
Collaboration Articles
We’re curious people by nature. And we love to teach others what we’ve learned. So explore our blog to gain fresh insights from our expertise in areas ranging from culture to AI.
SEP Named a Best Places to Work Company for 14th Consecutive Year
SEP has once again been recognized as one of Indiana’s Best Places to Work for the 14th year consecutive year. The statewide survey and award program evaluates participating organizations and honors those with the highest levels of employee satisfaction and…
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Collaboration between design and development has historically been an uphill battle. It used to be that a designer (or team of designers) designed a software application, and then handed it over the fence to the software engineers and wished them the best of luck. As you can imagine, this silo approach ended in unexpected results […]
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BizOps at SEP
You may have heard of BizOps as a business function, but there’s a good chance you aren’t sure exactly what that looks like day-to-day, or specifically how that plays out at a custom software consultancy like SEP. This post will give you a glimpse into what BizOps looks like for us. The History of BizOps […]
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WFH: Using Zoom Meetings to Get Things Done
One week into working from home I learned real quick that “what was” couldn’t continue. Suddenly my family became my co-workers. We were thrust into a new life and all we had was old mental models to draw from on how we lived life up until that moment. The life we had built and the […]
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Designer + Developer Collaboration
Context SEP started with developers, grew by hiring more developers, evolved by hiring designers. And since the developers “were here first,” there’s an easy and terrible potential for us to think of “incorporating designers into the development” rather than “incorporating developers into the designing.” My team chose a third way, which you all probably know […]
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3 Tips for Effective Collaboration with Software Engineers
Prior to joining SEP, I’d met maybe 3 software engineers in my life. Stepping into this new company and new industry felt overwhelming, and I had no idea how to approach working with an army of 100 software engineers. I’m now approaching my 1-year anniversary of working at SEP. Looking back on the past 11 […]
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Design Studios With A Team
Why Use Design Studios? Design studios by definition vary from place to place and shift when the participant roles and sizes are different. Since design studios are used to culminate to a team-agreed user interface (or close to it) approach for a user story task(s), the scope can be altered, depending on the need. You […]
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CommunityHERO: A Lesson in Collaborative Design
Here at SEP, the PXT (product experience team) has been making a push for more collaborative design on the projects we’ve been involved in. By collaborative design I mean including not only designers, but engineers, product owners, and project managers in the design process. We’ve had success with it on several of our past projects, […]
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Scaling Communication
This week, I was given a prompt asking “How do you communicate.” My first instinct was, “poorly.” Okay, that’s not strictly true. It’s more like, “obliquely.” I’m more comfortable with analogies than straight up saying, “it depends.” Don’t worry. I’m still going to tell you how to scale communication. Two kids sat down to play. […]
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Why Perform Discovery (Envision) On the Front End of a Development Process?
The rapid evolution of technologies, users and markets has increased the pressure on the software industry to respond to industry criticisms. Some of these criticisms were well deserved and these three top the list: Why does it cost so much? Why does it take so long? Why can’t we get what we asked for? […]
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