Persuasive Business Proposals by Dr. Tom Sant What’s the point? The point of this book is to write clearly and concisely, to differentiate yourself, and to better equip yourself with tools for writing persuasively. Ultimately, this book is designed to help you and your company write winning proposals. How was it? Good. I honestly felt […]
Conversations in Outlook…
If you’re anything like me, you probably get a TON of email each and every day. In addition, you probably get emails that span a conversation over multiple days. Well, Outlook 2010 has this amazing feature called, Conversations. This will transform your inbox to look/feel more like a threaded forum (or, more like your gmail […]
More bragging about SEP…
Okay, I don’t think it’s a secret that I REALLY enjoy working at SEP. However, I’m going to continue to brag about this company. Recently, SEP was awarded the #1 BEST place to work in Indiana! That is some exciting stuff. Today, when I went to Google and searched for “beast place to work in Indiana”, […]
Extending Discovery into Business Value
Our industry often sets its context too small to address the question of why software is so expensive. While addressing costs, we missed optimizing the other side of the equation – VALUE. To move to a new level of optimization, we need to expand the context of our development process to engage more of the […]
Is Developing Software REALLY expensive? Another thought…
The Lean Software and Systems Consortium conference in Atlanta left me with a lot to think about. My main reason to go was to learn more about becoming a more agile enterprise but that is a topic for another day. To summarize my previous post, software projects are often categorized as “too expensive”. However, it […]
Usability, and more…
Last week, we had 3 days of training. Jeff Patton came in to talk to us about usability, and how to work with our clients to make sure we produce something they actually need. He introduced ideas and concepts that weren’t entirely new…he simply put the ideas and concepts together in a process that makes […]
balsamiq mockups
We recently used Balsamiq Mockups to redesign a set of web pages. I’ve done a lot of designs on paper, in HTML, using FrontPage and even Visio before, and now I know, I was doing it the hard way every time. Balsamiq offers a way to present user interface designs quickly and easily. It has […]
Is Developing Software Really EXPENSIVE?
There have been many papers, studies, books, etc. on the high cost of developing software. What does this even mean? When we say software we typically mean a software product to sell to a market or a system to increase productivity. In both cases doesn’t the customer have some idea of the cost and potential […]
