Zen and the art of iterative projects

I know a lot of people who talk about agile projects and say they do agile, but what is this agile thing anyways?

Friend and colleague, Maria Horrigan, and I have been wondering about agile for the last three years. After experiencing problems in waterfall projects, particularly in government, we began to do our analysis, IA, and conceptual design explorations in smaller iterations. Sometimes we would execute the project in two or more parallel streams, with Maria looking at the work processes and practices across multiple areas of the project while I worked simultaneously on the user-experience design and information architecture.

We’re now capturing much of this work in a new blog — Zen Agile. Rather than yet another so called “agile” process, we’re concentrating instead on describing some easy to apply, simple philosophies to choosing activities, project products and patterns, and skills to apply on a contingency basis.

Of course, the material on the blog will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.

Enjoy

M

Social media engagement: What are Aussies doing?

I’ve blogged before about the taxonomy of social media — a simply means by which you can classify the activities or roles of people’s social media activities produced by Forrester. In previous posts, though, there’s been some questioning over exactly whether Australians are ‘engaged’ with some suggestions that a simple poll will confirm the old 1/9/90% ratios that Nielsen reported back in 2006 based on research in the 90s.

Source: Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, October 9, 2006

More recent research by Forrester, though, confirms earlier findings regarding the social media activities, including some new Australian statistics from their Nov 2008 Australian Adult Social Technographics® Report.

Source: Forrester, 2008

Specifically, Forrester reports that Australian consumers are blocking marketing messages and turning to each other for advice. Importantly, their research finds that:

• Three quarters of Australian online adults now use social technologies at least monthly
• One-quarter create their own content
• Australians are more likely to be content creators than their US counterparts
• Men are slightly more likely to use social technologies than women, but when it comes to joining social networks, the difference is negligible
• Creating content or joining social networks falls away dramatically as participants get older
• 46% of online adults in the Older Boomers and Seniors demographic, though, continue to consume some form of social media at least monthly, whether it’s watching other peoples’ videos, reading other peoples’ blogs, or looking at other people’s photos

With such a fundamental shift in how Australians use media, marketers, government, and private organisations must rethink their communications and engagement strategies. For example, to engage online women in Australia Forrester suggests, interactive marketers should focus on content and connections. As a small, developed market that makes heavy use of social technologies, Australia is the perfect launchpad for global brands adopting social marketing tactics.

Evangelists and marketers will be surprised “if they assume that social technologies are uncommon in Australia, they’ll be surprised to find they’re now mainstream. In fact, only 24% of online adults in Australia do not regularly use social technologies in some way”, reports Steven Noble of Forrester.

So, are Australians engaged? I think the statistics speak for themselves.

M

Scissors, Shears and Social Media Strategy

I was recently thinking about the ways in which some enterprise 2.0 and social media evangelists proclaim that because many people have just installed a wiki or a blog, and suddenly got traction with building relationships, collaboration and interaction, that all you need is to “just do it” and throw in some web 2.0 technology in order to have success.

I was thinking about this at 3am one morning and it made me think of scissors … yes, scissors.

I could give scissors to someone as a gift and know that they’ll use it for cutting things because, everyone needs a good pair of scissors at some time or other. But people need different sorts of scissors for different things. A good pair of shears is just invaluable in the kitchen — I don’t ever think I could do without my Mundial shears! I also have a big pair of dress making scissors — you know the ones with stainless steel blades and big black handles (I think I ‘inherited’ them from my mother). They’re great for cutting fabric without the blades quickly going blunt. I also use these to cut my dog’s fur when it gets long, but I’d rather have another pair just for that task. I also once gave a pair of round-nosed scissors to my nephew, who loves to draw and cut out paper, but I know he’ll never be able to use it for cardboard — it’s just too thick to cut!

In the end, there are lots of different types of scissors. You can buy generic ones and know they might do many jobs, but they won’t do all cuttings jobs. You could try and use them for anything but you might end up breaking them. Essentially, the only way to know what sorts of scissors to buy for yourself, or someone else, is to know what scissors they already have, and what scissors they might use for specific circumstances defined by need.

There are also lots of different types of social media you can choose from for use within the enterprise for collaboration or outside for communication and interaction with stakeholders. Most of these are as easy to start using as picking up a pair of scissors from Walmart or Target. And like scissors, these social media tools are now both easy to use and sophisticated enough to support real social behaviour, it’s more than likely that they will be successful in some way or other. But when you install a wiki or a blog how do you know whether it will be successful? Just because someone else’s technology implementation went well, do you know whether it will work for you? Sure, everyone in an organisation needs to share information, collaborate and communicate at some time. People need these tools just as much as they need a phone, a pen, and a pair of scissors. But, at the end of the day, how will you know the factors that contributed to their success so you can repeat the success at a later time? How will you know whether they have given you any actual return on your investment?

Last time I went into King of Knives to talk about scissors I got asked the following questions. Strangely enough, I think they’re also a good guide for thinking about social media:

• Who is it for? Do you know the who will use it, their wants and needs?
• What will they use it for: What on earth will they actually use it for? If they have had ones in the past, what did they have? Did it work properly? Will past user’ experience benefit this time around or hamper your efforts?
• Will they know how to do maintenance on it? Scissors need sharpening from time to time. I had to learn how to use a sharpening stone to get the best out of my kitchen shears. Social media tools also need attention — you can’t just build it and expect it to be largely self-maintaining. You need to know how to use these tools to know how to effectively establish and maintain online relationships and build trust.
• Will they need training or is it fairly intuitive? Knowing how to make best use of the tools you have means you get the best return on investment. Training is good, but remember that it won’t change people’s behaviour. Even though you might give people the skills and capability it doesn’t mean that people will use the things you give them.

I know it’s a pretty strange metaphor, but it works. Cut away with your scissors, they might work or they might not, but the only way to know whether or not you’ve spent resources in the right place, and can repeat any success (or avoid future failure), is to do planning and ask these question before you make your choice of shears or scissors.

M