It seems I’m not the only one dealing with name changes. Guy Kawasaki had two recent posts on picking names, How to name a name and The mother of name change reports, which explores the reason behind the 1900 corporate name changes last year. (Hat tip to Gernot Ross).

And of course there’s also Seattle local The name inspector, who focuses on phonetic breakdown of names, explaining why some work and some don’t.

Posted in creative thinking | 1 Comment »

With the end of year coming around, my highlights and lowlights for 2007 are coming to mind. One clear failure was my Scoliday project. In 2004 I set about creating my own holidays, to honor what I thought was important. I did them that year, fell off in 2005, and the started again in 2006 with a new list of days, some of which I celebrated.

Somehow in 2007 I didn’t even try.

I know a few folks did their own flavor of this idea, including antigeek, Konrad West, and more, and I hope they’ve faired better than I have.

I’m reading through my journals for 2007 and trying to see if I can figure it out.

Thoughts so far:

1. I didn’t have any partners in crime. As an author/speaker dude, I work solo most of the time and suffer from solo project fatigue. Having a holiday buddy or something would probably up my odds.
2. Perhaps I need a holiday every few months called called Celebrate all the holiday’s you’ve missed so far day. Build in a way to recover part way through the year.
3. Use this blog as a forcing function - post a note on the day, and if I didn’t celebrate it, hang my head in shame online or donate money to charity for each day I let fly by.

I’m still in love with the idea - but trying to learn from my mistakes, and improve my commitment level for 2008.

Posted in personal, philosophy | 1 Comment »

Three months ago, I asked all of you to help me decide the name of the revised edition of the art of project management (if you want to know why we’re changing the name, read that last post).

After more than 300 votes, here’s what won: Making things happen

After many discussions with the fine folks at O’Reilly, the final name is Making things happen: mastering project management. I’m excited about the name! My favorite chapter in the book is #12, the one called how to make things happen, and now it gets top billing.

For those interested in the behind the scenes drama: this was not a fun process. Like naming a child, naming a book is something one only expects to do once. If you don’t like the outcome, or the fact that there is a name change, I understand, but do consider this was 20 times less fun for me to deal with, than it was for you.

What’s most interesting is this - behold the power of the web! You guys say it and it happens! I must thank all of you who took the time to vote: the ability to point to data from actual customers played a key role in my discussions with the editors at O’Reilly Media on the new title.

The revision is well underway, and I’ll post more about it, and its timeline for release, soon. In related news, the existing book will be out of print soon, so pick it up if you want a collectors item.

For fun, here were some of the best, and funniest, write in votes:

• TBFKATAOPM2 (The book formerly known as…)
• What the #$!#!@$% is Project Management and How Did it Get inside this book?
• Projects. Managed. Berkun’s Way.
• Kill the messenger
• Who stole my project manager?
• Real world project management
• How to make enemies and derail projects in 5 minutes a day
• OH MY GOD, HOW DID I BECOME THE PM?
• The bible of mastering the zen and art of agile project management for dummies
• From bad to worse: how bad managers become horrible
• Who stole my project manager?

Posted in On writing, art of project management | 3 Comments »

The time has come. As mentioned a few weeks ago, the book formerly known as the art of project management will be going out of print. A revised edition, with a new title, will be out in 2008 (If you want to know why, read the post).

If you’ve been waiting to buy a copy of the book, you should do so soon. Amazon and other retailers already have limited inventory (noted by 5-10 day ship times). The used inventory on amazon and e-bay look good, but I don’t know how out of print status will effect that.

Once the book is out of stock, you’ll have to wait for the new edition, which will be out next year.

Posted in On writing, art of project management | No Comments »

I hate most systems of innovation I see or read about, as they fail to directly attack most of core challenges innovators face. But one idea I’m found of is the idea approval index. Here’s how it works:

How many approvals do you need to release something to a customer?

Think it through. It’s probably more than you think. Include informal or implicit approvals. Even if you’re the CEO, can you code the idea yourself? Design it? There are always people to convince or cajole.

The higher the number, the harder innovation is. The lower the number, the easier. It’s that simple. For example:

A) Joe Blogger has an idea for a way to radically improve his wordpress blog. He stays up late and codes it up. The next morning he posts it on his website. Idea Approval Index = 1. It’s just him - he thinks it, makes it, ships it.

B Fred is the engineering lead at Bozotech. He stays up late and codes it up. He shows it to another engineering lead for some feedback. They review it with the Quality assurance manager, who requests some changes, and get their designer to clean up their UI. Finally they show it to the group manager who loves it, and asks them to present it at the next feature review meeting (4 other team leads). Finally, days later, the web team agrees to get it online. Idea Approval Index (IAI) = 10 .

Counting approvals is a rough guide - it tells you how many chances there are for an idea to get killed before it makes it out the door.

Are there problems with this metric? Sure (Feel free to play devil’s advocate in the comments). But as a rough guide it’s handy. If you want more innovation and change, you want to lower the approval index. If you want more predictability and stability, raise the index. If you want both at the same time, on the same project, you’ve got a tougher problem - I’ve got answers: leave a comment if you care and I’ll post a follow-up.

It’s no surprise that the risk taking required to develop a new idea most often happens in small groups or by people working solo - their approval index is low.

Posted in Innovation, Management, creative thinking | 8 Comments »

In chapter 3 of The Myths of Innovation, I explore why innovation methedologies are prone to fail. It’s not their fault - there are many factors involved that are out of the control of any individual. You can do many things right and still fail.

There are dozens of challenges that must be overcome, but to be handy I distilled them down into 8 basics. This provides a handy checklist for evaluating why ideas die, why a start-up failed, or where the real tough spots are in making innovations happen.

1. Find an idea. Historically this is easy. Ideas are everywhere and anyone who can consider a problem for an hour can come up with possible ideas for solving it. Creativity is rarely the hardest challenge.
2. Develop a solution. The gap between an idea and a working prototype is HUGE. So what if you think something can be done, go and do it. Until you can show the manifestation of the idea, it’s still just an idea. Thousands of brilliant minds have conceived brilliant ideas, but failed, despite years of dedicated effort, to successfully prototype them.
3. Find a sponsor and funding. Even with a kick-ass prototype in hand you need resources to develop the prototype into a product. Whether an entrepreneur or a middle-manager, odds are good that to finish a prototype, or make a product out of it, you’ll need someone else’s approval. (Even if it’s your wife’s permission to spend nights working, a friend who will let you live in their basement, or a bartender willing to run you a tab).
4. Reproduction. Making one of something is not the same as making a thousand. I happen to have an amazing mousetrap: his name is Vincent and he’s my 15lb cat. But I can only sell one, as cloning him would cost $50,000 and that’s more than anyone would pay for a good mousetrap. Having an innovation and having an innovation than can be reproduced economically are not the same thing. Software is generally easy to reproduce, but many innovations are not. When it comes to the web, reproduction often means scale: can your server handle 50000 people using your innovation at the same time? This is a different technical skill set than creating the prototype.
5. Reach a customer. This is where the skill set required to make a successful innovation changes dramatically. OK. So you’ve overcome the first four challenges - but now the challenge has nothing to do with domain expertise, prototype brilliance, or even funding. Now someone has to inform potential customers that your innovation exists, persuade them to be interested, and convince them to pay money for it. Wow. What does this have to do with breakthrough thinking or a brilliant prototype? Very little. Those things help, but the challenge is now about persuasion, not creation. Up until this challenge, most innovators are deliberately hiding from the world in fear of idea theft, but now they have run in the opposite direction.
6. Beat competitors. Every idea has competitors. Even if you successfully reach customers, you won’t be the only one trying to reach them, and in the pursuit of customers things get ugly. Thomas Edison, in the war over electricity, tortured animals to convince the world his DC current was safer than Westinghouse’s AC (they were equally dangerous). How to position, advertise, make partnerships, sign deals and distribute a product is complex, unpredictable, and has little to do with the quality of the idea being sold.
7. Timing. This is the challenge that crushes innovators souls. A huge number of things can happen on any of your important days that a) decides your fate and b) you have no control over. Imagine what happened to all the start-up companies that announced their new product to the world on Sept 11, 2001. No one knows their names, and many of those companies did not have the resources to stage another launch. WWII had a huge impact on innovation: many ideas that weren’t war related were mothballed for years, including broadcast television in the USA. Timing impacts product launches, business deals, cost of goods, and dozens of other decisions innovations depend on.
8. Keep lights on. And of course, while you’re doing all of the above, someone has to pay the bills and keep whatever daily business there is running.

The book digs deeper into these challenges, and how succesful innovators overcame them, so if you dig this view take a look at the book, The Myths of Innovation.

Posted in Innovation, Myths of Innovation | No Comments »

I’ll be speaking next week at Lunch 2.0, a local tech networking event. It’s a good deal: Free! You show up, meet some people, eat some food, and listen to me talk about innovation, and answer your questions, for a half hour or more.

The lunch is at F5 headquarters on Elliot Ave downtown - details here.

Posted in On Tour | No Comments »

#2 on the free review list comes from Geneva Switzerland, at parking-friend.com, a site for valet parking at the airport and other places.

Summary:

• Designed like a poster. The visual elements are strong and dominate the page. This would great for a poster where you need to draw attention, but if someone is on the web page you already have their attention. The large P element on the left and the price star on the right overpower the rest of the design. The P alone consumes 100+ pixels of width, purely for cosmetics. If the site were high style (shoes, clothes, etc.) maybe you could argue for the style value, but this is a parking site - a utility experience.
• Choices are hidden and links unclear. The page works by showing/hiding one of three choices: airport, event or other. Airport is chosen by default, but to see the option options you have to click on the right question. With only 3 choices there’s no reason to hide UI: radio buttons work very well for handling this kind of decision making.
• Colors and sizes are too strong . Trebuchet is known to be a good web design font, but if you split sentences into two colors and default to 20pt text, it gets hard to read (See the Terms page). Whitespace is increasingly important with difficult fonts or large sizes, but the text heavy pages on this site have few paragraph or line breaks. The purple/orange theme is good and works well, but it doesn’t need to be followed through within sentences - two color phrases are hard to read.

The squint test: One visual design trick is to squint your eyes and see how the page balances. The two dominant elements stand out like this (see below). The problem is that neither one earns it’s prominence, and they demand this first order attention on every single page.

Simplified redesign:

Taking into account the above, this design simplifies the grid. The visual elements now fit the page, instead of demanding an unwarranted amount of pixels and attention. All text is one color, the hide/show UI is replaced by a simple radio button scheme. I also cleaned up the navbar, moving the language choices and log-in into a tighter layout.

Before and After:

A few things I missed:

• The price should be restated in the text, or before the book now button. Messages in graphics are often missed, as they’re offered parsed as secondary information, and the star on the right is the only place the fee is currently mentioned.
• Credibility should be emphasized. Why should people trust their cars to this company? The pitch for credibility should be stronger. There should be photos of the lot, of the service crew, statistics on how many satisfied customers there have been or how many years it’s been in operation, etc. on the front page (even if put behind a prominent “Why trust us” link).
• Radio button layout is dull. With more time I’d play with the text and radio button layout. Leading with a form is never sexy, but it gets straight to the primary task of this website: make a reservation. Looking at other parking websites shows similar form centric designs.

Posted in Design, ui review, usability | 3 Comments »

I got hit with a case of the lazies, and didn’t get to my promised free usability reviews until now. These will be high speed reviews: 10 minutes of analysis, and the rest of my time (30-45 minutes per site) spent explaining the issues and offering alternatives.

Drew Kime submitted this homemade forum software, used by iwethey.org, which is cool since my own forums are still locked in search of a forums package that doesn’t suck.

Summary:

• The core design is *ok*. The basic threaded forum UI is familiar to many, and most of the problems this site has are ignorable, not fatal. However there is a general lack of basic UI knowledge here, as layout and prioritization are mostly ignored, wasting everyone’s time.
• Basic layout issues. The top 10% of the screen is what people will see first, and on every page. But this design is a scramble: there are no easy columns for eyes to follow, important links wrap around lines, and the logo itself forces people’s eyes to do much too much work (never cover part of a letter with an image). Basic layout should always follow a grid: all left edges align, and any new columns align (See Before and After below).
• Lack of prioritization. There are nearly 25 links in the top area of the screen, and no attempt is made to prioritize them. What percentage of users will need the source code for the forum? I’d say less than 2%. How about a list of changes to the source? I’d say less than 1%. Then why have these two links as the first ones on *every* page? The most frequently used links should be the easiest and fastest to find. Move info about the software to the footer.

Posted in Design, ui review, usability | No Comments »

We walked. We walked. And then we walked some more.

And thanks to all your contributions, we raised over $1500 for folks who need some help this holiday season. Awesome! Thanks for helping us make a difference.

We’ll be sending out the signed books and artcards on Dec 2nd.

If you feel guilty now, you can still donate online until Dec 2nd: and donations of $25 or $50 get special gifts from Jill and myself - to find out more, go here.

Thanks - you guys rock.

Posted in philosophy | No Comments »

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I sad anything that is avoidably ugly?

But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you - even think your thoughts for you… and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.

From the essay Politics and the English Language, By George Orwell

Posted in On writing | 3 Comments »

Amy Tieneman at CNET wrote about a school project, where kids design, and play with, their own paper based laptops. Some of their UI designs are hilarious, if not fascinating. One of my favorites has separate buttons for weird games and really weird games.

Here’s an interview with Amy, the kids, and a slideshow of various kid’s designs.

(via metafilter)

Posted in Design, Innovation, creative thinking, humor | No Comments »