It’s budgeting time with many organisations putting together their budets for 2009. In the current climate IT is an easy target for cutting costs. Stories such as “no new non-core projects till 2010″ and “no project that can’t demonstrate a postive ROI in 12 months” are abound. There is a risk that [...]

Posted in Agile, innovation No Comments »

..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 [...]

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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 [...]

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The <enter time period> ends and a retrospective is held.  The team writes on Post-It notes things that are important to them and they get stuck up on the wall.  And maybe they get grouped into similar topics or themes.  And then the team vote on them; the topic that has the most votes is [...]

Posted in Agile, Methodology, Work 3 Comments »

Documents, or rather words are the scourge of product design. Because words can never convey the true meaning or emotion of what is really required. All to often, software development projects are driven by the documentation - agile projects can be equally guilty of this- driven by words on paper (or card) that [...]

Posted in Agile, Methodology, interaction design 2 Comments »

I’ve only thought of blogging about Lois Vuitton once before and that was on how they positively encourage queueing outside their stores during busy periods. It’s a pretty strong brand that can tell its customer to hang about before being allowed to come in and shop.
This time I’m not blogging about them in [...]

Posted in Agile, Marketing, project management No Comments »

Exciting times for us in Hong Kong. The inaugral meeting of Agile Hong Kong is next Tuesday, 5th February. Martin Fowler will be attending, hosting an informal Q & A session. It’s sponsored by ThoughtWorks who will be providing the drinks. Check out agilehongkong.com for more details.

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Let’s imagine a mobile phone provider that that has an on-line presence as well as a high street retail network. Their current website was built several years back on legacy technology; it is slow and has a conversion rate lower than industry norms. Along with having poor usability, the current shopping cart functionality [...]

Posted in Agile, Customer Experience, Methodology, Mobile phones, Web design, Work, interaction design, project management 2 Comments »