Presentation Powertool

Last week at the Microsoft PDC it was clear that all presentors were not only well trained for the job but also that they were leveraging tools to make their "Customer's Experience" great.

How many times have you presented using a projector and that people have been complaining on the font size or the overall readibility of the material presented on the screen?

This does not have to be. I am culprit of this lack of concern for my participants, well... not anymore.

I downloaded ZoomIt. Try it, your assistance will thank you for that!

When the design IS user centered...

Been silent for a while although I have a pile of topics to cover here, not all directly related to process improvement... although... user centered design is non arguably a process improvement in the context of product creation activities... This is what this post is about.

Last year I offered myself an Ipod touch. Loved it at first sight as everyone. However I was quickly disenchanted when I noticed how the Music playing application was lacking advanced features. After all, beside selecting music and playing it you couldn't do much (it is still this way today) and to make it worse some functionality are implemented reverse. One notable example is how Apple offers us to manage play lists, rather than being song centric it is play list centric. Tell me who sits with its Ipod to create playlist? Unless I am so weird, it is when a song plays that I am thinking about which play list I want this song into. Anyway, I digress...

Apple did surprise me though with the way the implemented the concept of requesting a song via the Remote application. This is a piece of beauty from a user centered design stand point.

For the Remote application neophyte, Remote allows someone in a wifi zone where an Itune is found, to control it. This privileges can be granted to guest at your place.

Before the digital era we were stacking records to order the play list. Well, this is more or less what the Remote application and the ITune DJ allows to do with the "Request a Song" feature. This becomes very interesting in a party when many people have IPhones or IPods, it allows people to browse and search your library and request and vote for songs. Making the music experience of your gathering tied to your guests preferences.

What makes this feature useful is the fact that it is user centered, that it directly relates to a human behavior.

The point here is that as software consumers we should not tolerate anything but user centered designed products. It is obvious when you see such products, you can always relate the software flow to the related human behaviors and in all cases this makes the software much simpler and nicer to use.

This is the endeavor the company I work at has embarked on more than 3 years ago now. Since we cannot resolve the peace and war problem, let's make the world a better place to live through user centered designed software!

For an in depth presentation of Itune DJ and Remote you can consult this post.

Read the other side of the coin

When the design is not user centerred...

I have to admit, I generally love Google's products. I am however often not impressed by their way of handling customer requests or the whole customer experience thing for that matter.

The last deception for me is this feature that now allows to do an undo after sending an email. I can relate to this feature because I have requested the ability for my sent email to sit in my outbox for some time (like you can do in Outlook for example).

From the point of view of listening to their customers they do well, it is easy to submit feature request or bugs.

But when I enabled this Labs feature I was up for a major deception. It was clear that they got it all wrong. In this case, the code mechanic and feature works:

1. I can effectively undo a send email
2. I can personalize (minimally: 5 or 30 seconds) the time is stays in my outbox.

Where it fails miserably is how the user interaction is done. It is so poor that the working feature is more or less useless.

When sending, I have to click on the "undo" link at the top of the screen but this is only there until I do another action. Since after hitting send I always do something else (I am not waiting 30 seconds staring at my screen to maybe think that I should not have hit send), the message disappear thus rendering the working feature useless.

What as gone wrong? Or, what could have happened to prevent this? (note that I am assuming that this is the implementation they choose to do to fulfill my feature request)

It is simple: Get someone involved on the development side at Google to validate the approach they were to take with the customer.

Doing so would have allowed them to:

Understand my goal

• I need the ability to cancel sending an email.

Understand my motivation

• I sometime use the wrong tone in an email, I get excited, I need time to cool down before I realize I may have said something the wrong way.

Understand my workflow

• I need the period to be longer than 5 or 30 seconds, I need 10 minutes.
• This above implies that I cannot rely on the last action "undo" link there is for everything else.

This is so simple that it is pathetic that they do not do it. This is something that is important and a lesson that we made a loooooong time ago at Macadamian: validate your understanding with your customers/users so you reduce the risk of mistake at the soonest possible time.

Now if someone at Google can read this an start interacting with their customers it would make my day.

Kanban collaboration nirvana?

I've been educating myself more and more lately on this Kanban buzz. For the neophytes, this is more or less the Toyota model applied to software development.

One thing that struck me is how it enforces collaboration. The cool thing is that I can relate to some of the inherent benefits when thinking of a project that I worked on a few years ago.

One thing Kanban ask you is to be lean. To be lean implies to have control over your queues. At Toyota it meant that the door maker guy would only start making new doors when the door installer guy would have only X left in his pile. How does that translate to software you ask?

Well it is simple. The number of stories accepted on the board are limited, the WIP (work in progress) is kept to a low number, similarly all the queues of your SDLC are kept to a small number too. There goes for the queues optimization theory, you can read more here.

However, these limitations on the queues size have an interesting side effect, and it is that it will promote collaboration over everything else. In a Kanban system a team member for example, is encouraged and might have to offer help to the QA team in order for them to free some room in their own queue, which will allow the dev to promote the new completed story to the QA stage. Similarly, a developer could also assist in the UCD (user centered design) activities if the bottleneck was found to be there.

Isn't this beautiful? I think so. This is something I recall doing at a small scale when I was project leader, I would find myself occasionally helping my QA team to reduce their queues.

At the time I did not know that much about Toyota nor Kanban, but it feels good today to see that I had such behaviors without really knowing much about some of their benefits.

Another side effect of this is the growing requirement for highly agile team members, team made of people that can do just about anything for the benefit of project... and the team!

Why team collaboration and communication is so painful?

A recent twit from Gerry Kirk that I follow on Twitter, is providing me with an answer to this question.

His recent link to Working Agreements is putting emphasis on it, not directly but indirectly.

When I read this, one thing struck me: there is a lot expected from everyone - not too much - but a lot. Failures at communicating these expectations will undermine your team. Not only at the Agile/Scrum level as explained by Nicolas but at all levels of your organisation.

People have to understand the purpose of the expected communication and collaboration activities. They have to value them as a practice and they have to buy into the technology that enables these activities to happen.

Again, the people, process and tool triangle...

Will you join the Google wave?

I am quite late with this Google news but I am just done watching the developer preview at Google IO on May 28th.

It's quite long but quite worth it as an overview.


This is very exciting in my opinion as it revolutionize further the way we communicate. Google already created a mini revolution with Gmail, but Wave integrates all communicateion tools we use daily (email, IM, SMS, blog, content collaboration, etc...) in one. That's lovely. The more I think about it, it's not a communication revolution but a collaboration one.

We have all replaced the words "search this" in favor of "google this"... I would like to predict that we will soon replace email and threads by Waves! IMNSHO, this is the end of email the way we use it today.

Will you join the Wave?

More stuff about Google

Following up on my twitter post...  

on the other hand is the fact that Google will keep creating weird features in Gmail - last example is this inbox feature for slow connection... 

How many Google savvy users are still on 3200 bauds modem?  Admitedly the value of this feature is of limited reach...

There are a bunch of productivity related features that are in their funnel I am sure, I for one keep pushing features their way. 

Last one was something inspired from the Syndeo Project Server we created back in the days...  It's the ability to put email threads on a stack or on a symbolic push pin board that you can later pick and add as attachments to other emails. 

I do not know about you but I keep having to do this, digging out threads and then forwarding them arround.    Of course I can send them individually but in many cases it makes sense to keep them together to keep the context in one bundle. 

Been waiting for this and other similar productivity enhancement to gmail... Maybe I am alone with this need who knows?

 

You can contribute feature list to Google at 

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=suggestions.cs

Google Tasks

This is something that I have been waiting for a long time now... 

Last week Google released an update that shows your tasks in your calendar.  Kind of mandatory if you want to get them done! (granted that you at least look at your calendar once a day...)

Read more about it here. 

OSEF - Software as a Service

Yesterday was the event on SaaS, we had a very information savvy group and our panelists, as usual, have helped demystifying SaaS for the rest of us. 

A couple highlights for me from the discussion:

SaaS is raising the bar with respect to the quality of the development process.  

I was not expecting that one.  But when you think about it, delivering software (read: value) frequently puts pressure on the need for the development team to create quality software at all time not relying as much on an intense and lengthy verification process.  In this context, successful SaaS product teams have better software development processes.  We did not dive into the details of it, but risk mitigation and quality assurance strategies such as: user centered design, code review, agile methodologies, automated unit tests are certainly part of the mix.

Lesson: When building software in the SaaS model, ensuring you have a great software development process should increase your odds of getting the most returns out of your SaaS initiatives.

Your development team are on the operation team. 

We had an extensive discussion on the shift that SaaS causes on the involvement of the development team.  This is a no brainer when you think about it.   When releasing software on a monthly basis (or even faster) to your customers, you must have your development team available at all time, otherwise who's going to take care of the unexpected failure occurring on a Sunday night?  This is a clear distinction over the more traditional delivery model of shrink wrapped software.  

Lesson: Ensure you are engaging your development team for more than "simply" building the software.  They must be available to handle software failures at all time.  

Hope to see you at the next OSEF, the last of this season (for real this time!) 

If you are not member, please request membership through http://www.meetup.com/ottawasef/

Cheers! 

The power of your team

I posted earlier this week on The Macadamian Files blog. 

Beside the technical lesson in there, this post if omitting - by design -  a gem that jumped right in my face the minute I got my answer. 

The hidden gem is a practice that consists of leveraging your entire team experience.   This is how I got the answer to my question.  Powerful collaboration. 

Here is the practice definition:

Description

• Offer a mechanism to reach out to the experts in your organization.

When to Apply?

• Knowledge exists in the org but it is not maximized and software errors or delays are caused due to that. 
  
• You have a distributed team.

What needs to be done?

• Define communication channels, it could be mailing lists, IRC channels, forums, etc...
  
• Ask your experts to participate and offer to everyone else to volunteer.

We did not set up that system from day 1 at Macadamian, it's only when we started to be distributed and somewhat larger that it became clearer that we needed channels to our collecctive brains.  

At Macadamian, we created 3 specialized mailing lists: engineering, usability and quality assurance. 

This is the mechanism that allowed me to get the answer to the problem I was blogging about on The Macadamian Files.   These mailing lists are now part of our problem solving process.

While you dig on the web you also email the group,  you are likely to be surprised by the volume of knowledge of your organization.  

Macadamian win OCRI's - Service Company of the year!

Another beautiful day! Presented to Macadamian , whose approach helps software product development managers attain the mix of skill, speed, quality and cost they need to be successful. To Macadamian, success means working hard to raise the odds of other companies' products succeeding in the marketplace. http://www.ottawasun.com/Money/2009/04/09/9065971.html

OSEF - Delivering Software Faster

Yesterday was the 6th event of the year.  We had a great pannel!

Adrian Cho, Development Manager, Rational Team Concert at IBM 
(see his work at http://www.jazzproces...)

Jason Mawdsley, Director of Project Management and Certified Scrum Master at Macadamian 
(see his blog http://ontherighttrac...)

John Fait, Lead Software Developer, Enterprise and Developer Business Unit at Adobe

We looked at ways that you can use in your oganization to "Deliver Software Faster".  Interrestingly enough, the discussion kept being steered towards Agile methods, Scrum in particular - probably a sign of our time! 

In the end Scrum has not - as is - been identified as the silver bullet though, but instead, an custom version that fits your organization might very well be YOUR silver bullet. 

An interresting shift that happenned early in the discussion consisted of focusing not on "Delivering Software Faster" but more "Delivering Value Faster".   

With no surprise, this consists of putting the user of the product as a key component in the product evolution, a couple methodologies were discussed:

• User Centered Design Methodology
• SyncDev

Last but not least, people.  It's only with a great team that you will accomplish great things.  Make sure that:

1. your hiring process allows you to get the best out there,
2. your people are doing things they like,
3. they are well trained.  

But first and foremost, have inspiring leaders that will help them to be self motivated at achieving theirs and your organization goals. 

Micro Deliverables

The Tech Republic had an interresting post earlier this month:  Monitor Project Progress by using micro-deliverables.

This is a lesson we made almost two years ago.  Being mostly software centric, we refer to this as the "patch a day principle".   We even push it further than the author of the post by targetting deliverables on a "almost daily basis".

1. Amongst developers, the code is an awesome communiation tools.  
   
2. You cannot catch an error much sooner than the next day it is commited.
3. In distributed contexts, the time zones often plays in your advantages and review happens over nights. 

As you can see by the name of the "principle" this is something very software engineering centric.   There is no reason to not apply this accross all roles involved in a project though: Documentation, QA and UX. 

This is about predictability and this is a requirement common to all activities on a project.   Make your project lead and your customer happy through a predictable team using frequent micro-deliverables!

MS Live Workspace

A few of us at Macadamian have been experimenting with the Microsoft Live Workspace thingy... Sort of Google Docs for MS Office users.

This is still very beta and several key collaboration features existing in Google Docs are missing. To name a few:

1. Folders: this was the first annoyance, when you collaborate on a project you want to keep things clean otherwise it gets... messy... one need a way to organize files.
   
2. Email Collaborators: This is a low hanging fruit, when you collaborate you need to email your collaborator, why isn't this there yet? Beats me.
   
3. Notifications seems flaky: I just started to get them (took time to work) but they have no content, just a link, only partially useful.
   
4. History: Well, I have yet to find a way to see the "diff" between the versions. I do not think it's there although I am sure I read somewhere something about this.
   

All in all this is an acceptable stab at it from MS, in my opinion mainly for two reasons:

• It promotes document sharing in a rather nice and working (most of the time) way. Can we be done with sending each others documents as attachments once for all?
  
• It leverages Words and other Office tools - although most of the time overrated and overpowered for most uses - they have been adopted in organizations, keeping them around while working in the cloud makes it comfortable for most of us and it does not create the same resistance to change effect than Google Docs does.
  

This being said, the current Live Workspace offering is far from the power that we need for efficient distributed collaboration. Google seems to have a serious lead there but people wants to use Word... What can you do?

I still thinks this is far superior - event with the occasional glitches - than the staus quo of keeping sending each others documents as attachments.

With this at least you will stop asking yourself: "Am I looking at the latest version?"

Delay on send...

With the integration of Gears and the related addition of the Outbox in Google Mail, it seems that Google is ready to implement a feature "I" ;-) have requested a long time ago... "Delay on send".

This is a feature in Outlook that has allowed me in the past to fix already sent emails before they get onto their journey in the interweb...

Ultimate feedback loop for bloggers...

Following up on my last blog post...  I started wondering last week if process savvy people in the work place were the same at home.  I was thinking about this when doing the recycling duties, i.e. avoiding to put garbage in the recycling bin and vice versa... 

There is a corrolation for me.  Then I thougth wouldn't it be nice to ask arround?  Then I found this little free instant survey tool... What do you say?

Feedback loop for bloggers...

Jason's recent posts made me found out about this new feedback thingy "Reaction" that Blogger is offering. Combined with Google Analytics this is probably the ultimate feedback loop tool for bloggers that I have seen so far. 

I just turned it on on my blog.  Of course, comments are interesting an very welcome but they may be intimidating to some readers.  Ticking a check box is not as engaging but does provide valuable feedback to the blogger.  

To turn the "reactions" feature on, simply go to your template and edit the layout of your post item.   When you read a post with this, send feedback to the author, I am sure they will appreciate.