To celebrate America’s two hundred and thirty first birthday, The Technical Management Institute is reducing the price of our one-hour and two-hour classes to zip, zero, or free! For about the cost of a drink of tap water, you can have me come to your company and put on one of these short-format workshops. This will only last a limited time, so act now!
LinkedIn has a cool feature that let’s you ask a question of your whole network. This morning, someone in my network asked this question:
Tools for visualising interactive prototypes? What do you prefer?
Powerpoint, ConceptDraw, Omnigraffle, Flash, Ruby on Rails?
We are reviewing the tools we are using to help visualise interactive storyboards and concepts for our clients. What are other people using? How important is it that the tool supports experimenting with real data and conditional branching in order to explore with the development team the consequences of their design decisions?
My reply:
Consider Paper Prototyping.
It is low cost, easy to do, and will quickly teach you how a real user will react to the system. With a paper prototype, a human acts as the computer, so your prototype can support some very sophisticated logic without the need to create code. Modifications are trivial, encouraging experimentation, discovery and improvement. I was skeptical at first, but after using it a few times I have become impressed with the power of this tool.
I wasn’t liking my business cards.
So Hillary and I spent a couple of hours on Overnighttprints.com today and came up with something that I like better.
What do you think?
“It’s so great to hear that I’m not the only one dealing with this problem!” said one engineering manager after another had shared a problem they were having getting non-technical upper management to understand the time and complexity issues of software development.
The Bay Area Engineering Managers Support Group will meet tomorrow (Tuesday) night in Palo Alto. The evening will start off with short interactive workshop. Tuesday’s workshop will focus on one of the easiest ways to improve the effectiveness of meetings. Next will come a facilitated discussion in which participants can share issues that they are facing at work and get feedback, tips, and advice from the group. The event is free. We still have room for a couple of more folks to join us. Please RSVP at meetup.com or by leaving a comment on this blog post.
This coming Tuesday, I’ll be facilitating the first meeting of the Bay Area Agile Managers Support Group. The event will start off with a short workshop focused on one of the key criteria for having successful meetings. Today was the day I practiced the workshop with a live studio audience.
Compliments and criticism are the two edges of the feedback sword. Today, The Chief Happiness Officer’s Blog explains that to be effective, compliments must be specific. This generalizes well to ‘feedback must be specific’. In particular, you want to clearly describe the behavior that you observed. For instance: “Bob, I see that while you were fixing that bug you also added several new tests and refactored the module.” Now that Bob knows exactly what you are going to compliment him on, tell him about the impact this will have: “That will really make it easier for people to work in that module in the future, and probably prevent some bugs too!” At this point, if we were delivering criticism, we would request a change in behavior. Since we are giving a compliment, we can simply say thank you: “I really appreciate you doing that. Thanks.”
You can find more on feedback here.
The Chief Happiness Officer has a good post today on knowing when it is time to quit your job.
If you are unhappy in your job, go read it. No really, stop reading this and go read it. OK, since you are still reading this, I’ll give the upshot of his article, but really the whole thing is worth reading.
You are invited to join the Bay Area Engineering Managers Support Group.
Share the adventures and challenges of managing engineers. Each session will start with a short presentation on a topic of interest to technical managers. After that comes a facilitated discussion where participants can share challenges that they are facing and get feedback, ideas, and support from the group. The event is free. Food and beverages are available for purchase from out host restaurant. Come out, join the discussion, and become a better manager.
Our first meetup will be held on Tuesday June 19th at 7:00 PM. We will meet in the event room at Hobees 4224 El Camino Real, Palo Alto, CA. You can RSVP by leaving a comment on this blog post or by joining our event on meetup.com
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