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.

 

Project & team management

·         Planning poker:

The use of planning poker to estimate time to finish a task has indeed surprised me. The way to operate is simple, but the result is promising because it demands consensus of people from different background with different views and perspectives.

·         Five remedies from Royce (1970)

In my to-be projects that I will manage, I will not forgat to apply 5 practices introduced by Royce (1970): 1)Design first 2)Document the design 3)Do it twice 4)Plan, control and monitor testing 5)Involve the users. The detailed of these practices can be found at my previous post. In the post, I also discussed clearly how I applied it in my term paper.

·         Design activity graph:

An useful way to record design thinking of a team. There are five types of design thinking that should be recorded in the graph: scenario thinking, requirement thinking, high level solution thinking, medium level solution thinking and low level solution thinking. This is useful to reflex on the productivity of design thinking, facilitate users to identify possible problems and enhance the process.

·         Video presentation:

It is not only to control presentation. Most importantly, it is used to encourage creativity: How to introduce your idea and work in an innovative and professional way. Moreover, this practice encourages careful selection and distillation to choose most important points to represent in the presentation.

Requirement and innovation

·         IDEO cards:

Though at first doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, the use of IDEO cards is now an indispensible practice when I research and gather users’ requirement and opinions.

·         User stories:

“User stories” is also a promising practice. Thinking in term of “as a …, I want to …” potentially reveals possible use cases, factors related to risks chances, culture, social etc. of a product.