January, 2009

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31
Jan 09

Busy 100%? Better if it was only 80%

Johanna writes Serial Monogamy Project Participation

What I’m finding interesting in my work is that people who have some slack can commit to one project much more easily than people who are 100% “committed” to a project. The people who are 100% committed have no slack to provide other projects some consulting or provide future projects some thinking. The people who are only 80% committed to one project (and not committed to something else, slack is key) are more able to finish their work and accommodate the inevitable interruptions.

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29
Jan 09

Variable Productivity of Knowledge Workers

Thought Clusters write about Knowledge Workers and their variable productivity:

There is also great variability in the per-hour output of a single knowledge worker. Mary comes early to work and cranks out a lot of code by noon, but then her productivity takes a nose dive after lunch. The company would lose nothing by asking Mary to simply work 5 hours in the morning and go home.

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27
Jan 09

Pick a Friendly Fight with the Boss

Things they do in Toyota’s IT Department that are a bit different:

Do What The Boss Says, Or Not: It’s not what you would expect to find at a Japanese company, but at Toyota employees are encouraged to “Pick a friendly fight”. Employees are encouraged to speak up and contradict what their bosses have told them to do. Don’t do what your boss told you to do just because he/she told you to do it!

[via The Business of IT]

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25
Jan 09

Usability with Agile

Usability expert, Jakob Nielsen conducted some research about Agile Development Projects and Usability:

For 50 years, almost all experiences have shown that traditional waterfall development methods result in a poor user experience. The reason is simple: requirement specifications are always wrong.

Jakob says successfully integrating usability into an Agile approach involves 3 basic strategies: 

  • “Perform usability activities, such as user testing, in a few days.”
  • adopt “a parallel track approach, where the user experience work is continuously done one step ahead of the implementation work”
  • build “foundational user research that goes beyond feature development”

[Thanks for the bookmark Striving Green!]

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22
Jan 09

Google Reader & RSS

Google Reader for Beginners:

And a great “what is rss” video repost:

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