razor cuts - a blog about managing projects, people, and the communication between them.
The Doing Gap
I spoke at an Ignite event recently as part of the Bath Digital festival. The Ignite format (5 minute time limit, 20 slides that transition automatically every 15 seconds) challenges you to distill what you want to say, and focus on the core of your message. I’ve been wanting to talk about the transition from [...]
How do you solve problems?
In an interesting meeting recently I was asked an interesting question: ‘how do you solve problems in a programme environment?’ Like many people who make a living from getting stuff done, problems are an everyday thing: they’re just part of the rich tapestry of projects, and indeed – life. I wrote about problem solving a [...]
Learning Lessons
I come from a family of practical people: entrepreneurs, farmers, teachers, engineers, and so on. People who get stuff done. I’ve read two books recently that made reflect on practicality (and my family), and the role of failure in forming experience. As project managers we often use building analogies, and the books in question: How [...]
Simplicity as an Outcome of Thinking
The concept of simple is all around us – the rise of Apple means that our exposure to a beautiful design ethic is ever-increasing. A lot of companies want to take a shortcut to compelling design by imitating Apple, but there’s a great quote from Steve Jobs on the reason that’s hard to do: ‘When [...]
But how do you *know*?
The case for (and against) testability There’s an old saying in the ad world, attributed to John Wanamaker: ‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half’. Designing systems can feel a lot like this – agonising for hours over which features people will find valuable, which [...]
Let your ideas brew
A change of context is always a welcome one. At the Future of Web Design conference, the leading lights of the web design world shared their thoughts and expertise to engage and inspire – talks illustrated with beautiful slide decks and a pleasing amount of profanity. For a mind that is constantly juggling the myriad [...]
Getting under the hood
A lot of the web people I’ve met over the last couple of years (designers, developers, user experience people, content strategists, information architects, and so on) seem to love physical products, and not just the latest gadgets – at the upcoming Build 2012 conference for example, there are workshops in axe restoration and leather craft. [...]
Signature focus
The focus of signatories on a piece of work rises exponentially as the point of their signature approaches. We sometimes hear; ‘the boss doesn’t read anything until the last minute, and then he wants a load of changes.’ Its frustrating, but its also human nature – the busier we are, the thinner our attention is [...]
The Evil of Mandatory Fields
Forms are a vital part of an information business – they’re the primary way that organisations capture data about their users, and often the mechanism by which they understand what their own teams are doing. But, if they’re so useful, why is it that no-one likes them? I’ve been working with a large organisation in [...]
Dark Matter, Part 2: Articles of Faith
In the last Razor Cuts post, we wrote about the gaps in expectations – the dark matter between people – the place where unwelcome surprises lurk, but there is a better, nobler, side to the dark matter equation: Faith. Sometimes we work with people who naturally take responsibility, people who have the ability to imagine [...]
