June, 2006

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

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