Coleman McCormick speaker notes – IAOO 2016
Thanks for visiting! These are the notes and links from my talk at IAAO 2016 — Automating Field Data Collection. Below you’ll find links referenced or mentioned in the talk, the slides for download, and contact info to get in touch.
- Fulcrum Case Studies – If a picture paints a thousand words, then a client success story paints a thousand pictures. Hear straight from our clients how Fulcrum changed the way they do field inspection and data collection, and how Fulcrum saves time while delivering better, more complete and accurate data.
- Amazon approach to product development – Check out this Quora post to find out Amazon’s MO for product development: rather than creating a product and trying to drive customers to trying it, instead opting to “work backwards.” In this model, Amazon will write an internal press release about an unfinished product. If people aren’t interested in the press release, then it’s rewritten with different benefits. Once they get a feature set that people get excited about, only then will a product be created.
- Balancing Power with Usability – With great power comes great responsibility (so we’ve been told.) But with great power doesn’t always come great ease of use. Here I discuss how to weigh the two factors – usability and powerfulness – against each other to strike a balance that gives you the most muscle with the least hassle.
- Avoiding Overengineering – Discussion of how adding too many features adds unnecessary complexity which adds to development time and work, often without creating much in the way of wanted functionality.
- More about Scrum – A quick primer on Scrum (in a nutshell, a way to get work done as a team in small pieces at a time, with continuous experimentation and feedback loops along the way to learn and improve as you go), and how to implement Scrum within your teams.
- Improving Feedback Loops – Exploration of how feedback’s usefulness is limited by time, with instant feedback being best for creating opportunity and process improvements
- “You aren’t gonna need it” – Why make it if you aren’t going to use it? Discussion on why it’s smart to create functionality when it’s actually needed, and not before.
- NPS JIFX Field Experiments – Explore innovations and projects from the JIFX (Joint Interagency Field Experimentation) team that “leads experimentation in alternative methods to enable rapid technological development by cultivating a community of interest and hosting broadly scoped quarterly collaborative field events which enable DoD, US government, and allied stakeholders to identify, influence, and accelerate early-stage technology development that address national and collective security challenges.”
Download the slides here (PDF, PowerPoint) or view the embedded slides above.