problems with [...]

Posted in Agile 2 Comments »

Language matters.  How you describe something frames your reference.  One of the problems with so much software is that it is designed for generic “users” (typically UML stickmen) who may also have roles, but don’t have lives.  Why this obsession with users?  Everybody “uses” things.  Surely the important thing is to understand the nuances of [...]

Posted in Customer Experience, Marketing, Methodology, Social networks, interaction design No Comments »

It is fairly standard practice in Hong Kong for buildings to have no thirteenth or fourteenth floors. They are considered unlucky numbers. Not sure what happened to the first, second and fifth floor here. And back-to-front button numbering that is neither in the telephone format nor the phone format. There’s a [...]

Posted in Hong Kong, interaction design, usability No Comments »

There once was a time where the honorable thing to do if you screwed up was to resign. No more it seems.  Times change and to resign is to walk away and admit defeat.  Defeat is something our culture doesn’t honor; no-one likes a loser.  So you ignore the critics and stay on; you know [...]

Posted in Banking, Work 2 Comments »