Laura's Winning Ideas

Vincent Wright posted a note about Scrum project management and pointed to this article about Scrum on Wikipedia. Next time you need to train a new person (on your team or interfacing with your team), this might be helpful.

Scrum is taken from a term in Rugby, a sport similar to Proposal writing.

A scrum project is organized into sprints, just as proposal teams organize around individual proposals.

Team members are divided into Pigs and Chickens:

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. However, while chickens make a contribution, pigs are fully committed.

Chickens include the SMEs, salespeople, management, technical staff and stakeholders in your organization. The pigs are the ones who must get the proposal out the door. Chickens can edit the “Product Backlog” (AKA the proposal storyboards) and provide input to pigs as requested. However, the Pigs are fully committed to the effort and will make the proposal happen.
At the daily status meetings, only pigs are allowed to speak, though chickens may attend. The daily meeting is “time boxed” to 15 minutes, and everyone arrives on time or suffers the team punishment. This meeting is held standing.

The Sprintmaster (aka proposal team leader/proposal manager/proposal coordinator) keeps a Burn Chart, detailing what remains to be done before the end of the sprint (proposal delivery).

Every “sprint” (proposal) is followed by a debrief meeting called a Sprint Retrospective.

When trying to explain what and how we work, having other examples is helpful.

I read a white paper at Marketing Sherpa last month about testing your web site on mobile devices.

Some estimate that as much as 40% of the initial contacts to your web site will be via mobile devices within 5 years. Humm.

I was skeptical, until I caught myself. I sat in an SMPS meeting, listening to 3 speakers from various companies. As the panel got warmed up, I surfed to each of their web sites on my iPhone. The two medium sized firms had reasonable web sites. Nothing fancy, but I got an overview of what they do and who their market is.

However, the third firm is very large. In fact, they are one of the oldest privately held firms in the U.S. However they have a web site that is probably fancy because it would not render on my phone. (Let me go check from my desktop… Oh yeah. very nice dancing baloney on every landing page.)

I didn’t think it was important when I read about testing your web site for mobile devices, but now I’m convinced.

Check your own web site here: www.iPhonetester.com

Imagine your client sitting in a meeting reviewing proposals for THAT BIG JOB, and they pull out their mobile device and surf to your web site to check some detail. What do they get?

Notice that I didn’t bother to visit the big company web site once I returned to my office. It wasn’t a high enough priority for me. If I haven’t had this post to write, I would have moved on without a second thought about that company.

Which company would you rather be?

One more datapoint. This week, Forbes Magazine cited another study estimating that at least 50% of first visits to web sites are coming from mobile devices. Run fast.

Technorati Tags: mobile device,surfing,iphone,website,Marketing Sherpa,Forbes

I subscribe to The Scout Report, a publication that’s been monitoring the web since 1994 and provides brief descriptions of sites we might otherwise miss.

Here are two with material you can use to help technical professionals improve their ability to win work:

Rhetoric for Engineers
http://www.tcnj.edu/~rgraham/rhetoric/

As a field of study, rhetoric has enjoyed a popular resurgence in at the college level, and when deployed effectively, various rhetorical devices can make any piece of writing much more compelling. Ron Graham has created this site designed to help engineers and “other practical people” with the practice and art of rhetoric. The site includes a summary of basic rhetoric, along with some “Two-Minute Drills”, which are designed to help engineers with developing answers to questions like “Are engineers made or born?” and “Define ‘reliability’”. Visitors can also look over the site’s complete contents via an interactive guide which covers everything from abstraction to workplace distractions. [KMG]

Writing Guidelines for Engineering and Science Students
http://www.writing.eng.vt.edu/

Crafting meaningful and articulate lab presentations and correspondence can be difficult for anyone, including engineers and other scientists. This particular set of resources is deigned to teach engineering and science students about creating and writing materials such as resumes, formal laboratory reports, presentation slides, and so on. The guidelines are gathered into several different sections, including “Introduction”, “Presentations”, “Correspondence”, and “Formal Reports”. There is material for instructors here as well, and the offerings include pieces on the design
of writing assignments, the interactive teaching of writing, and the evaluation of writing assignments.  Finally, the site also contains a number of writing exercises on grammar, punctuation, and word usage. [KMG]

From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout 1994-2008.
http://scout.wisc.edu/

Technorati Tags: Scout Report,writing,engineers,science,rhetoric,resumes,proposals