Can someone explain to me why Australia’s biggest Telco, and one of Australia’s largest companies, thinks that its appropriate to launch their brand new blogging service…. when the service is not yet available?
Why didn’t they at least bother designing this page? Maybe telling me *when* it would be launched. Maybe getting my email address and sending me a little note when its up?
Perhaps they could have cleaned out all the dodgy test content before sending the site public?
And I certainly hope someone is going to take a good hard look at that ‘BigBlog Community page’. An alphabetical index does not a ‘Community’ make….
everyone I know who loves agile-type methodologies has three things in common:
they work in a small team. Like, less than 10 people. Usually less than 5.
they don’t have to do monthly profit reports to management
they don’t have (external) clients.
That kind of environment makes it really easy to love a methodology where you don’t have to accurately define the scope of a project (what the client is going to ‘get’ at the end), and where iteration and collaboration is a way of life.
Consequently, over the last 12 months or so I find myself getting into lots of heated discussions with people over the value of functional specifications. The cool kids say that func. specs. are a waste of time, that they are creativity killers, and that there is no place for them in application design and development today.
I love the sound of that. Hell. I’d love to ditch functional specs if I thought it would give a good outcome. I don’t like writing them. Does anyone like writing them?!
But, can my clients cope without documentation? Without bits of paper that they rarely read but that allows them to feel comfortable throughout the development process – makes them feel that there is a process, there is a scope, and that we have it all under control. Tells them what they’re going to get for their money.
a bit of an archival record. An article in the SMH from a while back about the amazing Reach Out Central (http://roc.reachout.com.au), an amazing site and learning tool that I worked on with much love last year.
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a nice overview to the tasks associated with a competitive review and some sample outputs
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amazing shockwave work… check out the ‘sky’ project. Its like flying through the clouds, be sure to turn corners to get the full effect.
Its not something I’ve asked myself on a regular basis, but found out first hand when I dropped into an informal gathering in North Sydney last night.
My experience last night was that lots of people were talking about being semantic. Using tags.
For some reason, that surprised me. Perhaps its all the tag-cloud bagging I’ve been hearing lately. Perhaps because it feels as though tags have been around for so long now. (And they’ve been around for longer than that even, because tags are really just exposed metadata).
People were wondering how do we tags scale efficiently, and how might they work in enterprise applications? I was heartened to find that there were other IAs admitting to being dreadful tag-housekeepers on their own Del.icio.us and Flickr accounts (symptomatic of the large scale problem of tagging and maintaining meaning & efficiency).
Just when we’d decided that we don’t really care about complex and formal taxonomy, suddenly the word ‘thesaurus’ just kept popping up.
The old and the new…
That’s why this is called Web 2.0, isn’t it. What we’re doing now is just another iteration based on all our knowledge and experience from years back.
I was particularly happy to hear more people saying that their roles are now more valued within projects than ever before. And also happy to hear that there is plenty of work about right now.
My name is Leisa Reichelt. I am an independent consultant who works with organisations who want to better understand and improve the experience they're delivering their customers.
By improving Customer Experience we know that companies become more effective and profitable - winning more valuable and more loyal customers.
In particular I focus on working with customers to map their customer journeys and identify the critical moments of truth and touchpoints.
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