Thursday, February 23, 2012

Reading time!

Part of my work week is dedicated to reading and learning.
Most of my reading these days is actually UI/ GUI related stuff, as we're closing a large project at work, and are going through some final GUI iterations.

The 'Little Big Details' blog is dedicated to small but neat and significant UI features found over the web/ mobile world.

This blog, of presentation expert Jan Schultink (Idea Transplant) contains all sorts of tips and notes about presentations, presentation design etc.

Wired's webmonkey has some neat notes in their UI/ UX section.

Here's a neat book by Google about web design.

Terry Martin's great blog got some great insights about design, tech and startups.

And, finally, some management stuff:
My company's COO is a big believer in Theory Of Constraints, and has started to implement this project management methodology in our company (Time To Know).

Basically, TOC works by identifying the project chain and building blocks, trying to deal with each building block as fast as you can (Which also means using as many resources in parallel on each building block to speed up the task), and daily reviews to find the critical (Longest) chain, and speed it up.

This method, though counter intuitive sometimes, has been implemented in the project I'm leading, with wonderful result. My team (~20 UI/ GUI/ Developers/ Testers) have sped up our project delivery times, management overhead is lower, and we're actually enjoying the process...

If you're managing a medium to large size project, my suggestion would be to give it a try. Though it takes some commitment, it seems to be working well for me... As well as reduce original cost in ~30%.

A link to our TOC consultancy company would be added to this post soon.