Posts by: marc

Is the ThoughtWorks mind the creative mind?

  • Thursday, 8 June, 2006
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The guys over the fence in the media and advertising world are seeing a paradigm shift away from focussing upon the narrow “message” of a campaign to the broader “user experience” that encompasses the whole brand, not just a flashy graphic. This requires the “creative minds” to broaden their horizons. One such creative mind has created a picture that illustrates this.

The creative mind

This is a good way of thinking when attacking an IT problem. Not just focussing upon implementation detail, but the whole user experience. It means broadening the mind beyond the analytical. In addressing IT problems, developing greater “curiousity” and “expressiveness” is not a giant leap. But sesuality? Can developers ever have a sensual mind?

Recent experiences suggest so. Once a Dev has been hypnotised with a bit of web 2.0, emotional design seems to flow through their arteries. They “seek to satisfy all the senses. Aesthetics, beauty and form are driving forces…” That is they get all gradient-fills and curves and funky Ajax gizmos…

If it takes one man 3 days to dig a hole…

  • Thursday, 8 June, 2006
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I was talking to someone working on the Kings Cross regeneration project and he told a sorry tale that has a certain resonance with IT projects.

So they were drilling a big hole that had to be drilled and they came across a major sewer. Now someone should’ve known the sewer was down there but clearly they didn’t and the hole drillers had a problem on their hands. You can’t drill through a sewer, the sewer had to be moved. And it is no easy task moving a major London sewer, it requires major bypass surgery. Costs necessarily spiral – it’s a new project building a new sewer and with the hole unable to be drilled the timescales of the regeneration project slip.

But that’s not the end of the story. Apparently they start digging a new trench to lay the new sewer bypass and it is by a building full of business people who like to have their office windows open and clearly don’t take kindly to all the noise and dust from the trench being dug. And work on the new sewer grinds to a halt as negotiations take place on what to do. They have the windows open because it is hot weather and they have no air conditioning. Time slips further and costs escalate even more as the solution is agreed. Until the contractors have installed air-conditioning in the building no work can continue on digging the trench, no work can continue on bypassing the sewer and no work can continue on digging the hole.

Hot air balloon

  • Wednesday, 7 June, 2006
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For a while I’ve been buzzing about Luke Hohmann’s innovation games and am looking forward to his new book coming out. Using games, stories and pictures is a great way to get people engaged in workshops and get to the crux of problems. One problem you often get with people sitting around a table is a small number of vocal people contribute loudly, leaving timid bystanders with good stuff to contribute afraid to get involved. Obviously a good facilitator will look to overcome this, but get people in pairs, give them blank cardboard boxes and coloured pens and ask them to produce the packaging for the product they want to develop and you’ve got a great levelller.

These exercises do take time and can really only be done one at a time. In an attempt to fuse together the “product in a box” identifying customer needs and “speedboat” which identifes the anchors that are holding the project back, I’ve used the analogy of a hot air ballon a couple of times to some success. You draw a huge hot air balloon on the wall with ropes teathering it to the ground. You then get participants to put the features that they’d like to see advertised on the balloon. Participants write these down on post-it notes and they are stuck on the balloon. Clearly if all these features were all written across the balloon they would not all fit if sized so they could be read when the balloon flies in the sky. So just like in Formula One where a logo on side of the car will be larger (and more valuable) than the advertisment on the back of the drivers helmet, you then identify those features that must be visible from the ground (high priority) and those that may only be seen on the ground (low priority). That’s the first part of the exercise. The second part is to get participants (again using the post-it notes) to imagine the ropes are project constraints that will stop the baloon flying. In the space of 40 minutes if all goes well you will have driven out the top-of-mind features the participants want the project to deliver (and priortised them) and identifed the top-of-mind risks and issues that particiapants have. And most importantly you should have everybody engaged; with any luck a bit of laughter will be heard on the way. And that can’t be a bad thing in a corporate meeting room.

The steady sonambulism

  • Tuesday, 6 June, 2006
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A new baby means a lack of sleep. In the first few weeks they figure that the baby will be fed 6-8 times in a 24 hour period, so you can assume that you will be up every four hours. But what they don’t tell you / what you forget is that you start the feed every four hours. The feed takes say half an hour, add ten minutes trying to get the wind up and you could be looking at another half an hour to an hour settling the baby back to sleep. So she starts screaming at 3am, 4.15am you crawl back into bed giving you 2 and 3/4 hours sleep before it starts again. Whaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Hence if my eyes are red and I sleep walk through the afternoon I trust you will understand. Yawn. zzzZZZZZZZZZZ

It’s a girl!

  • Tuesday, 30 May, 2006
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And so at 11.50am on Thursday 25th May Lindsey gave birth to our brand new daughter. A bit of a surprise, we all thought it would be a boy – but that was a relief to Lindsey, we wouldn’t have to discuss the finer points of my preferred choice of boy’s name – Ozymandias. Instead we have a healthy girl, weighing in at the imperial 7lbs and 7oz. And her name? Sadly it is not to be Orphelia (my choice again) but Olivia Ita McNeill. India is delighted with her new younger sister, and Lindsey and I wonder if we will ever know sleep again. Oh, photos (can’t upload them on wordpress so on flickr):- http://www.flickr.com/photos/dancingmango/

I feel like a client

  • Wednesday, 24 May, 2006
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I took all of last week off to install a new kitchen.  The only thing I couldn’t do was fit the surfaces so I got the professionals in to help.  Air was sucked in through the teeth, the head shook.  “What numpty fitted this lot in?  Look at the gaps”  …Well I was going to use filler.  “If you want the kitchen to look good in a years time, we’re gonna have to pull it all out and start again”.  I don;t have time to start again, new baby arrives tomorrow.  Grrrrr.

And it occurs to me that this is just like the real world of business.  “We don’t need the consultants in, we’ll do it all in-house”.  But just like my kitchen, inevitably things go wrong, deadlines get missed and you end up having to start again and pay more than you ever anticipated.   Moral of the story, if you are going to do something, do it right.  Know your limitations.  Get the experts in.  Trust them.

Standing room only

  • Friday, 28 April, 2006
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“The airlines have come up with a new answer to an old question: How many passengers can be squeezed into economy class?  A lot more, it turns out, especially if an idea still in the early stage should catch on: standing-room-only “seats.”” [source]

This is depressing.  It is bad enough standing on a train, I hate to imagine the experience of being crammed in a real cattle class flight, standing all the way.

What is missing in this proposition is the question of the customer experience?  Is there a customer appetite for this?  Have the airlines done market research to understand the demand for standing room only flights?  (And not just run a few focus groups but mocked up the experience  and gathering feedback on it).  It is all to easy to drive a business case based upon the extra sales volume that this shoddy experience will be expected to provide, but when it goes to market, will the demand match that predicted in the business case?

Some people say anything to recruit

  • Friday, 21 April, 2006
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Recieved an unsolicited mail yesterday from a consulting firm looking to recruit developers (not a well targetted mail for me to receive it). What can they offer?

“Unlike many “consulting” firms, we don’t hire and fire based on client and project demand; we’re interested in a long-term relationship with people that share our drive. We hire employees because WE like them, not on the say-so of our clients!!”

Hmmm. so that’s a sustainable business model that inspires confidence…

I could’ve told you that…

  • Friday, 21 April, 2006
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Sometimes you have to wonder about academics in their ivory towers of research.  At the Ergonomics Society Conference a paper was presented on a usability evaluation of MP3 players and virtual jukeboxes.  The researchers used “reparatory grid analysis”, a pretty cool technique that got subjects to create their own “constructs” by which evaluations were made.  I’m not knocking their work – it was a good peice of research,  what I do question is it’s worth.  The research took several months and signficant effort to complete.  And thier conclusions?  Of the dozen or so products evaluated the iPod and iTunes were top of the class in usability.  I could’ve told you that after a couple of hours playing with all the devices (backed up by “heursitcs” if you want a veil of research rigor behind the results).  But accademics don’t do the pragmatic.  They need validity and relaibility.  Business needs results fast that sometimes only pragmatism and a healthy disregard of scientific method gives.

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