software | Scott Savage's Blog

Jive SBS – The most usable employee Intranet?

On December 28, 2009

Intranets often receive a lot of criticism, primarily due to a lack of use and therefore an assumption that they are useless. Personally I think this couldn’t be further from the truth, a poorly used intranet is a clear sign that your company culture is not collaborative. Jive seem to have recognised this, and have thrown the overused “social” keyword at the problem. The result, Jive SBS, is actually the most usable intranet product that I have ever seen.

Ignore the marketing jargon laden press release, here is what works about Jive SBS:

Documents can be grouped, searched and previewed amongst conversations
Clear staff directory with dynamic org chart
Comment and voting system lets you gather feedback on content in a dynamic and consistent manner
Tagging is a good structure for grouping the wide range of content on an Intranet
Web based documents are a far better way of collaborating on and revising policies etc.
Modular nature to group/personal dashboard is flexible and really makes customisation easy
The user interface is clean and user friendly (lots of AJAX, clear/consistent icons and whitespace)

And here is how it doesn’t work:

“Friends” doesn’t really apply, maybe “team mates” would be more relevant and useful? Even still…
Status updates are distracting and don’t have any real value
Activity update lists seem to be inconsistent as far as what is displayed

So basically some elements borrowed from the “social” web do work, but most don’t. In the end the product is just so flexible and easy to use that you can forgive the attempts at creating an internal Facebook.

Agile development management

By Scott Savage

On October 28, 2009

In software

We recently started moving toward Agile software development at work, and I was feeling a bit uncertain. The core reason for this uncertainty was that Agile is a developer-centric methodology and I didn’t understand how I fitted in as a Business Analyst, Project Manager and/or Product Manager.

Now I am a big fan of constant change, I just felt that developers were being given tasks that (despite being scoped user stories) still contained a large number of unknowns. I didn’t know if I trusted them to call me in when they got stuck, rather than finding the quickest route themselves. Additionally the roles of Project Manager, Product Manager and Development Manager were stepping on each other’s toes. Normally I am happy to write the requirements up front and then manage the project. Now there were no complete signed off requirements documents, project management was on a wall and the development team was in control. What am I meant to be doing? I am not someone who likes to sit back and wait to be called upon! I eventually found the following presentation, which was literally one of the only sources I can find about how Agile development management is meant to work:

Hitch Hikers guide to (software) management

View more presentations from allan kelly.

Even though I am only just beginning with Agile I felt the presentation gave me a good sense of where I fit. What are your experiences in Agile management outside the development team?

Top 3 Tools for Tuning Web Applications

By Scott Savage

On August 29, 2009

In CRM, Internet, software

I believe that the greatest strength of web based applications (as opposed to desktop applications) is that ability to develop a feedback loop. I like examples, so let me run through the top feedback methods that I currently use:

Uservoice – This tool allows single sign-on integration to allow you to have a private feedback forum that you can harvest for feedback. The best part about it is that, unlike your current WishList queue, it is self-prioritised by the people who actually know what they are talking about, your customers. You can also provide feedback back to your customers on how the ideas are progressing (approved, started, completed etc.). Nice way to close the user feedback loop.

Google Analytics – Putting analytics through a web application lets you know what users are using most often, how long they stare at a particular feature (or enter information) and what makes them bounce out. But it can also help you narrow that information down to specific users, simply by passing through some information to the new Advanced Segmentation tools using thesetVar() functionto pass through a user’s login name for example. You can even track events, flash components and of course conversions (successful transactions in your application?).

Performance Monitoring – It is a great idea to do user testing and time how long it takes to follow a path through your application, for example logging into your web-based CRM application, searching with some set terms, returning a result and then displaying the details of this result. You can time it in a user session, providing you with valuable (but once off) time information about user scanning and data entry time. How does this time differ at 9am Monday versus 3am Thursday? A web application performance monitoring tool like site24x7 allows you to run this path automatically every 5 minutes, 24×7. This not only allows you to check your servers are serving your application at a consistent time, but even just serving it at all. It will email you immediately when your application stops responding, send you a weekly performance summary report, show you performance from multiple locations around the world and even help you independently track your SLA compliance (and even publish all this via an API or public page).

Don’t wait for your customers to call you and complain, these tools make feedback easy, even to the point where users are providing it instantly without even realising. The next step is using these tools to proactively improve your web application, which of course is easier said than done. Just remember you have to measure before you can manage. 🙂

Software runs my life

Category: software Page 5 of 14

Agile development management

Top 3 Tools for Tuning Web Applications