Perspective PM

10 Steps to Success in Social Media

What are the differences between companies that do social media well and companies that don’t? Objectives, engagement and authenticity. Here are 10 steps to making social media an integral part of your business strategy without getting lost in an often misunderstood medium.

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The MicroHoo Project: Breaking it Down

According to the press release, the Microsoft/Yahoo! search deal is expected to take approximately 24 months to implement following regulatory approval. This estimate has some people wondering why it should take so long and others doubting it will happen that quickly.

To get a sense of what’s likely to be happening during those 24 months, note that this is not just one big technology integration project. The deal is comprised of multiple points, each of which will be tackled by different (though probably overlapping) teams as distinct projects within Microsoft or Yahoo.

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The Lost Art of Information Architecture

Back in my day, the web wasn’t participatory. We would visit a site, read a few articles, maybe even buy a book or a t-shirt even though (*gasp*) we couldn’t try it on first. If something really caught our attention we might bookmark it or email the URL to a friend. We didn’t have any tagging or tweeting or mashing or mobiles. It was a simpler web, and it was very, very boring.

It was also a lot easier to architect.

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Instructional Design: A Key to Software Success

I recently managed an e-commerce project and had the good fortune of working with a talented instructional designer. After witnessing first-hand the difference that can be made with a structured, thoughtful approach to software training, I sat down with Dorene Zjawinski Lofgren, owner of Lofgren Educational Design, to glean some insights into her methodology.

Read the rest of this article at digitalmediabuzz.com.

What a Business Analyst is NOT

The title of “Business Analyst” is one of the fastest growing in the IT industry. In fact, the United States Department of Labor projected a 29-percent increase in computer systems analyst employment by 2016. There are many resources available that explain what a business analyst is, often in terms of comparing the responsibilities of an analyst to those of other team members we’re more familiar with, like project managers, software testers and systems architects. It’s now generally understood, via the IIBA, that a business analyst “works as a liaison among stakeholders in order to elicit, analyze, communicate and validate requirements for changes to business processes, policies and information systems.”

Just as important to understand, however, is what a business analyst is NOT. As organizations create positions labeled “business analyst” while struggling to keep costs down, it’s tempting to use the role as a catch-all for tasks that an overextended project team just doesn’t have time for. This may save time and money in the short term, but in the long term, it will only hurt your projects.

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