At LexisNexis our best practice was the two-day JAD meeting …
I think the problem with the discussion outlined below is that it assumes that “a meeting” is the best tool for gathering requirements. Not so fast, partner … I think there’s an argument to be made that there are better tools and data sources — usage logs, customer feedback, web 2.0 forums, wikis, and shared docs, and, yes, even – gasp! – product manager insight.
Learn how to productively facilitate the discovery and definition of your next project’s requirements. Learn everything you will need – to plan and conduct a requirements discovery session, and facilitate this business requirements session with your project stakeholders. In this webinar we will discuss the role of the session leader or facilitator in a requirements meeting. We will explain a simple repeatable process for eliciting business requirements. And, we will provide a variety of tips, techniques and questions you can ask during the session to keep the meeting on track – and moving toward a successful conclusion with well defined business requirements and satisfied session participants.
via Webinar ProjectTimes.
Dear Authors,
I have decided to do a better job of keeping all of you informed about what’s new at Nimble, because I have observed that there is something of a tendency for authors to feel that you are “inside a bubble” that is wrapped tightly around author and book, when, from my perspective, you are all tightly connected to a thriving enterprise that is doing a lot of interesting (and related) things at a fast tempo. This “inside Nimble” info may or may not be of any great practical significance to you, but I hope that it will at least be energizing and thought-provoking. February has been a busy month.
On a strictly procedural note, a few days into February (slightly after the official due date, sorry!) I sent out Form 1099-MISC for all of you who are US taxpayers and received income from Nimble Books in 2008. I used http://www.paycycle.com, which did a great job for this small business at $39 for the whole project. …
Late in January, I cranked out the second volume of Joe Hind’s ten-volume THE SHIP KILLERS: THE DEFINITIVE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE TORPEDO BOAT. The cover image of the first Confederate torpedo boat, the CSS David, wraps around the spine in a pretty cool way. The series has been picked up by the online bookstore at the Weider History Group’s HistoryNet.com, which has 2,500,000 unique visitors a month and growing. Now it’s on to volume three–Joe and I are chugging out a volume a month until we’re done!
The first four AGE OF OBAMA books finally made it all the way onto online bookstores, and they should be showing up on Amazon Search Inside the Book and Google Book Search sometime next month.
Tom Myer and I redesigned the cover of his FROM GEEK TO PEAK, a terrific book about your first 365 days as a technical consultant–very pertinent in the current climate! You can seethe redesigned cover here. The old cover (still up on Amazon — it takes a while for these changes to percolate through the system) got too many complaints about being a travel guide to Michigan! I will be the first to admit that I am not the world’s greatest cover artist, although I have my moments. I am generally open to helpful ideas, although it usually doesn’t work well when authors want to do everything themselves, as there are both technical and substantive reasons why I need to be hands-on, so that I can get the persnickety details right and so that I can maintain some common look and feel over all Nimble titles.
Pete Jones and I changed the trim size and re-launched his We Tried to Warn You: Innovations in leadership for the learning organization, his insightful monograph on what it actually takes to succeed at developing innovative products inside a large organization. (Hint: socialization). Pete is a PhD expert in user interaction and product design, and he will be editing a series for Nimble called Designing Organizations that Matter. I became interested in interaction design when I managed the “HF” (human factors) group at LexisNexis, and I continue to believe strongly in the value of the people who fill that role and provide their skills to the product development process. (I like to use Nimble to “put my money where my mouth is”, as I did with my very first book, BASIC DOCUMENTS ABOUT THE TREATMENT OF DETAINEES AT ABU GHRAIB AND GUANTANAMO, which was motivated by my outrage and anger at the stupidity and wrongness of those unfolding scandals.)
I am always looking for books on technology and business because I enjoy the topics and think that the “best of breed” in those genres can be very valuable indeed, although, to be perfectly honest, I have not yet cracked the code of how to identify the books on those topics that will be strong sellers in the Nimble business model.
- Dark Navy: the Regia Marina and the Armistice of 8 September 1943 by Vincent O’Hara (author of The German Fleet at War, 1939 – 1945) and Enrico Cernuschi
- Secrets of the Modern World: F.W. Maitland and Yukichi Fukuzawa by Alan Macfarlane, professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, author of more than twenty books and one of the great social anthropologists of our era.
- Eclipses of the Sun by Jay Pasachoff, Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy at Williams College
- The Cold War Saga by veteran diplomat Kempton Jenkins and
- The Ultimate Guide to Harry Potter Fandom by Erin A. Pyne
Coming in March:
I hope this finds you all well, and please don’t hesitate to drop me a note if you have any ideas or questions.
Best regards,
The most useful single fact I gained from my outplacement seminar (and in fact, the only useful fact from it) was the average number of months that it took at that time for someone at my pay level to find a new job. If I remember correctly, it was 6.3 months, and as it turned out, I found a new job in 6.0 months, so despite all the emotional ups and downs, my experience was exactly typical.
A key factoid that was a great comfort to me (especially as my near and dear ones questioned me as time went on) is the Copernican principle:
In cosmology, the Copernican principle, named after Nicolaus Copernicus, states the Earth is not in a central, specially favoured position.[1] More recently, the principle is generalised to the relativistic concept that humans are not privileged observers of the universe.[2] In this sense, it is equivalent to the mediocrity principle, with significant implications in the philosophy of science.
No matter how much it seems to you or to others that it’s taking an especially long time for you to find a job because you are doing something special wrong, you probably aren’t.
(in response to a post on OLE, the Old LexisNexis Employees list)
Interestingly, Google [UI consultant what is a] produces different results than [Google UI consultant what is it] , even though “it” and “a” are usually stop words:
Words that are commonly used, like ‘the,’ ‘a,’ and ‘for,’ are usually ignored (these are called stop words). But there are even exceptions to this exception. The search [ the who ] likely refers to the band; the query [ who ] probably refers to the World Health Organization — Google will not ignore the word ‘the’ in the first query.
[ad#in-post]
I believe this is more advanced behavior than most search engines currently exhibit. Certainly when I was at LexisNexis there was no way on God’s green Earth that we were going to get the search engine folks to change the way the engine treated stop words.
I saw that Allan McLaughlin’s linkedin profile reflects a new title as Sr. VP, new Lexis at LexisNexis.
As a former lexis.com product manager, I am naturally curious to know what the general outlines of the redesign are! Can anyone say anything on the record (or offline)? And, if you were redesigning lexis.com today, what would you do? What is the Web 2.0 version of Lexis.com ? And Web 3.0?
Tops on my wish list:
- universal search
- very smart, rule-based, role-playing personal assistants that can undertake research projects with a minimum of guidance and bring back a collection of 3-5 high-quality, relevant documents from multiple sources. (this would be the heart of my Web 3.0!)
- document annotation & discussion (wiki/group features) with access rules to avoid conflict of interest
- blow up all previous business rules and switch to subscription only
via LinkedIn: View Discussion: LexisNexis Current & Former Employees.
Google runs 50-200 search experiments at any given time. this makes me insane with jealousy. When I was at LexisNexis, it was essentially impossible to run experiments in production.
Official Google Blog: Search experiments, large and small
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