The Opportunity At Ventera Corporation, we service both the federal and commercial sectors, focusing on management consulting, software engineering, and data solutions. In 2008, we turned to Scrum to improve our development life cycle, including quicker feedback cycles, improved vision translation, and shorter development iterations. Implementing Agile brought many positive benefits to our organization. At the team level, Scrum proved …
CMS responded swiftly by outlining steps to provide health care services to ailing patients outside a traditional hospital setting. The Acute Hospital Care At Home Program (AHCAH) was created to provide eligible hospitals with the innovative and unprecedented regulatory flexibility to treat eligible patients in their homes, expanding the Hospital Without Walls effort launched in March. To launch AHCAH, CMS partnered …
The emphasis on technology and cloud migration continues to expand, and if organizations are not careful, operational results will be negatively impacted. These trends give rise to an increasing focus on capacity, bandwidth, and security, to name a few. For operational teams to improve their chances for success and to prevent getting lost along the way, using a roadmap approach …
There are nearly 300,000 Meetup groups in upwards of 200 countries. These groups cover a large variety of interests, including technology, writing, and fitness, to name a few. After joining and hosting several Meetups, we’ve compiled a list of reasons Meetups can be beneficial to you both personally and professionally. Networking – Social or Professional If you are new to …
Have you ever been at your desk in your workplace, furiously (or calmly) working on a deliverable (maybe with your headphones in because sometimes the office gets a bit loud) when suddenly you find yourself stuck? “If only I had this last small detail,” or “it would be advantageous to confirm this is the right approach before I go down the wrong …
Challenges Traditional manual testing is not very efficient. Manual testing is labor intensive, requiring a team of people to perform multiple cycles of mundane tasks. Manual testing coverage is not always adequate – new builds and functions often take priority, leaving other items neglected. Manual testing time is often lengthy, with no economies of scale or efficiency improvements. Some automated …
Wireframes are helpful in the early stages of design so that people do not get distracted by the styling of the interface while discussing functionality. In wireframes, it is perfectly acceptable to have placeholder text and empty content blocks while details are still being determined. Because color is the first thing that humans notice when they look at an interface, it is very easy for people to focus …
A UX designer concentrates on workflow and interactions, typically working in low-fidelity mediums such as diagrams and wireframes. Conversely, a UI designer specializes in look and feel, focusing on high-fidelity mockups and branding. While UX and UI are entwined from start to finish, the crux of a UX designer’s work occurs in the early stages of the design process while the primary responsibilities of a UI designer occur during the latter stages. Below …
On every team that I’ve ever worked with, there are hunters and farmers. The terms were originally used in sales to refer to salespeople who would go out and “hunt” new business, versus the farmer who was better suited for cultivating growth opportunities within existing customers. In the context of a UX team, both are important, but for very different …
Data has an expiration date. What it is depends on how that data is being used. Consider a wildfire. Real-time data is essential here. Data about the fire, like location, expanse, terrain, temperature and speed, delivered a week after it’s been collected won’t help firefighters on the ground right now. Yet if you analyzed it alongside datasets from previous weeks, …
IT consulting is a highly charged, highly competitive landscape. Over the past half-decade or more, IT consulting firms have had a great deal of success positioning user-centered design as a key selling point in the commercial and government sectors. However, it’s really easy for sales and business development professionals to want to sell customers on the “concept car” – a …
Jared Spool says it’s important to focus on the ‘comb-shaped’ professional, rather than the ‘T-shaped’ professional when building a skills-based team. Which, simply put, is a generalist. He disputes that notion by saying a generalist is “equally good at all things.” This is an erroneous assertion that only leads to a debate over semantics, so I’ll digress. No matter if …
“At the end of the day, you have to know that ‘best practice’ is right for your users in your product.” There are many times where UX best practice are helpful, useful and a good guide to follow. A quick Google search shows there is no shortage of sites, articles and musings on rules, principles and guidelines under the guise of ‘best practices.’ However, this is …
Last week, a product manager from a popular brand had a few questions on Slack: How are UX designers and Product Managers connected? Do their duties overlap, if so how do you resolve conflicts? “There is a great deal of overlap between PMs and UX, with only slightly different objectives and focus.” We had a nice long discussion on the topic, and …
Over the last 20+ years of my career in product design, the industry has been in a constant state of change (i.e. chaos). Process has changed, methods have transformed and outcomes have progressed. There is one thing that has remained consistent throughout that time — how we approach design solutions. There are three ways to design solutions: Innovation, Automation and …
