Question: What’s the difference between a questionnaire and a survey? Answer: A questionnaire is a series of questions and answers on a topic; a survey is the overall process of obtaining useful information using a questionnaire.
Question: OK then, what are the steps in the process? Answer: Until recently, I was stumped on that one, but after a lot of help from others and some thinking, I have an answer for you…
Interview with Project Management for Humans Author Brett Harned
When you think of project management what pops to mind? Overpacked gantt charts? 500 “urgent” emails flooding your inbox? Brett Harned knows another way to move you towards efficient processes and happy coworkers. He’s put his wisdom into a new book Project Management for Humans. I interviewed Brett to get to know the human behind the book.
Author Brett Harned and his French terrier Maggie relax at home with his new book.
Meet the Author
What did your childhood bedroom look like?
I kept it neat and organized. Even my “messes” were tidy. Like this huge stack of CDs I’d reorganize depending on my mood: alpha by artist, by genre, by favorite, or most played. I pinned things to a cork board rather than the walls.
When did you first catch the bug for project management?
Razorfish recruited me for a role as a PM. When they first reached out I didn’t know what that was! I’d been an account director with some project management responsibilities, but it wasn’t a formal role. As they explained what it was to me, I thought, “Oh yeah, that’s totally up my alley.”
What does everyone need to know about project management?
Everyone manages their own work in some way. Some people are good at it. Others? Not so much. If you want to be a good teammate, freelancer, business owner, you have to pick up some skills that will help you move things along and complete projects successfully.
Some folks have told you they’ve never worked with great project managers. Why do you think this is?
In digital, the role is new and undefined. We’ve always dealt with deadlines and budgets, but no one owned them. Now we’re see more PMs on teams, no standards of practice exist yet. This makes it tough for anyone to be truly good at the job. I want to change that! I wrote this book to help us take a step forward to design the role of PM for the digital industry.
Have you ever had a project management fail? What happened? What did you learn?
Where to start? I’ve failed a lot, and learned much each time. Once I managed a website redesign project where the UX team had designed some amazing forward-thinking functionality. It tied to the client’s strategy and took them in the right direction. The client loved it and all appeared well.
Until I showed the wireframes to my developers and they told me the functionality was completely out of scope.
I’d failed to double check with the developers before seeing the client. Now, it fell on me to fix it. I was nervous to deliver the bad news back to the client. So I engaged the help of my team and my I to prepare for the conversation. We walked through possible scenarios. If the client gets upset, what do I do? If he doesn’t like the options I’ll present, then what?
I got the client on the phone and broke the news. I apologized and suggested other options that might work. He was definitely disappointed, but the project ended up doing really well. Most experienced people understand that scope creep happens. The best way to address it is head on—and come with alternate solutions.
What gets in the way of successful project management?
Fear. If you’re too nervous or scared to have a needed conversation, or force an issueyou’ll fail. If you ignore minor issues, they’ll get worse. Be confident in your own problem solving skills and invite your team in to tackle issues as soon as you can.
What’s the biggest benefit of successful project management?
Good project management makes everything else easy. Work happens more smoothly when you you provide a level of organization and transparency. And communicate in a timely with the people on the project. If a PM runs interference on communications to let the team focus on the work, the team ends up feeling happier and being more productive.
If members of my team are hopelessly disorganized and resistant to changing their ways how can I help them?
Remember that not every solution will work for every team member. Be flexible with the way you manage and communicate people. If people are completely resistant, explain to them why organization is important. After they get that, work with them on a solution that makes them comfortable.
What do you recommend folks read from the book to motivate themselves to dig in?
The first chapter in the book covers what project management is, and how it applies to everyone. It’s not just about having a PM on a team; it’s about understanding how project management practices can help you get work done. I also think that the personal stories in the book help to relate very basic, non-work interactions to the principles and practices of PM.
What other profession would you like to try if you could?
Maybe I’d start a small business like a restaurant, or work outdoors. No matter what I did, I’d be able to use my experience as a PM and consultant to help me.
Knowing what you know now, what advice you’d give to your younger self?
Be you. Follow happiness. (Thankfully, I feel as though I’ve done this for the most part)
Join us at The Advance Retreat
How can we foster an effective, open, enduring culture of design in our organizations?
One of the coolest things about my job is that I get to engage in constant conversations with design people about what’s interesting and important. Whether it’s books, events, or consulting services, people love to tell us what topics they want us to cover.
From those many conversations, I’ve concluded that one of the things UX people need most is… well, more conversations. Acquiring and refining nuts-and-bolts skills are important too, but how-to information is increasingly easy to come by. Productive conversation with peers isn’t.
So we’re trying something new: we’re launching the very first Advance Retreat. It’ll focus on answering a single question—one that more and more design leaders are struggling with: How can we foster an effective, open, enduring culture of design in our organizations?
That conversation oughta fill two days easy.
We’re producing the Advance Retreat with Marc Rettig and Hannah du Plessis of Fit Associates; they’re hugely experienced with this particular challenge. AND they are really, really good at facilitating conversations that lead to co-learning and co-creation. In other words, real outcomes. (I speak from experience; Fit’s help has moved Rosenfeld Media forward.)
The Advance Retreat is limited to 50 mid-late career design leaders, and you can apply to participate here. The Retreat may not be for you, but if your organization is larger than a startup, I’ll bet dollars to donuts that someone you work with could benefit greatly from participating. (Feel free to forward this PDF brochure their way.)
We’ll be meeting February 11-12 in Palm Springs. The very cool Ace Hotel is the ideal setting—both inside and out—for the kind of conversations we all need.
What could be more fun than learning interaction design from studying science fiction movies and TV shows? From Metropolis to Star Trek to Minority Report, sci-fi offers an unconstrained design milieu that can inspire and teach us, and in Make It So, Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel have captured those lessons in this ground-breaking book. From gestural interfaces to augmented reality, and from medical interfaces to future sex, you’ll be blown away by all this book has to offer.
Like all of our titles, Make It So is available in a lovely color 348-page paperback and three DRM-free digital formats (PDF, ePUB, and MOBI). Pick a copy here at our store or via Amazon.
Wired already has a nice write-up. Alan Cooper, The Bourne Identity’s Mark Coleran, and io9’s Annalee Newitz have weighed in with glowing testimonials. But we’ll let Bruce Sterling bring it home with his foreword’s conclusion: “I never imagined that I would be reading a book like this, or that it would be this good”.
Modern Web Form Design recording now on sale
Kicking yourself for missing Luke Wroblewski’s webinar, Modern Web Form Design, last month? Don’t fret; the recorded version is now available for purchase. (more…)
Pre-launch tickets to DesignOps Summit 2019 now available!
Pre-launch tickets are the best price we offer, and we only make 200 available. Register for a two-day conference ticket, or add a workshop and join us for all three days. Pre-launch pricing is limited to the first 200 tickets sold, or through July 9 (whichever comes first).
The conference sold out last year, and we anticipate the same in 2019.
The DesignOps Summit is for you if your organization needs to:
Build design culture and operations without stifling innovation
Design workflow management that saves you time and frees up mindshare
Find tools that activate better collaboration across teams
Develop processes for recruiting, on-boarding, and retention that set your designers and researcher up for success
You’ll mingle with and learn from industry pioneers who’ve already built fast-growing design operations at companies like Capital One, GE, Pinterest, WeWork, Atlassian, Autodesk and beyond. You’ll spend three days learning and networking in an intimate setting with over 700 forward-thinking design leaders like you. You’ll head home with new approaches, tools, and connections to build effective systems, on-boarding programs, and workflows for your team.
New Book: Designing Interface Animation
The most interesting places happen at the in-between places.
Val Head’s new book, Designing Interface Animation: Meaningful Motion for User Experience, sits smack dab in between two sub-genres: books that provide broad overviews of animation, and books that show you how to implement animation for interactive products.
Designing Interface Animation is the book you should use to make sense of animation so that you can create a plan for using it in your site. It won’t explain animation’s history, and it won’t show you how to code interactive animation. It provides the missing link—to help you develop a pragmatic, practical plan for where and when to use animation in your products and apps.
Timing couldn’t be better, as it’s getting so much cheaper and easier to take advantage of animation. That’s all the more reason to think it through—before taking a blind and potentially disastrous leap into coding.
Designing Interface Animation is now available for purchase in paperback and four DRM-free ebook formats. You can also pick up a copy from Amazon. If you want a taste, head over to the book site, where there’s an excerpt as well as an FAQ, lots of nice testimonials, and a really swell foreword from Ethan Marcotte.
We’re delighted to announce that Storytelling for User Experience: Crafting Stories for Better Design by Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks is now on sale!
Storytelling is something we all naturally do, yet few of us would claim to be a storyteller. In their book, Kevin and Whitney help unlock the natural storyteller in all of us, and demonstrate—with story after story—how we can communicate and design better by telling stories. (more…)
New Book Out Today: Blind Spot by Diller, Shedroff, and Sauber
It’s been quite a year here at Rosenfeld Media HQ. Four successful events, two new book imprints, and today, we bring your our seventh title of 2016: Blind Spot: Illuminating the Hidden Value of Business (by Steve Diller, Nathan Shedroff, and Sean Sauber).
It’s fair to say that if you’re in any type of business, you and I continually struggle to gain and strengthen customer loyalty. It’s one of our biggest challenges. But despite decades of books and discussion, we haven’t seen a clear way forward. As with other intractable problems, the best approach is often to pause, step back, and reframe.
And this is where Blind Spot nails it: the authorsmove us from a mindset of mining our customers for loyalty (and money) to creating sustainable relationships that benefit us both.
Relationships with our customers go beyond traditional values of function and finance. In Blind Spot, you’ll learn to understand and develop premium types of value—emotional, identify, and meaningful—which offer far greater opportunities for creating better relationships.
You’ll also learn a new method for modeling these relationships calledthe waveline, that Bruce Nussbaum calls “the 21st century replacement for the consumer journey”. Finally, Blind Spot offers a 7-step approach to innovation built upon a foundation of strong and healthy relationships.
As always, I hope you’ll pick up a copy—either from the Two Waves site or Amazon. Blind Spot is, like all of our books, available in a lovely paperback edition, as well as four DRM-free digital formats (PDF, ePUB, MOBI, and DAISY). To your success!
New RM book: Remote Research
We’re absolutely thrilled to announce the publication of our sixth book, Remote Research: Real Users, Real Time, Real Research by Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte.
