26:
At my current employer, I’m learning a lot discussing both business strategy and project management with my manager, a VP on the senior management team. We’re contributing to the conversation from opposite directions.
A recent discussion led me to create the following diagram:
- The mission
- defines ↓
- business objectives
- which inform ↓
- programs
- that define ↓
- products
- updated in ↓
- releases
- that are built in ↓
- iterations
- composed of ↓
- features
- divided into ↓
- tasks
- assigned by ↓
- tickets.
Big caveat: This diagram represents an ideal state. We don’t develop products using Agile (yet). Some of the levels are not so smoothly connected. And we don’t even all agree on the language used in the diagram.
The “task to ticket” step might be not be necessary, but in our environment we have people who are focused on the ticket system as the thing needing changing. So we’re doing as the Romans.
All the same, this diagram can help us be more efficient:
The most interesting concept in the diagram is traceability. The traceability is both ways; there should be a second set of arrows pointing up. Because there are established relationships, tasks must meet objectives. If you can’t connect a task to a requirement to a feature to an objective, don’t do it. Less waste, better productivity.
22:
Just got home from a Providence Geeks meeting where the folks from Treanor Brothers Animation, a 3-D animation studio in Providence, talked about how they got started and how they work. On the way home I kept thinking about their footage of actors in black with marker dots all over the body enacting scenes for video game sequences. The phrase “faking it” popped into my head, not in the negative sense. I was thinking more about how faking it can be an art.
I’m the product owner for a six-week project that we’re having to pull off without much availability from Development, because they’re tied up tight in a massive redo-our-entire-backend-system project. The scope for our six-week project isn’t that large, but one of my direct reports, Hristo, and I are having to take on some development tasks. And we’re most definitely faking it.
While he’s a talented graphic designer, Hristo is in over his head with some of the JavaScript programming (but he’s swimming just fine). The two of us have had to architect some logic that we would normally get from Dev. On top of that, because we’re taking some new approaches with managing the project and I insisted we take on more than the original scope (so we could make a better user experience), we have the eyes from above upon us. It’s a little bit of pressure. Like putting on a skintight, polka-dotted suit and pretending to be a superhero with 50 cameras rolling. It’s also a little bit of fun.
19:
At my current employer, we’re undergoing a massive re-work of our main site. Mostly backend changes, but I was given the opportunity to refresh the UI as I brought the HTML and CSS more inline with web standards. On the major customer form page, we have an email address field. While interviewing our Customer Care department, I found out that the largest number of calls they receive are for people who never received their confirmations because they mistyped their email addresses.
My immediate thought was to add a secondary email address field. It’s what you see in most cases. Our development group complained and rightly so that it’s never fun entering the same information twice and that at least some number of users just copy and paste the address anyway.
After thinking some more, I came up with what I hope is a more elegant solution. After the user enters his or her email address, a message appears in red repeating the user’s email address:
The solution depends on JavaScript, using the onblur event. For our site’s users, less than 5% have JavaScript disabled. One thing I like, though it’s subtle, is that the message explains why the user should review what they entered; they won’t receive their confirmation if it’s wrong.
07:
To do:
- Add resume in HTML, Word, PDF, and txt.
- Add portfolio page: As individual posts? Can you make a page of just one set of posts? Or do I need to use an image gallery plugin? I’d like to use employers as a sub-category to portfolio, so someone can see the work I’ve done for each employer. Then I could tag regular posts as work for an employer. Add categories for sample types (e.g., requirements, ui design, usability testing). Can I sort the portfolio page by employer, date, or type? A sortable table with filtering. That would be cool, I think; have to test it.
- Add a Contact page with email form (Does WordPress support form submission via email? I’m guessing Yes.)
- Post a few more things.
- Test in different browsers and on Windows.
- “User” test with Mehera (at least).
- Migrate blog to root.
- Add social network icons.
- Add a dashing photo of dashing Chris Jackson.
- Implement Lightbox jQuery for thumbs.
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