Work

Agility before Agile

Having spent the last 6 years or so, mostly project managing things digital, web and mobile we selectively adopted some artefacts and ceremonies from Kanban and Scrum. However neither the organisation nor clients were ready to fully adopt Agile culture.

Meanwhile Agile has found its way beyond tech’ into traditionally conservative organisations including banking.

There was some agility before the Agile manifesto formally pulled it all together. As a Studio Manager in the late 1990s we had a few things right and which I feel map to Agile priorities:

  • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

We certainly recognised and valued staff who could work in multi-function teams.  We sought designers with technical aptitude and developers with an creative flair to ensure some overlap in skill-sets (T-shaped capability). A core project team consisted of a designer, developer and account manager. Any of whom might be project lead, based on the nature of the project. i.e. a very creative project may well be lead by a designer, functionally complex projects lead by a developer and content driven projects typically by an account manager.

At that time,  laptops were rare and hot-desking impractical with each person’s workstation often highly customised, big and heavy.

We redesigned our studio and it’s furniture to facilitate quick and easy team flexibility. Instead of benches of workstations, we had specially designed furniture arranged in clusters of four. Within the cluster, the centre space was kept clear with computer screens were arranged to the outer edge ensuring team members can see each other, easily communicate and view each screen content with a slight turn. Workstations consisted of desktop computer and monitor both on top of a customised mobile pedestal. Changing teams was simply a matter of unplugging and wheeling the workstation to the next cluster.

Two clusters of 4, ready for workstations
Wine and beer for the opening of the new studio

I haven’t found an environment quite like it since. Of course, laptops and WIFI make the ‘wheelie-workstation’ less necessary. I remain proud of the work we did in that studio, my colleagues and the way we worked together.

Posted by creacog in Agile, Product management, Work, 0 comments

creative-cognition builds a flash game

The makers of StarCraft need have no fear, but I finally got around to implementing my first Flash based game. A simple retro tennis style game, built as a brand building exercise and integrated by my client into a Facebook application.

CVL-Tennis thumbnail

This was a fun project to work on and programme. To initially build a pure AS3 application, and to later integrate that with Flash CS3 when the real graphics were ready.

It was also an exercise in use of MVC. Since we did not use PureMVC nor any other other framework, using this pattern loaded the initial development with some seemingly onerous complexity. However the time invested later paid off in allowing easy adaptation of that game engine to the various graphics and controllers tried through testing.

Some links:

Posted by creacog in ActionScript, Adobe, CS3, Flash Platform, Flex, Projects, Work, 0 comments

a shout to my corporate site

creative-cognition

After a number of years of content-neglect, and problems of client confidentiality, I’ve finally got around to posting up a case-study covering some simple Flash based work samples. (Note: work samples, not code samples). Flash platform case-studies will be being posted more regularly here on in. But kicking off now with three bespoke user-interface elements : A special accordion, a minimal bouncing menu and a HTMLtext text builder.

The user-interface elements presented may not set the artistic Flash world on fire, but each represent very specific design solutions. They were also interesting and fun to programme.

Bespoke user-interface elements.

Note: creative-cognition ltd is no-longer trading

Posted by creacog in ActionScript, Flash Platform, Work, 0 comments