Random Articles

• Only Pigs Can Talk I’m reviewing an excellent presentation [pdf] on the agile software development landscape when two bullet points on Scrum’s daily meetings stopped me: Chickens and Pigs are invited. Only Pigs can talk. It took Googling to decipher the metaphor. Though it goes against my earlier stifling team work post, identifying who’s involved and who’s committed is an excellent way
• The 30 Second Rule  If it takes you or your collegues longer than 30 seconds to find a piece of information, then your workplace organization needs drastic improvement. I recently attended Minnesota Technology’s overview on Lean for the Office. The 30 second rule is a great yardstick to measure your day against. Extend the principal a bit..if no one but
• Productivity Tip: Empty Your Dock Back in the pre-OS X days, I used DragThing religiously to keep applications, websites, and documents at my finger tips. That mentality migrated with me to OS X - put everything in the Dock, keep it handy. Today, I shed it. Inspired partially by my preparation for the Tiger upgrade and partially by my proficiency with
• More Gets You to Better As I mentioned in my interview at Podcast411.com, I had an art professor who believed everyone had 5,000 bad drawings in them. Five thousand drawings bad drawings before the good ones could come out. This perspective is re-iterated in Throw More Pots over at Crossroads Dispatches. In this same token, I’m a firm believer every organization
• Usability Not Usable? - Part 2 “People are usually not receptive to a newcomer waltzing in and telling them they’ve been doing their jobs wrong.” Usability departments exist in a number of our client organizations. Unfortunately, their organizational structural frequently instills an adversarial relationship between the project teams and usability group. The usability group is considered an outside agency - ony evaluating