Akrasia and new agile teams

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.

Early adopting teams with poor leadership leads to depression.  Scrum will surface issues but it will not teach you how to fix them.  Sometimes ignorance is bliss...

SevenTablets First Happy Meter Results

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  4.4 out of a perfect 5.0  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.

User-Centered Design: Part 1 – New Software Development

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?

When Are Agile Requirements Ready For Development?

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 product owner, I need to add an attachment to a user story so that mock-ups are available for team members to reference.”

Eliciting Honest Employee Feedback

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.

10 Heuristics of User-Centered Design

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 timeless heuristics of user centered design as written by Jakob Nielsen.  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.

Communicating the Product Vision

What are we supposed to build?

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.

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.