tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-61184680192991776752024-02-18T18:06:16.487-08:00The Product OwnerPiikkilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09118596786969457862noreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6118468019299177675.post-13862778634067588612017-03-07T21:25:00.003-08:002017-03-07T21:25:55.350-08:00Writing Requirements for innovative IoT Products - Part 1Thanks to the growing interest in the Internet of Things (IoT), I was inspired to write this blog to show one way to manage these requirements in an agile fashion. Being the good product owner's we are, we will have done due diligence on the technology being used and the steps to making a thing enabled for connectivity to the internet, (recommend lynda.com IoT) Then balance your business and product knowledge to craft valuable sized-right chunks of work.<br />
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I have always been a huge fan of connected car technology since I can remember so I am going to make this example exercise fun by writing requirements for the following product vision statement:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: center;">
Improve the transporting experience for people with long commutes during high traffic volumes. As a car manufacturer and technology company, we believe it is our responsibility to make the roads a safer place and while doing so, protecting your personal information. </blockquote>
This is a big vision but all the market industry trends tell us this is where we have to innovate so where do we start without established customer feedback? Lets assume our product marketing manager says the majority of our customers are parents with children, our sales manager says if we can offer more compelling safety features, we can take back the largest portion of lost revenue. The architect is confident he can deliver any idea we come up with because we are using GE's predix platform and have the best electrical and software engineers on the planet. So everyone has ideas but nothing to form a product release, so we hold brainstorming sessions with a bunch of smart relevant people in hopes of forming a backlog of features customers will love. <br />
<br />
Thanks to excellent facilitation skills, group engagement and homemade cookies the session results in some great ideas. I want to stress how important this brainstorming session is to the overall story writing creative process. Record the conversations so you can capture all the everything so later if you want to document more details to your items you can. Here are the top voted ideas, already prioritized by business opportunity:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>I want to know if any drivers near me are using their mobile phones while driving so I know to use caution near them </li>
<li>Ability to self-diagnose the most common maintenance issues leading to accidents or break downs</li>
<li>Ability to use caution near someone with a poor driving history</li>
<li>Ability to park in the safest place(s)</li>
<li>I want to stay clear of anyone who just left a bar</li>
<li>I want to know the safest route to work and the safest time to leave home</li>
<li>If my husband and I are leaving work at certain times, we want to know who has the best route to pick up the kids and who should stop by the grocery store where the items on our smart refrigerator list have the lowest total cost.</li>
<li>Ability to know who has a criminal history for violence or stealing cars so I can decide if I want to park there</li>
</ul>
<br />
Our architect takes a look and says a few of these can be done at the same time reusing the same sensors, connectors and fairly straight forward. He says some of these require us to have our blockchain solution in place to decentralize the network, we decide to plan for dependent features in the next release. He adds some enabler features that need to be done to help us prioritize the backlog and understand related costs.<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Ability to decentralize the network to control connectors in a meaningful way</li>
<li>Use cryptonets to enable machine learning and make accurate predictions</li>
<li>Implement framework for total security of all connected devices</li>
</ul>
Now that our product backlog has some big chunky prioritized items, we have a story writing workshop with the team and use techniques like user story mapping to identify a minimum happy path of functionality. Our product manager says our product management team can sell any grouping of features, the strategic goal is to choose the lowest risk items so we can demo a working product to our executive team.<br />
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Work with the delivery team to sketch out your vertical user story blueprint. This might include technical layers suchas UI, sensors, connectors, etc.<br />
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Stay tuned for part 2 to read the rest.<br />
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<br />Piikkilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09118596786969457862noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6118468019299177675.post-74812554342325627442016-08-20T11:38:00.001-07:002016-09-02T18:10:55.574-07:00What makes a good Agile Product Manager/Product Owner?It depends on who you ask and where you ask it. Over the past 8 years I have been exposed to a myriad of industries, coaching agile product managers/product owners (APM/PO) on their new role and influencing organizations to consider product model structuring. I want to share the most common success patterns I have seen so far.<div><br></div><div>The most common success patterns are surprisingly simple in theory yet hard to balance for some brilliant people. The following is my top 5 but certainly not conclusive list.</div><div>1. Entrepreneur Spirit. The APM/PO is the team(s) leader. She is acting CEO, protecting the company's product or services as if it were her own money being investing. </div><div>2. Leadership. Takes responsibility and leads by example. Facilitates the best possible course of action and garners buy-in from the right people. Self-aware and able to make decisions. </div><div>3. Inspirational. She is the most excited person in the room and glimmers with passion for the product vision. Always ready to back up decisions with convincing evidence and respecting opinions when provided.</div><div>4. Customer centric. The APM/PO doesn't neccessarily need to be the expert in all things, but understands the need for experts in customer journey mapping, user experience design, market research, customer trials and feedback groups.</div><div>5. Organized. Understands the process and aligns herself to the best possible business outcome. Coordination between large groups and getting results out of a large system requires skills and knowledge of the process.</div><div><br></div><div>Some folks might be thinking I forgot to include knowledge about the product. I think this is important but I think a great APM/PO leverages the expertise of those that are closest to the subject. One cannot be an expert at all things but one should have the wherewithal to make smart decisions immediately and when to facilitate feedback for riskier decisions. After all, shouldn't we all be listening to the market and other reliable sources of intelligence? Shouldn't we never stop learning?</div><div><br></div><div>So what makes a good agile product manager/product owner? <span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">Someone who can balance their act between the 5 patterns listed above. Some organizations are not mature enough for the highly evolved APM/PO, so organizational skills are valued more than inspirational. Some organizations are trying to disrupt the market so the entrepreneur mindset is more attractive than someone who follows process.</span></div>Piikkilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09118596786969457862noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6118468019299177675.post-3554334705219879002016-07-20T14:05:00.003-07:002016-07-20T14:05:51.579-07:00The Product Owner role in SAFe<div class="MsoNormal">
The Product Owner role in SAFe. Many organizations that have experienced the
benefits of implementing scrum at the ‘team level’ do not realize that Scrum
scales too and that most well practiced Scrum teams would scale appropriately
over time. These organizations prefer to
implement a prescriptive approach that allows an organization to map their
current structure to something tangible with structure. Personally, I think any movement toward agile
is a good move so long as the organization keeps trying to do what is right for
the business and the people. This blog
is about how to implement SAFe’s content authority roles when organizations
have already scaled scrum.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Why did I decide to write this? After years of being a very effective Product
Owner and Agile Coach, I paid top dollar to get SPC certified by Dean
Leffingwell in Boulder, CO on SAFe v3.0.
I learned that the product owner group was represented quite a bit
different in SAFe. Product Management
and other management level roles own most of the content authority, which means
they assign value and prioritize all work.
Product owners do not write features and they do not decide what
features are developed. Product owners
take direction from Product Managers whom of which are part of product
management. The team gets to interact
directly with the Product Managers and Business Owners every Program
Increment. The Product Managers interact
and coordinate higher level decision makers consistently. In short, the SAFe product owner does not
need to have the technical, marketing or sales wherewithal to prioritize the
team backlogs.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
How does Scrum scale? In simple terms, scrum scales the
product owner role and the product backlog enforces There is one roadmap and
one product backlog. (SAFe would call
this the portfolio backlog). Alignment
and prioritization via a bi-weekly MetaScrum meeting with all stakeholders and
management. The product owner hierarchy
may include feature or application product owners all the way up to the Chief
Product Owner whom is an executive with fiduciary decision making capability. This person is responsible for understanding
the total cost of ownership and financial impacts. All levels of product ownership team utilizes
product management members as advisors to prioritizing the backlog. The product ownership team interfaces with
customers and stakeholders but must be available to the teams.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Let’s assume that all the content authority roles in SAFe
need solving for the advanced Scrum practitioner. The Content authority roles in SAFe include <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
</div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; text-indent: -0.25in;"> </span><b style="text-indent: -0.25in;">Program Portfolio
Management and Epic Owners</b></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; text-indent: -0.25in;"> </span><b style="text-indent: -0.25in;">Product
Management</b></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; text-indent: -0.25in;"> </span><b style="text-indent: -0.25in;">Product
Owner</b></li>
</ul>
<br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="text-indent: -0.25in;"> Scrum to SAFe content authority roles</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
</div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; text-indent: -0.25in;"> </span><b style="text-indent: -0.25in;">Program Portfolio
Management and Epic Owners</b><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;"> > </span><span style="color: #002060; text-indent: -0.25in;">Chief Product Owner</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #002060; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><b style="text-indent: -0.25in;">Product
Management</b><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;"> > </span><span style="color: #002060; text-indent: -0.25in;">Product Ownership team + Agile
Product Management</span></li>
<ol>
<li><span style="color: #002060; font-family: "Courier New"; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;">- </span></span><span style="color: #002060; text-indent: -0.25in;">Product Ownership
team (Includes the entire hierarchy from Chief to feature product owner)</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #002060; text-indent: -0.25in;">- Agile Product
Management (Includes Product Marketer + Product Strategist + Product
Technologist)</span></li>
</ol>
<li><span style="font-stretch: normal; text-indent: -0.25in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; text-indent: -0.25in;"> </span><b style="text-indent: -0.25in;">Product
Owner > </b><span style="color: #002060; text-indent: -0.25in;">Feature or Component Product Owner</span></li>
</ul>
<!--[if !supportLists]--><o:p></o:p><br />
Piikkilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09118596786969457862noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6118468019299177675.post-45381149638156708092016-01-02T14:04:00.001-08:002016-01-02T14:13:08.286-08:00New Year ResolutionsAs a product owner, I have specific New Year resolutions to make me a better leader to my team(s) and contributor to my company's success. <div><br></div><div>To be a better leader to my team, I will schedule recurring chucks of time to groom the backlog and hold all invitees accountable to show up. No more excuses. I will reflect on retrospectives that surfaced blockers I failed to resolve and action plan for the highest valued items. I may even learn something new about the team along the way. </div><div><br></div><div>To be a better contributor to my company's success, I will look for simple solutions to gain sizable wins and ensure a competitive product vision is in place that aligns with the strategic overall goals. I will forge relationships with end-users and/or customers. </div><div><br></div><div>To all you new product owners or product owners surviving in transitioning organizations, keep learning and be energized this year. The single greatest value you can offer anyone is energy. When change is underway and most are feeling sluggish, you be the one that keeps spirits high. How does one keep themselves energized? Get good rest, exercise, healthy diet and positive thoughts. Read about taking good care of yourself and the recipe for energizing yourself in order to energize others comes naturally.</div><div><br></div><div>Happy New Year my esteemed Product Owners and fellow agilists!</div>Piikkilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09118596786969457862noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6118468019299177675.post-24049352043920950812014-05-27T23:55:00.005-07:002014-05-27T23:55:55.099-07:00The Role of a Product Owner in Transitioning OrganizationsSo you are a product owner in an organization that wants to be agile but doesn't have the organizational infrastructure to enable and empower you. <b> The primary role of a product owner is to ensure product is delivered with the highest business value first within the shortest release horizon with the highest quality code.</b> To do this, the product owner must have the ability to negotiate with customers and stakeholders while continuously prioritizing the work consumed by product delivery teams. If you have practiced 'real' agile, you understand that the role of the product owner is the most challenging to adopt in an organization undergoing an agile transformation.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The roadmap to a mature product owner role can be correlated with the agile adoption transitional stages learning, improving, sharing and innovating.<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Learning Stage</b></div>
<div>
In this stage, teams are barely forming, receiving training and coaching. If teams can't demonstrate that they can execute agile practices, the transformation will fail. <i>The role of the product owner </i>will not scale past the project level and this person maybe formerly have been a project manager, product manager or business analyst. Simply prioritize the team's work and limit work in progress. Stop starting and start finishing tasks.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Improving</b></div>
<div>
In this stage, teams are practicing all the fundamental agile ceremonies. <i>The role of the product owner </i>might reach the program level and you can influence all functional areas by keeping everyone aware of the product vision and the roadmap to get there. You still may not get to influence the priority of work intake but you can make business value goals visible to all. Talk about it hang up posters about it, your job is to simply make aware and elaborate.<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Sharing</b><br />
In this stage, many agile teams are stoodup and the pilot teams are sharing templates, meeting logistics, process documentation, tool configurations and other lessons learned. Typically this means leadership members are convinced for at least one business unit and are more willing to provide for environments and cultures that agile practices thrive in. <i>The role of the product owner </i>may even be at a director, VP or even C Level depending on the size of your organization. This product owner may be able to control the portfolio of work and investment models. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Innovating</b><br />
In this stage, agile roles are scaled from the team to leadership levels, thus providing alignment from top to bottom by default. <i>The role of the product owner </i>is setup to reach maximum potential by delivering products that can change the world, wipe out the competition and attract the best talent.<br />
<br />
So you see, the role of the product owner has a place in every organization we just need to be patient with immature organizations and coach anyone that presents teaching moments. </div>
Piikkilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09118596786969457862noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6118468019299177675.post-1405918590771116192014-03-16T23:22:00.003-07:002014-03-16T23:34:42.311-07:00When vertical user stories become not so vertical anymoreVertical user stories imply that all necessary work in the database, service and UI layers will be testable and verified by the user. In fact, any story written by an end-user is typically a perfect vertical story that will result in business value delivery. So what is the big deal? Most agile teams break their stories down into horizontal slices that independently provide no business value. Vertical stories are keystone to reducing time market while tracing financial impact end to end, which is kind of the whole business case for investing in agile adoption in the first place.<br />
<br />
So when do vertical stories become not so vertical anymore? Top reasons include:<br />
1. Organizational structures that have separated groups by each horizontal layer in their vertical story.<br />
2. System architectures that are so complex and distributed, it takes months to get information from the right people and to coordinate an end to end testing effort.<br />
3. Poor portfolio management where priorities are not aligned across groups and highly specialized skills are spread thin<br />
4. When teams are unwilling or unable to change their mindset from big bang delivery to iterative delivery.<br />
<br />
Example 1:<br />
A financial services company has three separate business units that either support back office, middle office or front office. The teams working in middle office never interact or have knowledge of the customer. The business units only interact at the senior vice president and above levels.<br />
<br />
Example 2:<br />
The system architecture of a telecom company has not been able to automate their transactional processes. Many different functional groups try to automate and the data gets stuck in one of the many third party applications without ever synchronize to a single customer record. Manual processes must fill in the system gaps and the end user is not able to see the data. Synchronization would require coordination with all internal and external partners.<br />
<br />
Example 3:<br />
A program of teams is working in a vertically structured organization, non-legacy systems, and the solutions technology portfolio is complimentary. The only problem is leadership's inability to limit work in progress and spreading the talent too thin across initiatives. Too many projects in a program eventually will cause their own impediments. Teams get impeded, stories are put on hold and they start something new until an older story is unblocked. No stories ever get done in a given timebox.<br />
<br />
Example 4:<br />
A team practicing waterfall is forced to adopt agile iterative delivery but they can't seem to get over the incremental development mindset. They may not even have the skillset or information available to do anything but complete one of the layers. The idea of re-work is a negative outcome so they work from their own task list without ever really working from the user stories.<br />
<br />
If you relate to reasons 1-3 and you are <u>not</u> a decision making stakeholder, simply get as vertical as you can possible get for your business and system context; otherwise, you have the power to directly impact time to market. If you fit into reason 4, identify what you think your constraints and limitations are and simply validate them as logical. Better yet, if your mindset is the problem, reach out to other previous non-believers and find some rationale to change that resonates with you.<br />
<br />
<br />Piikkilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09118596786969457862noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6118468019299177675.post-11585866955528923702013-11-07T20:06:00.004-08:002013-11-07T20:06:59.848-08:00Scaling the Agile Enterprise - Seriously folks, it is really just ONE backlog we all plan from<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLQpZAbbQ4pXLqU5fNwhksl5XlkeHTIWINB871eL-xkdUMCyDAn9ST1FWHc8MirJe1XC1MZff10bRt5OA4F2qW_cKlFfqmLFc_Dq9hk5vPGh95Yo247sQt_O6dmR16_WXEK4VHBWsSPx4/s1600/ScalingtheAgileEnterprise.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="491" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLQpZAbbQ4pXLqU5fNwhksl5XlkeHTIWINB871eL-xkdUMCyDAn9ST1FWHc8MirJe1XC1MZff10bRt5OA4F2qW_cKlFfqmLFc_Dq9hk5vPGh95Yo247sQt_O6dmR16_WXEK4VHBWsSPx4/s640/ScalingtheAgileEnterprise.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Add caption</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />Piikkilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09118596786969457862noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6118468019299177675.post-74128900294183564522013-11-07T19:31:00.000-08:002013-11-07T19:31:00.217-08:00Akrasia and new agile teams<div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
Akrasia. Traditional command and controlism cultures can make people depressed. Knowing that you 'should' do something without necessarily deciding to do it. Like considering changing habits, the 'considering' feeling never goes away and imprints real estate on your brain.</div>
<div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
<br />
Early adopting teams with poor leadership leads to depression. Scrum will surface issues but it will not teach you how to fix them.<span style="font-size: 17px;"> Sometimes ignorance is bliss...</span></div>
Piikkilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09118596786969457862noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6118468019299177675.post-45117958121002790112012-10-01T22:01:00.002-07:002012-10-01T22:05:12.179-07:00SevenTablets First Happy Meter Results<br />
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As promised in my July post “Are Your People Happy?”, I am sharing our own company wide happy survey experience with our trusted readers. The happiness metric has always been maintained in product development but I received buy-in from leadership to administer to all members of our company community. We followed all the guidelines in the July posting and ended up with an overall score of <strong>4.4 out of a perfect 5.0</strong> with an accuracy level of about 86% confidence. In addition to the ratings, about 80% of the members that did participate in the survey results provided suggestions on what we should either ‘stop doing’ or ‘start doing’ in order to benefit the team and/or company overall.<br />
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<a name='more'></a><br /></div>
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Granted, we were fortunate enough to start off with a clean slate and all of our employee’s are hand picked in part due to their ability to ‘gel’ with the agile culture we are committed to. However, the road has not been easy at all times and the need for passion is critical indeed. I want to share exactly how we went about creating the happy survey, delivering and analyzing our first company wide happy meter. A <strong>Happy Meter</strong> simply represents the happiness pulse of all members of the company at any given time to include all the parts you are about to read below.</div>
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The Happy Survey</h4>
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The survey consists of 7 questions. Questions 1-3 are <span style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">mandatory</span> and weigh into the <strong>happy meter</strong> calculations. Questions 4-6 are non-mandatory and are added into ‘happy backlog’ where all suggestions accumulate until the top item is selected to be actioned and removed. Question 7 is a free for all to say what is on your mind at the time.</div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">On a scale of 1-5 (5 being extremely happy) how happy are you feeling about your <strong>ROLE</strong> in the company?</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">On a scale of 1-5 (with 5 being extremely happy) how happy are you feeling about the <strong>COMPANY OVERALL</strong>?</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Personally, I am currently very happy <strong>outside of work</strong> related activities (disagree or agree 1-5)</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">In order to benefit my team or the company, I suggest to <strong>CONTINUE</strong> doing the following… [free text comment]</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">In order to benefit my team or the company, I suggest to <strong>STOP</strong> doing the following… [free text comment]</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">In order to benefit my team or the company, I suggest to <strong>START</strong> doing the following… [free text comment]</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Please provide any kind of feedback you want. Remember these survey results are submitted completely anonymous. [free text comment]</li>
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Delivery</h4>
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On Tuesday (8-29-12), we used survey monkey and sent the link out to our ‘all@seventablets.com’ distribution group list. All responses were completely anonymous and members were given 48 hours to complete the survey. After I sent out the first invite to take the survey, I walked around each area and put little hand written bright pink sticky notes that said ‘Remember to take Happy Survey before I leave today’. Twelve hours prior to survey expiration, I sent an email reminder out and included the percentage of folks that had taken the survey so far. On average, it only took each member about 3 mins to complete and submit the survey.</div>
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On Friday (8-31-12) all the continue, stop and start comments were parsed out in their original message into a happy backlog so the management team could review each item and prioritize based on what we felt was reasonable to accomplish within our selected iteration timebox of two weeks. We analyzed how the selected item could really be a problem and design an action plan which ended up being a part of our committable culture statement. By the end of the meeting, I was thinking about how to involve all members of the company to rate/vote on the priority order of the happy backlog while maintaining the anonymity. By the end of the day, I had the results posted in the all company collaboration tool (Yammer) as both a discussion item to invite additional feedback and dedicated knowledge page for all to see the latest pulse of our Happy Meter.</div>
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On Tuesday (9-4-12), teams leads gathered their members for a quick fifteen minute announcement from the president. Posting the information on Friday allowed members time to review the happy survey results and engage in the message being delivered. He was direct and honest about the selection process and provided personal examples of the issue and possible solutions. He was very careful not to make reference to specific instances in the office where a person may be ‘singled out’ and suspected of submitting the said comment that was not the item for culture change. Remember trust is key!</div>
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Lessons Learned</h4>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Trust: an environment where employees feel safe to speak freely is almost required in order for this survey to really have an impact</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Transparency: if possible, publish the comments in the original submitters words. If some are removed or words corrected, announce why it was done to teach your members the ‘right’ behaviors. After all, this is prime time to make clear what kind of behavior is rewarded and what is unacceptable.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Buy-in: if management or leadership is not going to support the quest to happiness, then the best you can do is maintain this culture at a group/team buy-in level</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Useful feedback: include tips in the survey on a simple format to provide actionable feedback. It is important to really think about if an item has a root cause and what are some possible solutions</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Resist the urge: resist the nature instinct to guess who submitted a particular response. Most all items can either be attributed to positive behavior that should be part of your company culture anyway.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Buy-in: our company leader must show strong ownership in this survey out the gate. Until he/she does, it is likely that you will not get the greatest levels of accuracy in your responses.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Repeat: we must perform this survey again after we have tried to make improvements to the workplace</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Trending is necessary: in terms of evaluating anonymous results, you must trend data to start making confident decisions</li>
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Piikkilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09118596786969457862noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6118468019299177675.post-74313274987132704292012-10-01T22:00:00.004-07:002012-10-01T22:05:24.913-07:00User-Centered Design: Part 1 – New Software Development<br />
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The majority of our consumer market today expects software to be a service along with cloud access to data on any mobile device platform. As software provider’s, we must extend our user-centered design approach to include mobile device views out the gate. Most credible resources on interactive graphic design will use software providers LinkedIn, Google and Facebook as examples of great mobile user experiences. I agree, but would these web leaders have made the same design decisions had they started out with a device-centric approach?<br />
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The first time I launched LinkedIn for iPad I was pleased to see most of my content, however, I still had to navigate swipe by swipe and tap by tap just to figure out what was available and how to get to it. As of today, it is my observation that <strong>no one</strong> really has enough experience to claim the throne for best UI/UX mobile design and the consumer market is still learning how to <strong>properly</strong> use their mobile gadgets. In this posting, I want to approach user-centered design from a<span style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">new software development</span> effort and help set the standards for interactive design.</div>
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Before we go over some design standards, let us clearly define the target audience that should benefit from our guidelines. Lets start with millennial end-users and assume our guidelines will emerge along with the market feedback. Millennial end-users are not just the product end-users, they are the potential buyers as well. In the context of our current topic, these users can be profiled with the following attributes:</div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">More tech savy then any other generation</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">On average, each person owns two mobile devices</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Less motivated to learn new standards</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Over stimulated with less patience for processing time</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Expect and demand mobility access to all electronic data</li>
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The majority of applications and respective apps used day to day by our target end-users are performing as great as they look, whatever does not is simply not accepted by them. Is it any wonder that mobility has been around for a decade but is just recently being adopted for business use? This means that before you worry about how pretty your app looks, spend time ensuring performance is <strong>fast and reliable</strong>. Facebook just released a new software update for iPad that I have to admit is super fast and responsive, in which people are commenting is because they wrote it using the iOS native language. Fortunately here at Seven Tablets, we are able to devote much development time solely to optimizing our cross-platform code to mimic naive performance.</div>
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1. Adopt a <strong>device-centric</strong> approach to prototyping for all three major electronic views including web, tablet and cellular devices. Most designers I have worked with are successful when starting out with the tablet view following the iOS user interface guidelines. Make sure the design team has the exact tablet device and the workflow is storyboarded and ‘dramatized’. Literally act out the scenes at the estimated time of day you expect the app to be used most frequently. A great number of UI prototyping apps are available on the market for a very good reason. Designing the mobile views requires a different set of gestures and capabilities between interaction between the real world and system. Handle the prototype on the device by tapping with large thumbs and position the device in both portrait and landscape modes. How does it feel? Does the prototype UX make sense for the user standing up and tapping with their index finger? Does the user need to have internet connection at the time you expect they need to? Are the chosen gestures adopted by the device OS to take advantage of preconditioned hand eye coordination?</div>
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2. Condition your team’s mindset using an agile product development approach and focus each product update on the <strong>feature set that brings the most business value</strong>. The core feature set needs to be defined early in the design process and released early before business as a chance to make major changes to the plan. Clearly identify one target end user, storyboarding the most common workflow and choose only actions used 90-100% of the time should give the<span style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">design team</span> a fighting chance at getting it right the first time around. But don’t make the perfect design a science project, get it out to market as soon as possible reminding everyone that the <strong>greatest designer on the team is the customer</strong>. In your core feature set, copy and paste the following user story into your backlog: As a business owner, I need an <span style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">immediate and fast</span> way for users to send product feedback so we may deliver a product that customers love.</div>
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3. Per each graphic view, clearly identify the target end-users and<strong> figure out which features must be included per view by user type.</strong> Do not assume the same core feature set applies to all views or all users for that matter. Focus on each screen tracing through the flow of data and clearly identify what roles should be able to complete that flow. You may be able to reduce scope by not providing accessibility to user roles that do not need it. Identifying and focusing on the critical path in your feature set also lends for a clean and purposeful screen so you have real estate to add more functionality later when the market demands it. On most occasions, the front end design for mobile can take twice as long to develop as it does for the web so it is critical to prioritize mobile views.</div>
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Stay tuned for part 2, which includes designing in <strong>modular stand alone parts using an object-oriented thought process</strong>.</div>
Piikkilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09118596786969457862noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6118468019299177675.post-91042806032255868302012-10-01T22:00:00.001-07:002012-10-01T22:05:48.501-07:00When Are Agile Requirements Ready For Development?<br />
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As a product owner on an agile development team, I am responsible for populating the product backlog with a list of user stories to communicate the product direction. In layman’s terms, a traditional lengthy requirements document is broken down into small parts that are formatted into a simple story told by the end user in hopes that anyone should be able to comprehend. For example, “As a <strong>product owner</strong>, I need to <strong>add an attachment</strong> to a user story so that <strong>mock-ups are available for team members to reference</strong>.”<br />
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By design, a user story will force collaboration among the team members and ultimately increase the chances of a successful sprint iteration (not to mention invoking feelings of a shared product vision.) If ample time is allotted for effective collaboration, user stories should be reviewed with part of OR the whole team PRIOR to sprint planning. The goal is for development (and the rest of the team) to ultimately determine when a user story has all requirements ready for accurate tasking and estimation to occur.</div>
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<span id="more-2372" style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></span>All of my user stories have a lifecycle and the status includes ‘In Planning’, ‘Requirements Ready for Development’, ‘In Development’, ‘Ready for UAT’ and ‘Ready For Release’. In this posting, I am focused on <strong>‘Requirements Ready for Development’ </strong>which means the user story should have all of the information you and the team thinks they need in order to provide accurate estimates. Below is a proven requirements checklist that should keep teams happy and less frustrated with incomplete requirements. Very important to note that each user story may NOT require all items in the checklist. In fact, including too much detailed requirements documentation is dangerous and can defeat the purpose of choosing an emergent iterative design process.</div>
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Possible Requirements checklist:</div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">User Story format is complete (role, desired feature and business case) <em style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">*at minimum required</em></li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Conditions of Satisfaction <em style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">*at minimum required</em></li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Communicate the Database Structure</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">UI/UX Design (initially wireframes or mockups)</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Business rules including role based access control lists</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Workflows and triggers</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Acceptance Criteria (continuously refined during the sprint)</li>
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The Product Owner and stakeholders should be able to complete the <strong>user story format</strong> and <strong>conditions of satisfaction</strong>. Conditions of Satisfaction (COS) may be a bullet list of items the user should be able to do if the story is implemented. You can also think of COS as the ‘definition of done’ which allows the team to understand the work required to finish the story.</div>
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The rest of the checklist items should be reviewed with the team so much time is not spent on documentation that will<span style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">not</span> be read or even looked at by the team. <strong>Communicating the database structure</strong> can be as simple as including exactly what the input type looks like in the design or wireframe. If needed, include a markup comment next to the field to include max char length or lookup table values to select from. <strong>Workflows and triggers</strong> can also be included in the design or wireframe but if the instruction is complex enough, trace out the paths using data flow diagrams for precision.<strong>Business rules</strong> are especially important to document in a single on-going list and attach updated versions of the list to the user story. If different lists are maintained, it is easy to miss when one business rule modify’s or contradicts another.</div>
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In conclusion, it is the responsibility of the whole team to decide when requirements are ready for development. The extent of which you choose to document requirements may depend on the structure of your whole team. Most teams have at least a creative designer to deliver the look and feel requirements. If the team is moving faster than the creative resource can deliver, then the product owner and the team must collaborate and compromise often enough to come up with a good way to perform <strong>acceptance tests</strong> on the features via a user interface.</div>
Piikkilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09118596786969457862noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6118468019299177675.post-48932863666890680502012-10-01T21:59:00.002-07:002012-10-01T22:06:06.890-07:00Eliciting Honest Employee Feedback<br />
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In the office I spend part of my time researching the ROI on employee happiness. One of the toughest parts to figure out before culture shocking your company is to establish the current situation as told by each employee, not the HR Director or the CEO. The simple method of initial discovery is through a company wide survey or a couple of poll questions. <br />
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One of the most effective approaches to eliciting honest employee feedback is to start with high level questions and exaggerate the anonymous nature of the survey. Set expectations as soon as possible by anonymously reporting the results back, participates will learn the process and begin trusting the survey process. Trust leads to honest feedback.</div>
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<span id="more-2335" style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></span>Here is your happiness survey checklist:</div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">First thing stated is the policy of confidentiality</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">No more than 5 questions in one survey</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">All questions only allow for one dimension answers, no room for unclear responses</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Each question is very valuable and provides specific information</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">At least 1 question is quantifiable for stats and graphs, at least produce variability in responses</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">None of the responses assumes a certain state of affairs, provide a ‘none of the above’ or ‘other’</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Super clear, easy to read, no unfamiliar words or abbreviations</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">User friendly, if electronic be sure to test it out yourself and on a colleague</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Has an expiration date and time</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">If possible, offer a simple incentive</li>
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After you get results back, it is very important to share information on what the collective data means and/or what will be done with it. If people do not feel the company is committed to positive culture change, they will not value the importance of completing these surveys. Something actionable must be witnessed to prove that the voice of the employee is strong enough to invoke change. Video record the CEO announcing the results, what they mean and what he plans to do next is a great way to capture employee interest and buy in.</div>
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After the 3-8 min video is approved, send to each the team lead and schedule a time for everyone to stand around and watch it together on one monitor. Since each team lead with play an important role in evangelizing the happiness initiative, he/she will need to be prepared to listen closely to the reactions from each team member. If the team is comfortable enough, you can basically get a rating on the response immediately. In any case, you must always rate the quality of the follow through.</div>
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In conclusion, be sure to administer your first couple of survey’s using anonymous approaches, provide immediate response and send a poll to rate the effectiveness of the response. Do this in iterations and keep improving your methods at every opportunity. Happy Surveying!</div>
Piikkilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09118596786969457862noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6118468019299177675.post-2154585586951324752012-10-01T21:58:00.001-07:002012-10-01T22:06:16.991-07:0010 Heuristics of User-Centered Design<br />
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Lately the hot topic is UX (user experience) techniques and how to apply the best one to mobile. This week I want to bring attention back to the ten <span style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">timeless</span> heuristics of user centered design as written by <a href="http://www.useit.com/jakob/" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(31, 49, 56); -webkit-transition: color 0.1s linear; color: #ee4b45; opacity: 0.8; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="Jakob Nielsen"><em style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Jakob Nielsen</em></a>. In college we spent one full semester memorizing and applying them to our senior class project. They are called “heuristics” because they are actually rules of thumb rather than specific usability guidelines as provided by iOS. Please the following items as a checklist for any design you release.<br />
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<dt style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong>Visibility of system status</strong></dt>
<dd style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 20px; vertical-align: baseline;">The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.</dd>
<dt style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong>Match between system and the real world</strong></dt>
<dd style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 20px; vertical-align: baseline;">The system should speak the users’ language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.</dd>
<dt style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong>User control and freedom</strong></dt>
<dd style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 20px; vertical-align: baseline;">Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked “emergency exit” to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo and redo.</dd>
<dt style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong>Consistency and standards</strong></dt>
<dd style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 20px; vertical-align: baseline;">Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions.</dd>
<dt style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong>Error prevention</strong></dt>
<dd style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 20px; vertical-align: baseline;">Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.</dd>
<dt style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong>Recognition rather than recall</strong></dt>
<dd style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 20px; vertical-align: baseline;">Minimize the user’s memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.</dd>
<dt style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong>Flexibility and efficiency of use</strong></dt>
<dd style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 20px; vertical-align: baseline;">Accelerators — unseen by the novice user — may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions.</dd>
<dt style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong>Aesthetic and minimalist design</strong></dt>
<dd style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 20px; vertical-align: baseline;">Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.</dd>
<dt style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong>Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors</strong></dt>
<dd style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 20px; vertical-align: baseline;">Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.</dd>
<dt style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong>Help and documentation</strong></dt>
<dd style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 20px; vertical-align: baseline;">Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user’s task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large.</dd><dd style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 20px; vertical-align: baseline;"></dd></dl>
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<strong><span style="border: 0px; color: #333333; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Thank you Dr. Meader of MIS 330 at the University of Arizona, you were wise to drill these principles into our heads and making the senior class project grade 60% dependent on the them.</span></strong></div>
Piikkilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09118596786969457862noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6118468019299177675.post-36316843943266013242012-07-23T08:36:00.001-07:002012-07-23T08:38:00.714-07:00Communicating the Product Vision<br />
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<dt class="wp-caption-dt"><a data-mce-href="http://seventablets.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Screen-Shot-2012-07-21-at-11.33.42-PM.png" href="http://seventablets.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Screen-Shot-2012-07-21-at-11.33.42-PM.png"><img alt="" class="size-thumbnail wp-image-2226" data-mce-src="http://seventablets.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Screen-Shot-2012-07-21-at-11.33.42-PM-150x150.png" height="150" src="http://seventablets.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Screen-Shot-2012-07-21-at-11.33.42-PM-150x150.png" style="-webkit-user-drag: none; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" width="150" /></a></dt>
<dd class="wp-caption-dd" style="font-size: 11px; line-height: 17px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 4px 5px;">What are we supposed to build?</dd></dl>
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One of the most important responsibilities of a Product Owner is to communicate the product vision to all members of the organization. Not only is understanding the vision critical to product development and delivery, but it is also essential that everyone buys into the vision in order to contribute efficiently. For best results, spend time selecting appropriate modes of presentations per each audience type based on their needs and respective roles.</div>
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This week, I am sharing advice on techniques to present the vision and on how to maintain this information when you have adopted an agile methodology in which you are most competitive with a 'just in time' approach to planning.<br />
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Your <strong>executive team</strong> typically wants a 30ft view presentation of the product vision, but you must be prepared for a convincing dialog over all the questions related to strategy and product marketing. Pictures, numbers and colors are best for presenting any idea to an executive. Remember, this role has limited time to listen or read and you need to win enough confidence for them to entrust you with all the details. Here are some good artifacts to present:</div>
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<li><em>Roadmap</em> with at least a 90-180 day outlook. Be sure to include some figures and milestone points for potential revenue recognition. *Note: The roadmap is maintained until the end of time.</li>
<li><em>Business model canvas</em>. Recently I discovered a great template from a book called "<a data-mce-href="http://businessmodelgeneration.com/book" href="http://businessmodelgeneration.com/book" target="_blank" title="Business Model Generation">Business Model Generation</a>," and the authors built an iPad app which has revenue stream and total cost of ownership calculations.</li>
<li><em>Slideshow</em>. Limit to 8 bullet points and 8 slides max. Read up on powerful visual communication with less words. Could be thought of as a pitch deck to a board of VCs.</li>
<li><em>Elevator statement</em>. This format is good for all audiences and should be your opening line during the presentation; however, this is not enough for the executive you intend to win buy-in from.</li>
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Upper-level <strong>management</strong> teams typically want to know how they can support your direction in their respective disciplines and learn of any impact to shared resources including the budget, if applicable. If you have a roadmap, share it. If not, don't try to talk about the future too much, since anything more than 3 months out is going to change anyway. Here are some good artifacts to present:</div>
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<li><em>Elevator statement</em> with the following format,</li>
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<span data-mce-style="text-align: center;">"For the [target audience]</span><br />
<span data-mce-style="text-align: center;">That wants/needs to [problem,opportunity], </span><br />
<span data-mce-style="text-align: center;">The [product brand] offers [feature 1-2]. </span><br />
<span data-mce-style="text-align: center;">Unlike [main competitor], </span><br />
<span data-mce-style="text-align: center;">The [product brand] is [key differentiator]."</span></div>
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<li><em>Product advertisement.</em> This can be the software in a box design, the SaaS webpage, and/or the app store download description.</li>
<li><em>Press release</em> mock up. This is more specific but highlights the 1-3 key features that differentiate your product.</li>
<li><em>Magazine advertisement</em> mock up. Choose the magazine most appropriate for the product, and design what and how they would highlight about the product.</li>
<li><em>The release plan</em> translated. They will not read all the user stories and may not even understand it so you will need to translate it to a story outlining the epics and themes.</li>
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Your <strong>Product Development/Product Management</strong> team members will have contributed to all of the items above but will need direction from the product owner on where to start and what the first release should be. The team could consist of developers, QA, product managers, architects, business analysts, and any other roles in the hierarchy of product ownership which could include C-Level executives, VPs and directors. This is where all the straight-up, no-B.S. collaboration happens daily, and the entire team is expected to maintain these artifacts real time:</div>
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<li><em>Product backlog. </em>This is basically the roadmap broken down and in one singular column of priority. The items at the top will be more broken down with details while the items toward the bottom are epics.</li>
<li><em>Release plan</em>. A collection of themes that make up a product with enough features to deliver business value that is acceptable to market. Release metrics include release burnup and burndown.</li>
<li><em>Sprint backlog. </em>Set of user stories from the top of the product backlog that the Scrum team has analyzed and committed to finishing by the end of any given time boxed sprint.</li>
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Finally, don't forget about your external communication to <strong>partners and clients</strong>. Any one or combination of the product vision artifacts I have mentioned above may be perfectly suitable. It simply depends on the reason for sharing information. I suggest you always maintain an internal roadmap and an external roadmap to share with partners (and maybe clients, too).</div>
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As an experienced product owner, you know all the red flags to avoid and what expectations should be set with which parties. Timeless key principles to remember when communicating the product vision are to 'under promise and over deliver' and know that anything more than 3 months into the future is going to change, so don't over think it. If you are operating in a culture where product development follows Scrum and the rest of the company does not, then you will be forced to provide a year roadmap, and it will be nothing more than you and the team's best guess.</div>
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References:</div>
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- http://businessmodelgeneration.com/book</div>
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<br /></div>Piikkilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09118596786969457862noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6118468019299177675.post-24156325618874495522012-07-21T20:01:00.001-07:002012-07-21T21:41:51.444-07:00Retain Talent Through Recognition<br />
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Most CEOs will tell you the most important asset is their employees. Most human resource directors will tell you the most challenging problem facing them today is finding and retaining talent. After diligent recruiting efforts and waiting longer than the market does, you build a great team of mixed individuals that have the potential to produce amazing things. In addition to supporting an agile environment, companies must dedicate time and capital to implement recognition programs as part of the business model to retain their most valuable assets. Not just key employees, but ALL employees should have the opportunity to earn public recognition from their peers, managers and executive team members. At the end of the day, we all like to feel appreciated.</div>
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Money is important, and opportunities to earn more income should not be limited to only 1-2 times a year during scheduled performance reviews. Given the rate of turnover today, most teams are likely to have a different boss or a re-organization of departmental priorities with in any given six month period. If you are not a Fortune 50 Company with ‘old money’ enabled incentives and perks, then you had better start personally getting to know who your employees are so you can effectively reward them.</div>
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Once you know what makes your people happy, it is a great idea to allocate budget and receive sign-off to support a recognition program. Without a litte funding, the manager will incur the cost to motiviate his/her team, and this can limit reward options available for the whole team as well as for individual members. If you need help convincing your business owner, do some research and have accurate statistical evidence to present. According to Martz’s research, employees who receive recognition where they work are:</div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">5 times more likely to feel valued</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">7 times more likely to stay with the company</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">6 times more likely to invest in the company</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">11 times more likely to feel completely committed to the company</li>
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Given that the same research survey results showed that it takes 5-8% of an employee’s salary to to change behavior if the reward is cash, as compared to 4% of the employee’s salary if the reward is not cash (<em style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Nelson</em>), it just makes good business sense to develop a more personal relationship with your employees.</div>
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Once you have budget and buy-in, the fun part is coming up with different reward and recognition ideas. If your teams are not already in the habit of conducting continuous iterations of inspection and adaption, then you have a lot of information to compile. Know what the current situation is, where you need to be and how you plan to get there. Understand how each individual can and should contribute to make an immediate, noticeable impact on the team and/or company. After group and individual goals are aligned on the most important things that bring the most value, communicate how to measure success.</div>
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Finally, enjoy yourselves in a creative discussion on positive ways to recognize an individual and what would make that type of individual happy. Encourage fun rewards that serve as team building activities and individual professional improvement. Most importantly, everyone should re-learn how to say thank you. It is amazing how effective a timely, sincere and specific ‘Thank You’ can be.</div>
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References:</div>
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“1501 Ways to Reward Employees” written by Bob Nelson, Ph.D., copyright 2012</div>Piikkilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09118596786969457862noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6118468019299177675.post-12960137425854504562012-07-11T20:11:00.001-07:002012-07-21T20:02:13.586-07:00Top 10 Mobile Release Considerations<br />
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Your initial release is going to be the one you have the least control over when it comes to planning which product features bring the most business value. The reason you are constrained is because certain things must get done and decisions need to be made for the first mobile app release. This weeks post is most useful to experienced teams that are new to mobile development and need a cheat sheet on what are the most important things to know when planning the initial release. Since we are agile, the goal is to release an acceptable app early to market without sacrificing too much quality that you can not respond soon enough to market feedback.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">1. <strong>What device(s) and operating system(s) is your app compatible with?</strong></span><br />
<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">You should keep track of the OS version and build number of the devices being used by the QA teams in conjunction with the code updates released by the development team. Even if you are using a cross platform mobile development framework, it may not make the most sense to worry about all mobile devices this early on. Shave time by choosing Android platform and indicate the compatible devices and software version. iOS will take a lot more time to get the first app submitted and approved by Apple, this does not include the timely process of activating an iOS developer account.</span></div>
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<strong>2. What are the CRUD requirements for the selected end users? For example, is this a view only app? Should all or only some of the data update?</strong><br />
This is pretty specific to the end user’s function and what this target audience expects. Shave time by limiting the number of user interfaces so there is less opportunity for users to assume and update should be available. If it is appropriate to your project, go for a view only app with minimal update capability and build an API to a 3rd party web service.</div>
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<strong>3. Which of your end users benefit the most from mobile apps?</strong><br />
In our case here, we are assuming you know little to nothing about the consumer profile, so you may want to go for users that have already adopted the need for mobile apps. Catering to one or a few users can minimize the need for permissions and access control functionality. Shave time by focusing on the needs of one end-user perspective.</div>
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<strong>4. What is the baseline functionality required from a technical standpoint to provide enough business value?</strong> login, sign up, forgot password, etc.<br />
Be sure to only include those items which are deemed required by your development team. Studies have shown that only 20% of all features in any given software application are used 99% of the time. Let your market provide feedback on what is missing. Shave release time spending more time grooming the product backlog after each sprint looking for opportunity to release.</div>
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<strong>5. Is the app a free download, if yes how will you promote it?</strong><br />
If this is a free app, then you don’t have to worry about payment gateway providers. If you do need a payment You should involve the marketing department early on so they can get the most bang for company bucks. The strategy for a free app should always be purposeful and the right data must be captured for marketing and/or strategic use. Furthermore, your app may need to have the appropriate ‘forced’ update configuration.</div>
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<strong>6. What does the competitive landscape look like?</strong><br />
What ‘category’ and ‘price’ is this app searchable in the marketplace? Go do it now and keep doing it every sprint planning meeting because that is what potential buyers are presented with. Ensure your app is compelling enough to bring the most business value to the target end user AND buyer.</div>
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<strong>7. Who owns the data and should it be hosted in the cloud?</strong><br />
Depending on who your target end users are, you will need to research legal and security concerns that would prevent adoption of your mobile app. You may need to have a legal binding terms and conditions agreement to protect yourself and the company. If the data needs to be hosted in the cloud, you should start shopping for a vendor right now or seek the guidance of the marketplace or iOS developer community for possible short-term solutions that make more sense for your initial release.</div>
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<strong>8. Will you need to support the app with manual processes? Can the product handle a high volume of end users?</strong><br />
In this case, the worst case is the best case. If your app happens to go viral, but users experience poor performance, it can backfire and actually hurt the company reputation out the gate. If your app has functionality dependent on a manual process by the scarce human resources, there should be a protocol in place to handle the volume and still respond to customers quickly. Sometimes it makes good business sense to NOT automate processes for the first release, just make sure there is a plan to automate when the need arrives. Another precaution is to invest in performance testing and load balancing toward the end of the release cycle and then again immediately before releasing to market in a true production environment.</div>
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<strong>9. Which UI/UX do you design for first? Tablet or mobile phone?</strong><br />
Your creative director will have a strong influence in this decision but he or she will need to know what the strategy is and what the current situation of the front-end developer(s) skill set is like. After you finish answering 1-8 above, this should be an easier question to answer. Tough to suggest how to shave time for this decision, typically a mobile phone app has less functionality and features and the creative design could have a shorter lifecycle with less UI/UX flexibility.</div>
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<strong>10. Notifications and alerts</strong><br />
Be very cautious of what automatic notifications are triggered by the app and are not configurable for the end user. There is nothing more annoying to a mobile user than getting notified of items they do not care about. This could make or break the success of your app and should be tested thoroughly by your QA team prior to releasing. Shave time by not adding any notifications or alerts until your end-users request for it.</div>
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I encourage my reader to share experiences related to any item above that would be helpful to all of us and/or submit additional items to include for considerations. Remember, every project is different and each company has their own strategy. This is just a guide to cut through the distractions and prioritize your precious time on the important things that to prevent an ‘Oh No!’ moment after releasing to market.</div>
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<strong>Assumptions to this perspective</strong>: Agile environment, fixed target date, new product development, no roadmap yet, no clients yet, SaaS mobile and market research is slim. In this first release, it is more about building a reputation for your company in the mobile space and proof of vision stages. Note: If you don’t meet all the items above, these considerations are still useful for all Product Owners.</div>
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<strong>Release</strong> <strong>planning</strong>: A collection of user stories that is, at minimum, acceptable to market or meets the needs of internal initiatives. Best way to maintain a release plan is to get the software in a state in which each sprint produces release ready software and have a potential end user that will help decide when it is show time for the app. Do not accept user stories that are incomplete!</div>Piikkilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09118596786969457862noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6118468019299177675.post-66378556610374805262012-07-09T20:11:00.000-07:002012-07-09T20:11:00.333-07:00Is Your Team Happy?<br />
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Studies have proven that happiness is the key to success and longevity. Many companies will use incentives or rewards as a means to increase productivity but there are challenges to keeping employee’s motivated for a consistent period of time. Employers can only do so much to keep their people happy, people need to figure out how to make themselves happy. How awesome would it be to start tracking the happiness of your employees to increase productivity in the workplace?</div>
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The key to measuring happiness is through continuous iterative cycles of inspection and honest feedback from employees. I attended Jeff Sutherland’s latest webinar on the ‘<a href="http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/2012/05/happiness-metric-webinar.html" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(31, 49, 56); -webkit-transition: color 0.1s linear; color: #ee4b45; opacity: 0.8; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="The Happiness Metric">Happiness Metric</a>’ and I wanted to share some of the ways you can measure the happiness of your employees. The simplest way is to ask them using a short survey of questions and quantify the results. Each culture is different so you may adjust the questions a couple of times before you can make correlations to the P&L. Here is a sample set Jeff’s COO suggested I use on my last project. I administered this exact survey to 5 different feature teams (6 members each), keep reading…</div>
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Number 1 and 2 are the only questions quantified for the metric:</div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">On a scale of 1-5 (with 5 being extremely happy) How happy are you feeling about your role? (Indicate Role)</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">On a scale of 1-5 (with 5 being extremely happy) how happy are you feeling about the company overall?</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">What were the leading factors that increased your happiness since the last survey? (Give example)</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">What factors reduced your happiness since the last survey? (Give example)</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Do you feel like you understand the product vision? (Team)</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">What is the one thing the team could do differently next sprint that would most increase your happiness? (Improvements)</li>
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Discipline is another key ingredient to creating hyper-productive teams. Having your employees tell you how they feel and then doing nothing about it is counter-productive. So here is the warning label for this article: <span style="border: 0px; color: red; font-size: 12px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">WARNING: DO NOT TRY THIS AT WORK IF YOU ARE NOT SERIOUS ENOUGH TO IMPLEMENT CHANGE.</span></div>
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We will use metric again here at Seven Tablets and reformat it to suit the whole company, not just the product development teams. The culture at our company is all about success through creativity and happiness. Keep posted on my blogs and I will share the results in a couple months <strong>including</strong> how to get everyone to adopt the survey.</div>Piikkilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09118596786969457862noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6118468019299177675.post-25487764873422645182012-05-03T14:07:00.000-07:002012-05-03T14:07:19.240-07:00Timeless Usability Principles that every professional UX/UI designer should know<br />
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These are ten general principles for user interface design. They are called "heuristics" because they are more in the nature of rules of thumb than specific usability guidelines.</div>
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<dt><strong>Visibility of system status</strong></dt>
<dd>The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.</dd>
<dt><strong>Match between system and the real world</strong></dt>
<dd>The system should speak the users' language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.</dd>
<dt><strong>User control and freedom</strong></dt>
<dd>Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked "emergency exit" to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo and redo.</dd>
<dt><strong>Consistency and standards</strong></dt>
<dd>Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions.</dd>
<dt><strong>Error prevention</strong></dt>
<dd>Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.</dd>
<dt><strong>Recognition rather than recall</strong></dt>
<dd>Minimize the user's memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.</dd>
<dt><strong>Flexibility and efficiency of use</strong></dt>
<dd>Accelerators -- unseen by the novice user -- may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions.</dd>
<dt><strong>Aesthetic and minimalist design</strong></dt>
<dd>Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.</dd>
<dt><strong>Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors</strong></dt>
<dd>Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.</dd>
<dt><strong>Help and documentation</strong></dt>
<dd>Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user's task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large.</dd><div>
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</dl>Piikkilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09118596786969457862noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6118468019299177675.post-27357851310513908552012-03-29T09:42:00.001-07:002012-03-29T18:48:46.062-07:00MetaScrum - Maintaining Product Priority Order in the CompanyThe MetaScrum is the meeting where all decisions product are made and/or heard by representative decision makers from all areas of the company. Typically this is a weekly meeting run by the Master Product Owner and supported by the CEO. The agenda includes a charter of meeting rules, objective, current sprint status update and upcoming sprint plan. Depending on the company culture, more items may be included that impact the product release cycles. One of the most important rules to enforce is that all priority order changes must be made in the meeting and supported until the next meeting. These meetings can be critical to helping the product management and development teams focus on getting things.<br />
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I will be posting links to sample formats and documentation.Piikkilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09118596786969457862noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6118468019299177675.post-85411545013842669102012-03-26T18:27:00.001-07:002016-09-02T18:10:26.045-07:00Implementing new user experience designWhen it comes to agile requirements, user experience and creative design implementation often becomes a challenge especially for large organizations. I have many different approaches to recommend but I will share one way that was wild successful for me.<br>
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<b id="internal-source-marker_0.8840418423060328" style="font-weight: normal;"></b>Assume the user experience flow will require refinement after the screens have been developed and after real end users have used the system in their <b>physical environment</b>. The key is to partner closely with your customers at any given time in your planning, development and release lifecycles. </div><div style="background-color: transparent;"><br></div><div style="background-color: transparent;">Below is a phased approached. Make sure you have thoughtfully identified minimum task completion, don't try to solve the experience for everything in your roadmap. If you listen to your market, they will adopt new feature flows and experience changes if you always do the right thing.</div><div style="background-color: transparent;"><br></div><div style="background-color: transparent;">
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<b id="internal-source-marker_0.8840418423060328" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Phase1 (Mockup, Design, style guide and slices)</span></b></div>
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<b id="internal-source-marker_0.8840418423060328" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">-------------------------</span></b></div>
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<b id="internal-source-marker_0.8840418423060328" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">- Basic look and feel design and core user conventions. Conduct story mapping and identify only what tasks are necessary.</span></b></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 27pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: -17.5pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">- Usability testing and feedback sessions with clients, user groups and CMIO panel</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">- Upload designs to central repository for review by all SMEs and front end architect. Time box feedback and move on. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">- Work with product analysts or BAs to finalize user stories </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">- Requirements ready for development</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Phase 2 ( In Development)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">-------------------------</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">- Implement Design using artifacts provided by Creative</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">- Creative available for questions</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Phase 3 (Beta Feedback and Refinements)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">-------------------------</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">- Review implementation by development, make recommendations and refinements</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">- Beta Test Case feedback from client and product owner</span></div>
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Piikkilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09118596786969457862noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6118468019299177675.post-71560563814881164742012-03-24T22:04:00.003-07:002012-03-29T19:52:04.991-07:00Helpful Tips - Scrum Feature TeamsScrum feature teams make up vertical slices of areas of expertise to form cross-functional teams. Feature teams can help a company scale by allowing team to take ownership of active projects in-flight that must be released in parallel.<br />
Please note, unless your architecture is stable and modules are completely stand alone, be mindful of how many major features are being releasing in a given sprint. I recommend the team limit the number of active projects and never start a new project until the current one is 'shelf ready'<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Helpful Tips for Choosing Feature Team Members</span><br />
* There must be a Lead Product Owner or Master Product Owner that oversees all the inputs and outputs<br />
Per each feature team:<br />
1. One Product Owner. Each feature team should consist of only one product owner. I will start another discussion on this topic when the same resources are responsible for projects belonging to different product owners.<br />
2. One ScrumMaster. An experience ScrumMaster is recommended to teach both the product owner and the team to work through sprint goals.<br />
3. The Team. Try to keep the team size limited to three to four developers and no less than one IT QA staff per feature team.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Helpful Tips for Training your Feature Teams</h4>
For members new to Scrum<br />
1. Make it very clear to all team members that no one is the boss, it is a horizontal org chart with everyone answering to the client. Everyone is a subject matter expert of their team function. Each person is held accountable for their role and responsibility during the sprint.<br />
2. If teachers are limited, train development first. Developers appreciate Scrum if you point out that requirements and priorities do not change after the sprint is locked and committed to by the feature team. Check out Jeff's article on shock therapy - <a href="http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/2012/01/scrum-shock-therapy-how-to-change-teams.htm">http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/2012/01/scrum-shock-therapy-how-to-change-teams.htm</a>l<br />
3. Train Product Owners on how to write a user story and break it down into manageable parts. Provide high level training on the Scrum Framework, don't reinvent the wheel, use material provided by your Scrum Certified Professional or what is available on the Scrum Alliance.<br />
4. VERY IMPORTANT - When the team completes estimations and goals can be selected, make sure there is a face to face meeting in which the sprint goals are clearly defined and committed to. The ScrumMaster only locks the sprint goals when the expression on every team members face shows comprehension.<br />
5. Define a Sprint Activity Calendar and Checklist per each role. This is most helpful when there are old waterfall mindsets on the team.<br />
6. Let the feature team members attempt to follow the checklist according to their role, make the ScrumMaster responsible for ensuring all members complete a full set of checklists by the end of the sprint. <br />
7. The Scrum Coach or Scrum of Scrum Masters must conduct one on ones with each team member on a daily or weekly basis.<br />
8. RETROSPECTIVE IS KEY. Inspect and adapt. Train on what is most important, not on everything under the sun, or shall I say 'under the Scrum'.Piikkilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09118596786969457862noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6118468019299177675.post-21740437723029575422012-03-24T17:03:00.001-07:002014-12-19T08:59:53.284-08:00KISS - Keep It Simple Silly<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Every meeting room used for sprint planning by product management and development should have a laminated poster that says 'Keep It Simple Silly'. This advise is timeless when it becomes obvious that the teams are over complicating the software design. </span>Piikkilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09118596786969457862noreply@blogger.com0