Meetings without a specific agenda are evil. A vague agenda isn’t good enough. It’s a waste of everyone’s time. Know exactly what you want to accomplish, and know exactly who needs to be there and why. Exception: if you haven’t had a 1:1 conversation with your boss or a particular underling in weeks, then you should…
I’ve spent much of my career working at well-regarded agencies – large and small, and I’ve worked with my share of brilliant people at each of them. At the same time, I’ve seen and worked on very few client engagements that I’d really consider successful. Even when the end result was satisfactory to everyone involved,…
Please indulge a moment of self-pity… I know a designer’s job isn’t rocket science, but that doesn’t mean everyone is qualified to make design decisions. Unfortunately for me, that doesn’t ever seem to stop people.
I’ve been stretched too thinly across a few big projects and trying for nearly three months to find a couple of qualified people to help me on the work I’m getting through EVB. Right now the market is hot for UX people, and the only ones who seem to be available are the totally un-hireable.…
I can barely remember now, but before the age of MapQuest (and, subsequently, Google Maps), if I needed to go somewhere I’d never been to before, I rarely planned my route. If, for example, I wanted to go to a furniture store in a suburb on the other side of town, my process went something…
The guys at 37 Signals have a list of what they call “red flag” words that often come up in business communications and can get teams into trouble. Words like “only” and “can’t” (as in, it should only take you a day to add this feature, and we can’t ship the product without it) lead…
In my post yesterday, I questioned the value of “process” in web and software development and discussed my successes and failures both with and without it. The biggest problem with process is that it deludes people into thinking they have the fundamentals in place to guarantee a successful project. Process is too often a crutch…
UPDATE: There’s a Part 2 now. When I started in the web development business about a decade ago, I worked at a small agency with a few smart people, and we were basically winging it. As the dotcom bubble expanded at a frenzied pace, we grew along with it, and inevitably we had a couple…