Best Practices for Requirements Gathering Sessions

It's been a while since I've led a requirements session for an interactive application - but no worries, I found it's like riding a bike. After a few minutes the old habits come back, and iterative ideas and cascading creativity starts to flow. What has changed, however, is the application platform, the office environment, and the various knowledge capture tools at our disposal. So, in the spirit of knowledge retention and sharing, here's a brain dump of ideas that I…

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Tactics for Controlling Project Scope

I wrote about ways to "cheat" at project prioritization [aka trying to figure out what to work on next, when there is more demand (projects) than supply (people to work on them)]. One significant tool you have at your disposal is controlling scope - can you do 20% of the work to get 80% of the benefits? Easier said than done, sometimes you need tactics, that help identify an opportune place to stop, a run-on project, or a design that…

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Marketing a Startup Business (3 of 3)

author's note: 3rd of 3 parts of an essay first published in 2000. Check out part 1 and part 2 ... jpm Address the Rest The elevator speech follows rather quickly from the executive summary. The power of this “sound bite” is in it’s clarity and consistency – make sure that everyone involved in the organization can deliver it the same way. Remember, in a small company, everybody is a salesman! Of course, the elevator speech should not be viewed…

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Marketing a Startup Business (2 of 3)

author's note: 2nd of 3 parts of an essay first published in 2000. Check out part 1 here ... jpm Starting in the Middle To get moving on step 1 – capturing the “vision” – we’ll start in the middle with the executive summary. This presentation will help gather the relevant “what”, “why”, and “how”, without going into too much detail or oversimplifying. A little structure now will allow you to quickly summarize the salient points into your elevator speech.…

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Marketing a Startup Business (1 of 3)

author's note: I was recently asked about this essay, first published in 2000, so I thought I'd trot it back out as a series of posts. Written near the end of the dot-com boom, it still has some resonance, even with internal IT projects ... jpm Congratulations! Getting that terrific startup idea that has real business potential can be the easiest and the hardest part of going entrepreneurial. It’s fun to bat about ideas, look into new and exciting technologies,…

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The Key to Success for your Next Job Interview

I'm been clipping some interesting posts over the past few weeks, regarding interviewing techniques and hiring technical people. Rothman's aptly named blog is always good for an insightful article at least once a week - some of the recent postings of note include: A good technical person should always be intellectually curious about how things work. This translates into wanting (demanding!) to understand "the stack", as I call it - the technology pieces from the top (ex. PHP in my…

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A clash of languages over IM (bilingual? trilingual? quadlingual?)

I've been IM'g in a work atmosphere for over a year now, with internal and external folks, and still actively networking for tech info, support, etc. That peer group has a fairly well-defined set of etiquette, jargon, and style. In my new company, we are rolling out enterprise IM, and for most folks (including IT!), this is a "foreign language". (I'm "jpm1234" in the conversations below ...) Challenge #1: I think faster than I type, so I get a bit…

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To print or not to print? Depends on the life span of the content …

I've been (correctly) picked off as having an electronic preference for communications. Please don't hand me a printout - send an ecopy of that document, PowerPoint, project plan, whatever. PDF is ok, but original format preferred. Why do I like to gather information in an e-sorta way? Paper stacks up on my desk, fills up my file cabinets - it just gets in the way Paper is not searchable - I like to google my private knowledge base with Copernic…

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Finding shapes in the fog – How to frame a wispy, wandering conversation

An excellent discussion this afternoon, on a fairly complex topic we're trying to move forward. When dealing with broad system concepts that have been trivialized into TLAs - think CRM, PLM, BPM, TQM, yada - you need to help folks define some sort of framework to focus and steer the initiative in a general (hopefully correct) direction. Precision is not required in the early stages - like herding cats, we can start making progress when we can capture a generalized,…

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