Clicks & Notes

Managing Product Development - Organizing for “Efficiency”:

…assembly line organization isn’t the most efficient for brand new or not-repeatable-work work. In software, every project is unique…

If you’re developing a unique product, don’t bother trying to optimize around when you do which piece. (Don’t bother organizing all the GUI work together as an example.) The lesson is that implementing by slice, implementing one complete feature at a time is more efficient than grouping all like work together.

Cutting Through - Sanity checks for feature lists:

Here’s a simple technique that we use on a regular basis as a ’sanity check’ for the technical requirements of a development project.

1. If it’s not already been done, write out the functional specifications as a numbered list of requirements.
2. Do the same for the business requirements that were identified in the earlier stages of the project.
3. Take each functional requirement in turn and cross-reference it against one or more business requirement. At each iteration, ask yourself “what business benefit does this feature deliver?”
4. If there are any functional requirements that can’t be linked to a business requirement, ask yourself if it’s needed - and be very sceptical of the answer if it’s “yes".

Cutting Through - 10 ways to use blogs for managing projects:

1. Communicating with project stakeholders
2. Replacing paper
3. Building issue logs
4. Capturing information snippets
5. Publicising the project progress
6. Reducing email overload
7. Capturing requirements
8. Circulating screenshots
9. Keeping team members up-to-date
10. Provide an automatic audit trail

Cutting Through - Four ways to use wikis for project management:

1. Planning meeting agendas
2. Real-time minute taking
3. Brainstorming presentations
4. Keep documents up-to-date

See also Enhancing Internal Communications with Blogs, Wikis, and More (presentation by Nick Finck, Mary Hodder, and Biz Stone) for specific examples of how blogs and wikis can be used in organizations.