The wisdom of crowds helps us avoid stupid decisions. Unfortunately, it also prevents innovative, passionate, fantastic decisions. Collective Intelligence is collective insipidness. We need to keep the inputs of individuals in the mix.
Marketing / Usability
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Usability Sells Software – Word of Mouth Marketing
There are three main models for selling software. You can hire a direct sales force. You can spend a lot on marketing and advertising. You can let your users sell the software for you, a technique commonly known as viral marketing. There’s a catch with viral marketing – users have to like your software.
Business Analysis / Requirements
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Why Requirements Approval Matters and How To Make It Easier
Getting requirements documents approved can be a pain in the butt. Why do we need to do it in the first place? The approval process is more than just reaching concensus or creating a contract. Done correctly, it presents an opportunity to get more inputs from stakeholders.
Business Analysis / Business Process Modeling / IIBA / Organizations / Requirements management software
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2007 – The Year of the Business Analyst
Outsourcing is gaining momentum not only as a way to reduce costs, but as a way to create global teams. This trend is driving an increase in demand for business analysts. The change in perspective is driving companies to think about how they manage their business in new ways, and driving interest in new tools for business analysts to achieve these goals.
Flashback
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Flashback: A Year Ago This Week on Tyner Blain [2006-01-06]
A look back at the best from a year ago.
Business Analysis / Product Management / Requirements / Writing
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Writing Stylish Requirements
You knew it would happen eventually, the big ten rules of writing requirements has become the big twelve rules. Maybe scope creep isn’t such a bad thing after all. Writing style plays an important role in writing requirements too.
Agile / Communication / Process Improvement / Project Management / Software development / Testing
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Crossing The Desert With Bad Project Planning
Johanna Rothman recently wrote an article with a poignant introduction: “A project team focuses on an interim milestone, works like the devil to meet that milestone. They meet the milestone, look up, and realize they’re not at the end of the project–they still have to finish the darn thing. They’re living the Crossing the Desert syndrome.” Fixing it isn’t enough – how do we prevent it from happening?
Agile
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Ten Common Mistakes of Going Agile
This concludes and summarizes our winter-holiday series on the 10 common mistakes of going agile. The ten mistakes that Levent Gurses identified in the Dec 2006 edition of Dr. Dobb’s journal. Here are links to the ten previous articles, and a summary of the mistakes.
Agile
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Going Agile, 10 Mistakes: Make Agile the New Religion
Don’t over-hype the approach. Don’t be one-dimensional in your message. You will lose credibility. And if you over-promise, you risk making agile the scapegoat.