The good people at ethnority have made this lovely diagram showing a classification of the many social media services available. This is the "German" version (with nearly all services recognisable to soemone in, say, the UK or US).
- they also have one for the Internet as seen from behind the Great Firewall of China Not shown).
The TV show Heroes had a character, Hiro Nakamura, who could teleport in time and space. To do so he had to concentrate awsomely. Actor Masi Oka portrayed this with wonderful physicality (part of a superb performance, which made the earnest yet puppyish Hiro a treat to watch). It looks as if he is trying some barely manageable feat of strength or stamina.
It reminded me of something. As an inexperienced project manager I would sometimes try to force my projects along by sheer willpower. It doesn't work of course - once you are relying on others to do parts of the work rather than doing it personally, you lose the option of advancing things by, say, personally working late. So there are times when the project is temporarily beyond your control because you're up to date with your contribution and the rest of the team are working on theirs with all reasonable speed and care. It took me a while to get used to using the time to work on something else, instead of straining Hiro-like to teleport my project closer to its goals. I never did achieve teleportation or time travel, it just made me tired.
When deciding requirements for a project, we're often trying to decide priorities between many items. This rapidly becomes difficult to do in your head ("or in your heads" in a meeting). Here's a useful tool, the prioritizing grid.
It originally comes, I think, from Richard N Bolles, author of "What Color is your Parachute" (a manual for job-hunters and career changers). Career counsellor and consultant Beverly Ryle has an interactive version on her website. The original purpose is to rank skills that a person has (e.g. "I am good at writing and also at cooking, particle physics and kung-fu, but which of these do I like doing best?"). In its original context it is part of an exercise to help identify careers that a person is likely to find they'd enjoy. But the system could be used for prioritizing any kind of things - here is a screenshot of it in use to prioritize features of interest when choosing a car.
The way it works is that you write out the things you want to prioritize in any order, and number them 1-10 (if there should happen to be 10). In the screenshot, the un-prioritized items are listed on the left. Then you work through them in pairs like this:
Once done with number 1, you do the same with 2:
and then you move onto number 3:
...and then with each of the other factors until you reach the last pair.
It sounds cumbersome, but actually does not take at all long, unless you are over-thinking it, or need to define the factors better, or have a lot of items that you don't care about much.
Once you're done, you go through each factor and you count up the number of times you preferred it to something else. This gives you the rank order.
In the screenshot example I've done that (the website has pairs of radio buttons to indicate your choice, but you could of course do this on a piece of paper....). On the right of the screenshot you see the priority order that this generates. It looks like I want a car that seats 4 passengers, has plenty of boot ("trunk" to US readers) space, is cheap on fuel and hard to steal (family life in Oxford...).
As with anything else, I'd say "don't let the tool take over". Perhaps you don't really have a preference between a pair, or can't answer until the items are better defined. Either of those discoveries could be useful - probably more useful than forcing everything artificially into neat priorities in order just to get the worksheet done.
One for the Pet Hates series. It's become fashionable to be a bit wacky or matey in marketing communications to customers. But this is a bit risky, as you don't know what mood thery're in.
So in this example, the response email to an order I placed tells me how excited the autoresponder is to get my business (blue ring in the image below). "It's all rather exciting, isn't it?", burbles the autoresponder. Thrilled to the core of its little processors, it is, no doubt. So obviously very false. Harmless enough, perhaps, but I'm really not in the mood for this kind of thing right now, so it comes over irritating.
In an "oops - it could so easily happen to you" item, I'm addressed as "Dear Other Baker" (arrowed red in the image). Probably not because they have a customer called Baker already. More likely because the puldown for the title field did not have the choice of "Dr". (I applied for a credit card when I'd recently got my PhD, put "Dr" onthe form thinking that might help, and am stuck with it now...) A bit surprising perhaps that the Title pulldown does not accommodate "Dr", but it's not a design failure: the "Other" value in that title pulldown opens up a field in which unanticipated titles can be entered. There are of course very many possible titles that humans adopt (Brigadeer, Captain, Princess, Guru...), and some people are very particular about being allowed to use the correct title. So a free text field is arguably better than some humungous pulldown of all known options: if you truly wish to be addressed as "Jedi Master" on the delivery label of your goods, then the free text field can accommodate your wish. So the design is sensible, but it looks like something went wrong in populating the field from the value I gave.
Alternatively the company thinks I am one of the Others, a race of creatures from the "Song of Fire and Ice" fantasy series by George R R Martin (appeared on TV as "Game of Thrones". But this seems unlikely, as I have never knowingly killed anyone with a crystal sword and then magically re-animated them as zombie servants.
So here's the opposite to the "Pet Hates" series - ideas that I see in use and think are neat.
Glooo.co.uk would be happy if you filled their contact form (assuming you want to contact them about something sensible, I suppose). But people don't like filling out contact forms. So Glooo head their form with a big bold statement "Less than 2% of visitors will fill in the form below". We all would like to be in the top 2% (ideally in the Wall Street sense, perhaps, but you've got to start somewhere....). My guess is that it works, and in any case it is amusing...
A freelance project manager specialising in electronic publishing projects.
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