Great Dane!

Below are a few pictures, when students from Aalborg in Denmark who are studying IT management, visited the Smurfit iBusiness - Innovation through ICT masters class. It was a great to talk to other students with similar interest and a lot of new experiences and ideas were exchanged between both sets of students. It was also a great experience to sit in on Gitte Tjørnehøj guest lecture on the topic "Claudio Ciborra's "Drift" to "managing drifting digital development". This added another prescriptive to our previous weeks discussion about the trade-off between creativity and control or planning and improvisation in this circumstance. 

Credit Tobias Lindgreen Sørensen for the photos. 

Tobias, Sophie and I

Aalborg students, Bruno, Darren, Hamsa and Ian, captivated by Allen's lecture. Sanket...not so much!

Niall and I rocking our presentation! :) Sanket is still not impressed!!

Peter wordily thinking that he'll have to buy Speedo's with pockets to store his Ucard if e-lockers are installed in the swimming pool. 

Allen presenting to the class. 

Allen presenting to the class.

Allen presenting to the class. he does it a lot, but he's good at it :)

Aalborg students at IBM. 

A lecture debrief meeting..........at Dicey's :P

[Assessment] End of Term Video.

HI ALLEN!

Niall and I have decide to focus are end of year term paper and related video on the current Ucard system used in University College Dublin. I talk for the first half of the video about the current system and how we used IDEO method cards to identify the problem in the current system. Niall then talks about the problem we identified and how we plan to solve it. Finally Niall justify's why we think our solution is feasible*. 

I hope you enjoy our video!

*Three days ago UCD announced a partnership with IBM to become the world's first smart universtiy, like a small smart city. This means that our proposed solution is far more feasible but in general it is great to see UCD engaging with the cutting edge of technology. The full article can be found HERE

[Observation] Open software licensing in the real world

Last week in class we discussed the topic of open source software in particular Linux. A interesting topic of discussion was about licensing and how free open software can avoid splintering. Licensing helps reduce the chance of the software splintering. Two licensing terms I became more similar with are GNU and FOSS.

GNU was launched by Richard Stallman, a software freedom activist (pretty cool right!). Here is a picture of Richard.

"Richard Stallman - Fête de l'Humanité 2014 - 010" by Thesupermat 

GNU stands for Gnu Not Unix, another clever play on words, as programmers love to do! Richard also pioneered Copyleft (Another Pun) which uses the principles of copyright law to preserve the right to use, modify and distribute free software.

After last weeks (Week 10) class I wanted to check what open software was used by applications I use everyday, and more importantly was the redistribution of the software correctly licensed.  So I decided for my 'Quick and Dirty' experiment I would try and find the licensing for four applications I use most often on my mobile. These were WhatsApp, Snapchat, Dublin Bus and Spotify.

Results:
Snapchat:
I could not find the licensing section for Dublin Bus or WhatsApp, this is not to say the licensing section is absent from their application, I could just not find it.

Both Spotify's and Snapchat's licensing where under the settings tab.
I have attached a screenshot from Snapchat's licensing page, you will notice they have used a lot of Apache software.

Spotify:
In comparison to Spotify, the language is a lot more user friendly in terms of users who are unfamiliar with the licensing of open source software. This user friendly language makes this section of the application more accessible to all users. It would seem to me that whoever wrote this part of the application had read Thaler and Sunstein book NUDGE, As this friendlier language transforms this complex information into something people can understand. Also Spotify talks a lot more about GNU and FOSS, compared to Snapchat.

Conclusion and Further Research
I would love to hear of any other applications mobile or web-based where I should check out their licensing section. I also think it would be cool, next time you are on an application you use often, if you can find where the licensing is and what type of open software the application uses. I would also be interested in peoples opinion whether the licencing section should be in 'layman' and simple terms or the 'techy' language should be kept as only people interested in software would check the licencing section?

[Assignment] Teaser Trailer for End of Term Video

Thinking outside the box!

Niall and I wanted to create a bit of hype  around the end of term video submission for Managing Design and Development. So we analysed how large film markers created hype, they did this by revealing teaser trailers. This is what Niall and I have decided to do  for our submission.......Yes it's a good as it sounds. We are just going to leave it here. Enjoy!

[VIDEO] An internet without screens TED Talk - Tom Uglow.

Tom Uglow a Google creative lab designer gives an insightful TED talk about what a world might look like if we interacted with the internet with our natural and physical environments and not through screens. He makes some fantastic points about why screens are not a great design and argues that humans love natural things, and that natural things and the use of the internet can co-exist. He talks about design companies form around the world and how they are designing natural but simple tools for everyday life. You may also see in some of his slides, his use of 'quick and dirty' prototyping.

This talk reminded me of week 3, when we had to design a 'text free' interface and more recently last weeks discussion about the creative process in terms of Pixar. With this new knowledge I definitely think that my text free prototype from week 3 would look a lot different.

I would encourage you to take 8 minutes to procrastinate take a look at this talk.

[Case] Scrum Proposal

Case Study 

Please find the details of the case study HERE

Recommendations 

It's clear that new product development (NPD) and maintenance work are two different sides of the same coin for the company, however, each has their own life-cycle.

My recommendation for the company is to split the NPD and the maintenance team. Thinking about my recommendation I felt it would be hard to implement this in the company, however having read fellow classmates blog's; I think Hogan (Neal) Tran best surmises how my recommendation could be used in the real world.  That is that each customer is allocated a team, and the team and the customer progress together throughout the lifecycle.

It seems that the company hasn't expressed this to its employees or created a culture for it. Cheating a little bit and using this weeks paper about Pixar, one of their recommendations is to create an environment which facilities the nature of work the company wants to produce.

I don't think that the company should add another employee, rather the company should follow my recommendation above. 

Other considerations 

I don't think implementing scrum would impact their ISO9000.

They should employ scrum, as part of this I think daily stand up meetings are something the company should employ straight away. 

[Plan] Project Proposal - Ucard - Term Paper

Ucard

Niall Yelverton and I have decided to focus on the UCD Ucard for our term paper. 

The Ucard is a student identification card, which uses RFID technology to enable students to access student facilities including libraries, gym & pool, certain buildings.  RFID technology also allows UCD students to pay for items on campus, however payment by Ucard has not been adopted by all campus vendors. 

Plan 

To do a comparative study between the Ucard and other universities in Ireland, for the purpose of this study we will focus on universities and colleges in Dublin. Such as Trinity, DCU etc. 

Using the IDEO method cards we will gather data about the existing Ucard system and then analyse this data focusing on one or two issues and suggest design improvements. 

We are conscience that we are writing this paper for the decision makers in Ucard, so are design improvements will have to be feasible in the real world. 

Talking with the developers of Ucard we can figure out what IT infrastructure is currently in place, who runs the IT infrastructure and what can be changed in the infrastructure. 

Challenge

We have faced one major challenge already. Our main challenge is trying to organise an interview/chat with someone form Ucard, who can tell us about the current IT infrastructure, who runs it and what can be changed.  Getting no response from emails we talked with Ucard directly and are currently awaiting a response.  We will keep you updated. 

Please provide any suggestions or comments about our research proposal. 

[Readings] ISO 9000 and the very small firm

After reading this weeks (Week 7) readings one paper raised a lot of questions in my mind, so rather then give a synopsis of the reading I will outline some questions and comments I have raised in relation to the reading.

'ISO9000 and the very small firm' by E.M. Wareham (1994)

While researching ISO9000, I came across this very good video on YouTube, it also highlights some themes that were mentioned in the paper. 

ISO9000 is an international standard quality management system, from my analysis of the case, two factors seem to be affecting the use of ISO9000 for the self proclaimed 'one man band' company, Vinculum Services. 

1. Cost: ISO9000 was expensive to install and the implementation has not led to cost efficiency.It also cost the 'one' employee time to implement the project "the time was found working more hours per week". As the employee describes their was "no return on the effort put in".
2. Administration/Paperwork: Vinculum brought in a consultant to help implement ISO9000, the consultant had only implemented ISO9000 with large organisations,. (When I first read this I thought this was Vinculum mistake, but I soon realised that ISO9000 is normally implemented in large organisation, so finding a consultant who had experience implementing ISO9000 for a small company must have been impossible.) This meant the consultant expected the 'one man band' to do as much paperwork as a large organisation, this of course drowned the employee in paperwork. 

Not having any experience working with ISO9000 I found it hard to understand the advantages of the system and other disadvantages, not covered in this paper. Fortunately my father had worked with ISO9000. As a background, my father was an electrical estimator for a large engineering organisation. I have surmised his main three points below.  

1. Advantage: ISO9000 allowed for assimilation of information between departments. So when he had to send files to another department, he knew that the recipient of the file would be able to navigate the files as ISO9000 standardize the filing system among departments.
2. Disadvantage: ISO9000 required total compliance and non-compliance would raise a 'red flag'. This meant that unusual circumstance caused them to be non-compliant. Unusual issues included, not being able to find the price of a product, meaning they had to 'guess' the price. This of course meant they were non-compliant. A more common occurrence was that they had a fixed price for materials they used in every job, however ISO9000 required them to 'go out and find prices', this created extra and needless paperwork. 
3. Suggestion: Similar to the recommendation in Wareham paper, he suggests that companies should identify their necessary procedures otherwise, they will waste time on excess paperwork, which is time and cost consuming.  

Learning: What I learnt from Wareham paper and talking to my father is; what ISO9000 cost in terms of money and labour it made up for in customer satisfaction as a result of being ISO9000 compliant. Other advantages for a large organisation would be the standardisation between departments.

Suggestions: ISO9000 needs to reduce the paperwork for non-necessary/rare procedures, this is ultimately the responsibility of the organisation as they should know what procedures are critical. As Wareham states this would make ISO9000 more accessible to smaller companies. 

My other suggestion is that ISO9000 should be more flexible for rare occurrences, I realise the obvious argument to this suggestion is that it defeats the purpose of standardisation. 

(Image Credit: Quickmeme.com)

Finally, overall this paper highlights that ISO9000 is viable option for small firms, which was the aim of the paper. 

[Assignment] IONA case 2

Shane Errity, Nile Niall Yelverton and I list our findings, using the jump processes for Iona Case 2. The second half of the blog post outlines our solutions to the three key issues that we raised.

Issues:

Organisation Structure:

Business Model

 → Changed from people focused to product focused

Culture

 → Tight knit to dispersed teams (in different locations)

 → Culture of Wine and Cheese and informal Toners meetings, vanished.

 → ORBIX seen as a dead end job

ORBIX Focused:

Didn’t have a holistic view of  the company's lifecycle. (Racconn Chaos lifecycle paper)

Focused on a narrow viewpoint of just ORBIX didn’t consider how it interacted with everything else in the company.

 → This led to a cannibalism in profits

People in the company didn’t have a holistic view of the organisation, this can be seen by the quotes at the end of the Iona case 2. The Travelling Salesman example in Racconn paper, highlights how decisions are easily made if someone has all the information.

Expansion Strategy:

Linear approach to cope with a non-linear problem.

 → Orbix hired new people. Fredrick Brooks would argue this adds to the delay of the project.

 → On Call rota for engineers

 → Hiring more people only eroded profits

ART was the solution, it just  didn’t arrive soon enough

 → Every employee wanted to be working on the cutting edge of software, this made working on ORBIX seem like a dead end job, this added to engineer stress

Solutions:

Organisation Structure:

If IONA had a formal business model from the start, then the engineers would have been able to handle the quick expansion better.

ORBIX Focused:

Employees need to see/be thought the holistic view of the software development lifecycle and the ART expansion. Engineers wanted to be at the cutting edge and they didn’t realise the importance of their work with ORBIX to help ART succeed. They only had a narrow view that working with ORBIX was a ‘dead end job’

Expansion Strategy:

To cope with expansion, Iona should have changed the Orbix architecture towards a new technology paradigm, such as a service oriented architecture.

[Recap] Week 6 Managing Design and Development - The halfway mark

Week 6 notes

Spacecraft Galileo - 14 year project – Cost: $1.6 Billion 

It was a high risk strategy by NASA. “All their eggs in one basket”

(Image credit spacecraftkits.com)

NASA Philosophy '92 - '01 ‘Faster, Better, Cheaper’ 18 Billion 146 payloads 10 Failures

Philosophy smaller scopes. “Hedging Bets”

Scope 4^th variable, other three variables (Faster (Time) Better (Quality) Cheaper (Cost))

Never going to solve the problem of balancing all 4 variables but we have to deal with them all.

Fred Brooks’ Law, adding manpower to a late software project makes it later"

People and months are interchangeable, Brooks

 

(Image credit  Dilbert.com)

Alpha à Beta/Prototypes à Shipped/General Availability (GA)/ Final Release

Don’t give people an idea that it’s finished until it is actually finished

Scope = Requirements

“If you actively manage scope, you can provide managers and customers with control of cost, quality, and time." (Kent Beck, 2000)

Tools to manage scope include MoSCoW (Stapleton 1997)

(Image Credit: Managing Design and Development Week 6 slides)

Quality: Hard to measure. Are you measuring quality of the process or quality of the product?

It’s hard to describe what quality is?

Kent Beck: 'Quality is a terrible control variable'.

Cost: Every business has sunk costs. Every company has necessary costs to produce value.

Cost are equipment resources people and money.

Scope: 'Identifying the problem is the problem'

IDEO method cards a way of gathering Requirements.

It’s important to understand where the requirements are coming from. Is it the customer/ business? Hidden hand of the analysts may skew the requirements and this affects the value delivered by the project.

(Image Credit: Managing Design and Development Week 6 slides)

User Story – Goal Driven requirements – Part of the Scrum method.

Story Title:

As a…. (Identity of user)

I want to….(Minor Objective)

So that…(Ultimate Goal)

This is evidence for the project team, to show that you are addressing the need.

(Image Credit: Managing Design and Development Week 6 slides)

When you’re unsure on the requirements; (Above Diagram)

Constraint diagram with the ID’s.

Unique ID’s are essential for requirements design.

Implementation

You going to the user base, being a host to them, hospitality. (Social Norms, introduction)

Introduction of new product

Where the theory meets the practice

The learn IDEO cards

Maintenance and Use

(Image Credit: Managing Design and Development Week 6 slides)

Design complexity osculates (Traditional)

Failure doesn’t plateau in software it spikes.(Actual) Diagrams above. 

[Homework] Project Requirements Week 5

Find an example of a real world project requirement?

This was the question posed to the class by our lecturer at the end of class, otherwise more commonly known as homework :). 

1. I began my research by first asking the question, what is a project requirement?. I was trying to determine what were the essential components of a good project requirement.  
2. I finally had a 'simplified' list of what I believed to be a good project requirement.  
3. I then set about finding a real world example, which I could use in class discussion, or during the class stand up meeting. 
4. The real life example I found was a project requirement for the library of Syracuse University (New York). 

The project requirement; 'The library will have a public-facing blog that will serve to communicate library news, events and resources, as well as providing the library’s user community with the ability to comment on posts.' (Syracuse University, (2011) 

I have attached a PDF* of the project requirement for you to view. While it is not one page long, as requested, I think it's a good example of project requirements. 

You find the link to the Project Requirement HERE*. 

Additional Information: You can view the results of the project requirements HERE. 

Reflection: While I personally think this was a good project requirement example. I think the project would have benefited if some of the functional requirements were less ambiguous. I think the project requirements were good, but the overall execution was not of the same standard. I have linked the website above for your own analysis of their execution of project requirements. 

Any feedback and/or comments, are appreciated. 

*The PDF is the work of Syracuse University (2011) and not my work. 

[Class] Week 3. Paper Prototyping and Balsamiq.

Exercise:

One of three exercises during class this week was to design a 'text free search interface'. The exercises details can be found HERE.

In class, on a blank A4 sheet of paper, everyone sketched their ideas, this is called paper prototyping. This is my wonderful creation below :) 

We then used Balsamiq software online to help 'mockup' our paper prototype.

Below is the Mockup I created using Balsamiq. 

Reflection:

By drawing the ideas I had in my head, I felt that my ideas could be understood better to whoever I was explaining my thought process too. I have to admit that I preferred the digital mock-up of my idea as it seemed more like what was in my head. Then again my lack of drawing of skills may have influenced this favoritism. I know understand the value of the paper prototype, it gave me a point to build from and it's a lot easier and quicker to make changes; then in Balsamiq. Overall I found this exercise useful in understanding the importance of 'Quick and Dirty' prototyping in the design process, and it will come to my aid during the rest of time in Smurfit and in my future career. 

[Assignment] Try it Yourself.

"By wearing a prototype medical device throughout their daily activities, the team understood the physical, social, and emotional implications for patients who might use it" 

I Andrew Desmond want to understand the Laptop rental scheme in the UCD James Joyce library. 

My procedure will be:

To try the product myself, in order to appreciate the actual experience a real user has. I will use the product over the course of the day and record my findings and suggest recommendations based on these findings. I also plan to record my use of the product. 

I found the Following: 

I found that swiping the UCard for a second time, seemed like a redundant step. While observing, I noticed that swiping your UCard the second time tended to be the source of many errors for first time users. 

You have to wait a minute until after the person in front of you has closed the laptop drawer. This was annoying at times. 

The system was easy to use, fast and all the laptops were in excellent condition. 

The ability to connect to the printers form the laptop was a huge benefit, it saved me having to queue to print my files. 

I felt under pressure, and I was always checking the time, with the 3 hour time limit.

Their was no machine in the Blackrock Library.

I didn't read the T&C as I didn't feel comfortable standing in front of the machine reading the T&C.

The first time I went to rent a laptop, they were all gone; this was on a Thursday at 18:00, during the second week of college, which suggests that they may need to invest in more laptops.

Not a great start :) 

Recommendations: 

• The second swiping of the UCard should be removed. It is a redundant step.
• The system shouldn't need to slow down between users, this task should be performed in the background. This would speed up the borrowing and returning process. 
• More physical laptops are needed. 
• This service needs to be available in all 5 of the UCD library's. 
• Their should be  a countdown timer or pop-up when you are near the end of your rental time. 
• The Terms and Conditions should be somewhere on the laptop, possible as a background on the home screen. 

[Assignment] Character Profile

"In order to understand 4 different types of customers and how to target them, IDEO developed 4 different characters for a pharmacy wanting to reach the male-beauty product market"

 I Andrew Desmond want to understand the Laptop rental scheme in the UCD James Joyce library.

My Procedure will be:

To observe real people using the product, to develop, character profiles to represent archetypes and the details of their behavior and lifestyle. This will bring a typical customer to life and the value of different needs to different users. I stood next to the machine in the library and whenever someone rented out or returned a laptop I got them to fill out a short survey, so I could create character profiles. In total I observed 84 people over three days and below in the "I found the following" section, you can see my results form the procedure.

The survey I used to help build my character profiles!

I Found the Following:

Below are 2 character profiles I built as a result of my observations. 

Character Profile 1.  Click on the Picture for a closer look!

Character Profile 2. Click on the Picture for a closer look!

Recommendations

• Over 75% of people observed, need pre-installed software to help them complete projects.  
• This service is only available in the James Joyce library in UCD, but not in any of the other 4 UCD libraries. It seems that UCD should look at setting up a laptop rental scheme in the Health Sciences Library (Profile 2) and have pre-installed software on some but not all the laptops. (Profile 1 & 2). 
• Also looking at 'Usage' figures from Profiles 1 & 2, the rental time should be increased form 3 hours to 4-5 hours. 

[Assignment] Extreme User Interviews.

"By understanding the role and the mindset of the youngest family member, the IDEO team uncovered new product design opportunities for household cleaning."

I Andrew Desmond, want to understand the laptop rental scheme in the UCD James Joyce library.

My procedure will be: 

To identify individuals who are extremely familiar and unfamiliar with the laptop rental scheme in the library. I will then interview them about their experience with the product. I also plan to record the users interaction with the product.  

I found the following: 

I will first describe my interview with Richard who is extremely familiar with the product. Richard has been using the product for a year. He uses the product 5-days a week, and rents a laptop for an average of 3 hours a day. During study week, he rents a laptop for 12 hours a day. 

Richard using the Laptop Rental Scheme in the UCD James Joyce library. 

After my interview with Richard, I found the following:

• The 3 hour rent limit influenced how long Richard would rent out a laptop; it was also an inconvenience to his daily routine as he would like to rent the laptop from 09:00 - 13:00 and again from 14:00 - 18:00, but this is not possible with the 3 time limit. 
• When the laptop is returned or restarted, the laptop wipes everything that was saved to it. 
• Sometimes the system does not work.
• Their are not enough laptops at peak times. * Peak Times 13:00-15:00 Mon-Thur and Study Week.
• Software which is freely available for UCD students, was not installed on the laptop. This meant that Richard had to use his own laptop for certain modules due to software requirements. 
• Richard found the system easy to use, quick and that all the laptops were in 'excellent working condition'. 
• Out of 5, Richard gave the overall experience 3.5/5. 

Richard Using the Product

My Second interview was with Craig, who is extremely unfamiliar with the product. Craig has only  used the product once before and that was on the Thursday (17/09/2015). Craig used the laptop for 90 minutes.

After my interview with Craig, I found the following: 

Craig using the product

He didn't read the Terms and Conditions page before renting the laptop. 

The 3 hour time limit did influence how long he used the laptop, as he had forgotten what time the laptop was due back and was therefore afraid of getting fined for keeping the laptop over the allotted 3 hours. 

He thought that having to plug the laptop back in as a means of 'clocking back in' the laptop, was risky as the charger may fall out or not register properly. 

He's initial thoughts were that the system was, efficient, quick and that the laptops were in an excellent condition. 

Although he did suggest that their should be more information online on how the system works for first time users.  

Out of 5, Craig gave the overall experience 5/5. 

Craig using the product (for the first time)

Recommendations (as a result of both interviews):

• The time limit for the laptop rental should be extended to 4 hours. 
• Their should be a period of grace before all the information is deleted from the laptop. 
• The software which is freely available on UCD connect should be pre-installed on the laptops. 
• The Terms and Conditions should be set as the laptop's background. 
• When you Log-in, you should be able to have all your pervious files, that are stored in an internal UCD cloud. 
• Their should be a step by step video online for first time users. 
• A pop-up should appear when you have 30 minutes of rental time remaining. 

IDEO - Method Cards

IDEO are a design and innovation consulting firm best known for their human centered design based approach. IDEO developed a set of cards, while not exhaustive, they help designers approach problems from a human centered point of view. There are 51 cards split over 4 ‘suits’ , similar to a set of playing cards. The 4 suits are Watch, Ask, Learn, Try. These cards are best used to explore new approaches to problem solving. They are called Method Cards.

For our Managing Design and Development class we were tasked to use 3 of these cards ‘in the wild’. Our first plenary was focused on the question, what is a system? Simply, as a class, our general agreement was; input, process and then outputs.
You can find the classes answers HERE. This test ‘in the wild’ builds upon on our learning from the first plenary. Focusing mainly on the human interaction with the system.

For my project, I chose the Laptop Rental System in the James Joyce library UCD. (Picture Below)

After choosing the technology I decided on the three IDEO method cards I would use. I chose;‘Extreme User interview’s‘, ‘Character Profile’ and ‘Try it yourself ’.
I will post my method and analysis on this ‘Field’ experiment shortly.