Category Archives: 04 – Collaboration

Setting up a project is to establish collaboration structures. A common practice is to set up teams that exchange documents. Rather than working together, people throw documents at each other.

Collaboration creates teams

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Agile software development relies on teamwork. The idea: a team can create more complex software and it can create it quicker than a single person. However, different teams do not fulfill this promise equally well. Some teams stoically pull a cart with square wheels and do not even spot the fault. This article explores a wide range of aspects around team work with probably one key message: Collaboration creates the team and thus providing room for collaboration is an easy way to strengthen a team.

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5 approaches to integrate UX skills and professionals into organizations

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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.

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UX in a burn-out system – UX Brunch in Zürich

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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 *)

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Agile conversation or requirements engineering?!

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Requirements 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?

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Burn-out machine game @ agile breakfast in Zürich

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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/

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The team wall – or agile knowledge management

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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!

Using the team wall has high impact on team performance.,
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Bill & Chuck – and how they fight ideas into the market

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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.

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Why Joey taped a picture of a cake to his wall

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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. 

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Know how to shape the future

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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.

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Collaboration – Buy or Lease?

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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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