Posted by Robert Merrill on August 9, 2010 under Uncategorized | 
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Robert will be speaking on “Room to Breathe: The Vital Role of the BA in Shaping Early Project Effort Expectations” at WI BADD™, the Wisconsin Business Analysis Development Day, on Tuesday 10/5/2010 in Madison, WI.
Posted by Robert Merrill on May 4, 2010 under Agile Methods, Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment
I’m always on the lookout for where I need to be heading with my practice, and the idea of Agile User Experience Development is now on the short list.
I’ve been on teams with some fairly good usability/user experience people over the years, and they love the waterfall. Identify all the users, develop all the personas, and then make a complete set of wireframes and subject them to some level of user testing before doing a whole lot else. The result can be months of calendar time and up to 20% of the project budget gone, and you still don’t have any working code, and therefore the accompanying established team velocity that lets you hold the ever-present launch-date wolves at bay and keep the project from turning into a Death March. Read more of this article »
Posted by Robert Merrill on October 26, 2009 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment
Once again, reality fails to conform to plan, even in the case of something seemingly similar to something done every year—the manufacture and distribution of influenza vaccine.
In “Swine Flu Vaccine Shortage: Why?” on NPR.org, we learn that late-in-the-process verification of actual yields, and a bottleneck at the packaging stage, have led to a late-in-the-lifecycle discovery that we don’t have nearly as much vaccine as we expected to have by now.
It will be interesting to watch the story unfold. Here are my predictions of what we will learn: Read more of this article »