Team & communications

Sawyer (2004) said that there exist 3 archetypes of software development teams:

Describing organization

People: The most important factor. “take away the people and organizations are nothing” (Weber, 1949)

Use metaphor to make sense of organization

·         Metaphor is one way of interpreting and making the complexity of everyday situations comprehensible

·         A metaphor lends a particular view or insight into a situation, one that ‘frames our understanding’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) of what is going on.

Gareth Morgan (1986) offers eight images of organizations for interpreting and diagnosing conditions and situations: Mechanistic, organisms, brains, cultures, political systems, psychic prisons, as flux and transformation, dominating instruments.

How I applied lessons from class in term paper

MSD class has introduced many concepts and theories, practices and tools. However, it would be of little value if we do not apply, or at least try to apply them. Follows are some practices and knowledge that I did apply in my term paper.

Summarization of useful practices and tools from MSD class - Part II

Part I discussed some tools facilitating interaction and communication between team. To continue the first part, in this part, I will discuss tools and practices regarding project & team management and requirement & innovation.

Summarization of useful practices and tools from MSD class - Part I

At the end of the course, it would be helpful for me to think of all the practices I have done in the classes, all the tools I have applied and among them, what will I use and how will I use in future. Actually, there are quite a lot of activities in MSD class, which makes the subject so special – to the degree that I describe in the previous post: The way MSD class operates did create a culture.

Activities that I mentioned are various, ranging from small to big, simple to complex: group work on NATO paper in the first week, building base race in second week, the application of IDEO cards in the third week. Some other notable activities are standup meeting to introduce term project’s idea, planning poker and user story used in “cool software” scenario. To demonstrate how to evaluate objectively, we did Kongregate game case. One interesting activity is “smelly design” in which we sketched a digital nose on paper and by Balsamiq. It did give us a sense of interface design, an important step to conduct our term paper. We also did Spaghetti cantilever and have funny time together to see the way team operate. In this activity, we also sketched “design activity graph” to capture the design thinking of the team.  Some lessons regarding the scope of a project and the relation between number of iterations and the success of the projects are enlightened in “Battleship” game case.

Voyage in the MSD Memeplex or a perspective of the way MSD class operates

Unlike other posts which discuss various points and perspectives regarding concepts, theories and practices in systems development management, this post is dedicated to express my feeling of the “culture” of our class – Or in simple word, the way our class runs.

Writing blog for all subjects in iBusiness programme to relate them and use one subject to facilitate others

Since the very first days, Professor Allen has encouraged us to write blog. “Write it as a personal study log”, he reasoned. However, I did not see much of the value of writing blog at that time.

 

As Steve Jobs once coined: “You can't connect the dots looking forward you can only connect them looking backwards”, only now I understand the value of all my posts. Writing post, firstly, give me chance to reflex on the material that I read. This is quite straight. But the value of writing blogs lies on the ability to relate different posts, probably in the same subjects, or even in other subjects.