Getting a performant team needs an investment into the team. Instead of frantically or stoically pulling a cart with square wheels, a team should be able to spot the fault in the system and change. This however proves difficult in practices. The good news is: collaboration creates the team and thus providing room for collaboration is an easy way to nurture the team.
Over the last years, many companies adopted user experience (UX) good practices and hired professionals. Some created centralized teams of UX consultants, other included designers into development teams, yet others created a team to contribute a design system or user research. This article is a collection of five approaches on how to include UX skills and UX professionals into organizations, open for discussion and refinement.
Retrospectives are great to improve collaboration in teams. To add to the many options available, here are ten or so questions you can use for you team retro. The questions follow up key success factors and have the potential to reveal blind spots of a team.
Continue readingSome companies take a quite structured approach to creating user experiences. Others create user experiences unwittingly. Looking back, I detected six principles in regards to creating user experiences.
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At the UX Brunch in Zürich on December 6, 2019 Rahel and I held a presentation and some very engaged discussions on how we as UX professionals ourselves heat-up the burn-out systems we are caught in. Here is a summary including some of the slides of this session.
By Markus und Rahel *)
Continue readingIt’s quite easy to rush through creativity workshops enumerating, rating and selecting ideas to hand-over for later implementation. This article is however about a different kind of creativity, the creativity that comes from gaining deeper understanding – together in a workshop.
By Beatrice*) and Markus
Continue readingRequirements engineering (RE) has a long and successful tradition. Different approaches always existed. Still it is optimized for an artifact driven setup: Individuals pass on documents. Agile practices are however geared for an interaction driven setup where individuals form one “super-brain”. The discussion about requirements is part of the agile conversation. And now, the proven approaches from RE suddenly create friction and bad smells. So, should we forget about requirements?
On March 6, I had the opportunity to play the burn-out machine game with about 40 agile consultants in Zürich. We spent two hours with engaged discussions and insights about the very serious and highly relevant topic burn-out. We even had a good time doing so.
https://www.meetup.com/de-DE/Agile-Breakfast-Zurich/
Here’s the situation: A customer asked us to improve the quality of their core system so that they again can act on the demands of their users and customers in a timely manner. We had a team room at our disposal and we again made extensive use of the walls. It turned out that the team wall made the difference!
An important management tool to improve team performance is the Team Squeezer. It’s really simple: just use hierarchical power and exert pressure to make the development team hurry up. Usually the Team Squeezer backfires.
Let me introduce two characters, Bill and Chuck. To be honest, they are personae distilled from people you could meet. They are especially interesting because of their behavior: Instead of collaborating to let ideas compete they fight to get their ideas into the market. And sadly, they have good reasons to do so.
At the recent Agile Unconference in Zürich I came across the concept of lean agile procurement. The key insight for me was: forget preparing RFPs, rather establish a good relationship with a select list of partners.
Tom Wujec’s TED Talk entitled “build a tower, build a team” is certainly worth six minutes of your time, it is fun to watch too.
I particularly like the statement that “Design is a Contact Sport!”
Take a look here http://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_build_a_tower.html
If you ever tried to propose an idea to somebody, you have certainly experienced a few personalities, like Joey has in this story. And after having met them Joey, for example, felt the urge to pin a picture of a cake in a sunset to his cubicle walls. For others, this is not sufficient and they have to create a lengthy comic strip.
In order to create great products, know how is needed. Interdisciplinary or cross-functional teams are the way to make people with different expertise create a common solution. Here’s a puzzle piece for cross-functional teams: 6 generic areas of expertise needed in a product development.
Installment sales are great. Instead of spending the whole amount of money up-front – and save for it – you simply pay your monthly deposit. Still, someone will have to pay the interest and cover the risk involved, i.e. you, the buyer. Thus you trade the profit of having something right now with the higher costs. Did you realize, that this is an analogy to how we collaborate?
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