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WhatTheFont for iPhone

Written by Andy Weir. Posted on July 28, 2010. Filed under Blog, mobile, production, project management. Tagged , , , , , , . No comments.

42 days, 17 hours and 20 seconds. A conservative estimate of the amount of time I’ve wasted over the years hunting high and low, trying to identify a specific font.

No longer. A dream.

Digital Production – Ready to get serious?

Written by Robin Wong. Posted on March 9, 2010. Filed under production, project management. Tagged , , , , . No comments.

digital production

Digital is still young. If the media we know and love was a family, what would it look like?

  • TV would be the Dad, still trying to act cool, occasionally pulling it off, trying out email and interactive TV
  • Radio would be a great uncle, whose picture would be on the wall, dressed in a World War I outfit, gone but not forgotten
  • Cinema would be a great-great grandfather, a sort of viz-esque Victorian Dad, starched collars, classical but timeless
  • Print would be an ancestor, immortalised in a painting, or perhaps a old manuscript, with a single page framed in the hall

What about the new generation? Digital, and it’s younger sibling Mobile?

Well they’re not even out of school yet. Digital is just about in secondary school, and Mobile? Well Mobile is still in shorts. They’re both trying to find their way, to sound more official and grown-up, but the grown-ups simply aren’t taking enough notice. Well some are, but most aren’t taking them seriously still, because they don’t know the lingo.

What if there was some way these young upstarts could somehow get recognised? What if they could become more mature?

I’ve been speaking to a lot of people in agencyland in the last 4 weeks, and something they all say is that there’s a real shortage of digital production talent, at all levels. Another problem is that Seniority is not comparable. Some producers claim to be senior after a very short period of time, which may be possible, but not with so little experience in terms of projects, technologies, platform, and people.

Agencies rely on being able to produce great work reliably to retain their clients, and they’ve been doing so because their output is being managed by a very experienced group of TV, Radio and Print producers who’ve been doing it for years in a tried and trusted way. Everyone knows their roles and responsibilities, there’s an unspoken code of conduct generally, and there’s even a spoken one in the form of accredited courses, for example the one run by the IPA and various higher education establishments. But there’s few equivalents within Digital.

The IAB run a course, but it only skims the surface, 2 days hardly qualifies you as anything other than a beginner (but it doesn’t profess to be more than this). The IPA currently offer nothing, but are showing an interest. Higher education establishments are trying, most notably places like Hyperisland, but few in the UK seem to be doing the right thing. Places like Plymouth have built up a good track record, with what was formally their MediaLab arts course, now called Digital Arts & Technology, but this doesn’t give enough focus to managing the digital arts. London College of Communications has produced some good people recently as well.

What I’m interested in is an industry-driven accreditation though. I’ll be speaking to some Heads of digital production over the coming weeks and putting together a plan for an official course for those who do want to hone their craft and be recognised for it. Any course worthwhile won’t be easy, and it won’t be quick, but it will be useful, and it’ll help this industry evolve into what it needs to be so that Digital and Mobile can stand side-by-side with all the other members of the media family.

What will a course look like? Well I see 3 levels, much like the scrum alliance format.

  • Beginners | aimed very much at Juniors or those with less than a year of experience | a foundation course run over a few days, reinforcing the basic concepts and perhaps introducing some new ones. Digital platforms, their associated workflows. Roles and responsibilities. Media plans. Budgeting and Risk Management. Differing methodologies. Tools. QA.
  • Intermediate | for those with between a year to 5 years experience – skilled practitioners | A system of peer-review could help strengthen the value of this rating. Applicants might be required to carry out some recommended reading and write an essay on digital production to demonstrate their knowledge and experience. This would be backed up by references from team-members, and details of a broad spread of technologies and technologies (successful ones). One could consider having a points system, or using Professional Development Units to ensure sufficient experience is gained.
  • Advanced | for those wishing to engage in training and management of other producers | Again, this could be a points based system, perhaps with tasks aimed more at helping people to understand best practice. One could have more in-depth training over a period of weeks with practical and written tests.

I’d be keen to hear your points of view on this. What do you think? Would you invest some time to make this happen? Maybe take a quick survey on what’s important for digital producers?

When can change happen?

Written by Robin Wong. Posted on January 27, 2010. Filed under production, project management. Tagged , , , , . No comments.

left a bit, right a bit

I just read an interesting article over on lifehacker about putting the brakes on ideas at certain times during the production process. You start a project, come up with some great ideas, focus on the best, start work on bringing those ideas to life, and then along comes an idea that you wish you’d have thought of in the first place. What do you do? Drop tools and replan? Ignore this distraction for now and address it at a later phase?

Well there’s obviously several schools of thought, but 2 things are clear. First, great ideas should never be dismissed, especially if they add more value to the end user.  Second – and this is the counterbalance to the first idea – change is only worthwhile if it doesn’t reduce the overall value of what you’re trying to achieve. If changing course and incorporating a new idea means you can’t realise all the other great ideas you had because of all the extra planning and changes you’ll have to make, then clearly park it for later.

The next conundrum revolves around the question “when is it a good time to change”. For an agile project, I would argue that embracing change is a central part of how one approaches a project, but this does not equate to having carte blanche at any time to throw new ideas into the ring. For me, if you’re using a sprint model, then at the start of each sprint, the team should evaluate their priorities and decide what is going to add the most overall value. Until the next sprint, the team should stay focused on achieving these priorities. Any ideas that pop up, can be parked until the end of the sprint, when they can be considered by the team again.

There will always be exceptional circumstances when this isn’t the case, and you may need to down tools to investigate if you should change course, but I believe those situations should be kept to a minimum. I’ve seen teams change course all too quickly mid-sprint, to the detriment of the project and the morale of the team. Waiting until the end of a sprint is often a short period of time, and if it doesn’t come soon enough for the impatient, try a shorter sprint on the next project.

Listomania

Written by Andy Weir. Posted on January 22, 2010. Filed under Blog, project management. Tagged , , , . No comments.

To Do

There are two sorts of people in this world. You’re either a list-maker or you aren’t a list-maker. If you are a project manager or producer you probably fall into the former category. If I wasn’t able to make a list and then purposefully set about crossing out those tasks I really don’t know how I’d get anything done. In fact I just can’t get my head around how all you non-list makers out there get through the day. What kind of messed up spaghetti brains you must all have. My mind boggles. Anyway – I digress, for all listmakers out there we are currently being showered with online list tools to help us make lists in a better, more graphical and easier way. We’ve come a long way from a pad of paper and a biro. So for your enjoyment I’ve ‘listed’ all the best ones out there. The key criteria for me is a list that doesn’t take up loads of your time, making, reviewing and organising it. Your time is better spent doing the tasks in it!

Basecamp Logo
Great integration with CVS Dude and Trac for version and Bug tracking

Action Method logo
Lovely interface and great tie up with their iPhone App.

Busylissy
Very simple interface, nice calendar design.

Scrumy logo
Awesome Information Radiator. For those that like to physically pick up and move a task to the done column rather than merely cross it out.

Please feel free to suggest any more!

Sketchy Wireframe Templates

Written by Andy Weir. Posted on January 15, 2010. Filed under Blog, production, project management. Tagged , , , , , . No comments.

I’ve recently been using these handy wireframe templates from Geekchix.org. There is a broad spectrum of templates here, all geared to let you spend more time on the functionality of your product rather than anything surrounding it.

My particular favourite is the iPhone Stencil Kit!

RetroSpecial

Written by Andy Weir. Posted on January 11, 2010. Filed under Blog, project management. Tagged , , . No comments.

Retro PatternIn keeping with the Agile manifesto we’ve successfully had our first retrospective. At the end of week one for WEIR+WONG we looked through everything we achieved in the short time we have been up and running. We looked at what we had set out to do at the start of the week and then looked at what we had actually done. Pleasantly it has turned out to be a great deal more than we originally estimated. We now have a good idea of our burn down rate and can re-adjust our timings and planning this week. Over the weekend I was a little worried that the warm cosy environment of our local tavern and the drinks we were consuming to celebrate week one had had a rose tinted effect on my outlook. Happily however, its now Monday and I can confirm that after looking back we are in a great place going forward.

Using Basecamp

Written by Robin Wong. Posted on January 8, 2010. Filed under Blog, production, project management. Tagged , , . No comments.

basecamp

I’ve always been a fan of basecamp, and I’m pleased to say that we at WEIR+WONG are using it. It’s great for collaborative working, mainly because of it’s simplicity and the flexibility it offers. But you need to be disciplined, it’s easy to get mixed up with how to classify each type of target. What’s allowed for a milestone? what do you classify as a todo list? how complicated can a todo be? How can you use this in an agile way? So where does one start? Clearly, there’s a lot of ways to play this, so this is how I approach it.

Capture

what I find handy to start with is to just capture all your ideas on what objectives you’re trying to achieve, working as a team to create your initial list of todo items. Unordered. Unranked. This allows you to see the basic universe that your project exists in. This is akin to creating your product backlog, to borrow from Scrum a little. You’ll find that you get a whole bunch of what I term as tasks (single actions, such as “write strapline”) and projects (a set of related tasks, such as “create designs for pages”), at this stage, leave these as they are.

Prioritise

Before you try and set deadlines and milestones, you need to work out what’s really important for this project, you need to prioritise your list and for this, it’s vital that you have all project stakeholders present. I rank by business value and risk. High business value and high risk items should be tackled first, so an action, or rather mini-project like “prototype unused technology” would fit the bill here, whereas “Translate copy for phase 2″ would not. Next I would tackle the high value-low risk, then low value-low risk, and finally low value-high risk.

Projects vs. Actions

Using my 1 task = action and 2 tasks = project analogy, you can then start translating your prioritised list into todo lists (projects) and todos (actions).

Team estimates

As a team, you can then take your list and start working out key milestones by estimating how much work you can effectively achieve in each sprint, or, if you’re not using sprints, each set of deliverables. I’ve found that this can be one of the trickiest stages for those new to the idea of team estimates, so it’s often handy to time-box this kind of estimation activity to limit the amount of detail you go into. You can always come back and readjust your estimates once you’ve found your teams project velocity. It’s also a doddle to move any todo item around the page in basecamp, so it’s not like you’re over-investing your time in changing plans. Don’t forget, don’t get hung up in the detail here, your time is better spent doing work that’s of actual value, re-planning needs to happen later as more facts come to light, so no need to sweat that your estimates may be a little off.