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Requirements Versus Design: It’s All Design
This guy is bang on - requirements analysis and functional design - rarely in practice can they be separated and in agile projects the analyst should revel in this fact and the opportunity it presents!
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An Agile Functional Specification
In praise of specification, even in agile projects :-).
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A Volkswagen initiative along the lines of gamification. I am not sure I morally agree with the Speed Camera lottery (rewards for sticking to the speed limit paid for by the fines of those that don't), but I am sure that it could work!
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Book Resources | Beyond Bullet Points
Useful set of templates for presentation structuring a la "BPP"
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The Future of Social Customer Relationship Management
I may be outing myself as a CRM ignoramus, but I had never heard of the Value TRInity (Customer value indicators based upon Transaction, Relationship and Influence) - not sure that it is a complete view, but it is catchy ;-).
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Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Having just been reading about how Kanban helps to create "Flow", I stumbled across this presentation about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's apparently seminal work on the topic, "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience."
Based upon my normal disdain for the profession, I am a little worried that I am finding the writings of a psychology professor so interesting. Perhaps I am finally maturing. -
A great overview of Kanban and Scrum, and how they can be made to work together. As always, common-sense prevails - take the best bits from both, but do so knowingly because otherwise you will break them both!
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Lean underpinnings for agile thinking, summarized well.
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Another great presentation on InfoQ - this time, a thoughtful talk by Karl Scotland on combining Kanban and the thinking that underpins it (rather than just the process itself). I particularly like the fact that he connects systems thinking archetypes around flows and pressures with the motivation for the system, since I absolutely buy into this myself... though I still can't claim to really understand the systems thinking underpinnings (despite a half a dozen books and too many online articles!).
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Saw the TED talk from Simon Sinek and enjoyed it. Web site is nice to.
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InfoQ: Testing for the Unexpected
It has been a while since I have personally spent any time in the world of quality assurance, but, as so often, I have a strong opinion on the massive difference that "good" testing can have, not just on finding and avoiding problems, but also on improving the product that is being developed (think, "does the customer really want to do this this way?!?"). This is a nice presentation on exploratory testing in agile projects.
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Method Cards (Beta 1.0) | Design Thinking
A nicely structured presentation on how to apply a process to the creative design process.
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S-Bahn-München zeigt aktuellen Standort der Züge in Google Maps an | Internet | News | ZDNet.de
Now that is a mobile app worth having - realtime map of train positions in Munich... OK, so it is only worth having if you live in Munich... let's hope it extends to other towns soon!
Saturday, 30 July 2011
Twinstan's interesting links roundup on Diigo (weekly)
Saturday, 23 July 2011
Twinstan's interesting links roundup on Diigo (weekly)
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Strategy 2.0: The Six Key Telco 2.0 Opportunities - STL Partners / Telco 2.0 Research
Good overview of status quo on direction for telecommunications companies under pressure on all sides.
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How Strategic Planning relates to Enterprise Architecture
A promising no nonsense start to this article ended in disappointment, but still the discussion around business capabilities and how best to segment them in the context of strategic planning is an interesting one. I remain convinced that the best way to frame these capabilities is through the customers' eyes (ie. via customer experience scenarios or journeys), even at the cost of some clarity in what the capability actually requires (in the case of inward facing needs); I have sadly yet to see much of this in TOGAF case studies or application.
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The Incredible Run of Google+ - Technorati Technology
Wow, google+ is spreading like crazy. I don't dare speculate where this one is going, but if you are in the online business, you better start playing with this one!
Trial and error - a beautiful thing
I finally have the beginnings of a plan for a bunch of entries that will hopefully say something interesting about the connections between systems thinking, design thinking, agile methods and business modeling.
I suspect that it is going to take quite a while for me to formulate this out (think years rather than months), but I just watched a talk by Tim Harford (known from the "undercover economist" books and newspaper columns) at TED Global 2011, that I think is a good way to kick things off, since it made a lot of sense to me and brings together the iterative and exploratory methods of both agile and design thinking for innovation with a degree of structure:
The basic premise is a simple one; the world is too complex for us to be able to find solutions to issues by thought and analysis alone, we need to accept that we do not understand everything and, more importantly, accept that trial and error is a valid way to find solutions. As Harford says, this is obvious, but not accepted (check out some of my earlier posts on common sense solutions not necessarily being applied).
Having accepted this premise, the key thing in my eyes is to work out how to become great (and efficient) at trial and error - that is, learning incrementally from what we do and the agile, design thinking worlds have a lot to offer on that front, be it sprints, retrospectives, exploratory design, customer centric learning. Add to this the rigour of systems thinking approaches to build better understanding of complexity to building or support decision-making frameworks and you have a winning combination.
More to follow.
Here is the video:
Saturday, 16 July 2011
Twinstan's interesting links roundup on Diigo (weekly)
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Visually Launches To Automate The Making Of Infographics | TechCrunch
I was sure that I had already posted on this.. must be getting old. Love the site, love the direction - one to subscribe to if you enjoy simple visualisations of complex data!
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Another cracker on gamification from management exchange