March 14th, 2016
On March 12nd I held an introduction course on agile project management principles, tools and technques at the Order of the Engineer in Bergamo. Here is the supporting deck I used during the seminar (slides in Italian only).
September 6th, 2015
If you have some background in journalism or mass-media communication you probably heard about the popular rule of the 5 wh-questions: any news story should provide an answer to the questions “who?”, “what?”, “why?”, “when?” and “where?”. But you may not know that such rule was taken from Cicero’s De Inventione, a kind of handbook for orators containing lots of hints on how to do a public speech in the 1st Century BC.
In particular, Cicero wrote that any good speech should contain a set of 6 properties used to determine the completeness of the exposition (expositio). These properties, or loci, and their relative questions, represent a classical principle of rhetoric that can be very useful for evaluating a website in all its aspects, too. It may be surprising, but any website in 2015 can be not so distant – as a communication process – from a speech in the ancient Roman Senate.
This is the so-called 2QCV2Q Model, from the initial letters of the Ciceronian loci on which it is based, originally developed by L. Mich and M. Franch at University of Trento (Italy). It’s based on the fact that the design of a website, too, can be viewed as a series of answers to the question contained in Cicero’s rule. In fact, the original model identifies a set of evaluation elements for each of the 6 properties and the resulting checklist has 4 important features:
The following presentation sums up the whole methodology. Note that I updated the evaluation elements in order to include some modern principles of web design and UX that were not present when the original model was created.
March 15th, 2015
Maybe you heard something about a time management system called the Pomodoro Technique. It’s a very simple but effective way to organize your daily to-do lists splitting each task into fixed time units. Each of those units is a “pomodoro” and lasts a total of 30 minutes (25 minutes of work with a 5 minutes break).
The Pomodoro Techique was originally thought for personal time management, but can be applied to team and organizations, too. In fact, we can consider it like an evolution of Timeboxing, one of the core methodologies of Agile Project Management.
The following video offers a quick walk-through on how the Pomodoro Technique works:
I can see 3 main advantages of appliying the Pomodoro Technique:
Getting started with the Pomodoro Technique is super simple.
STEP #1: Write down your to-do lists for today, with a set of defined tasks ordered by priority.
STEP #2: Get a countdown timer. You can use the one in your smartphone, but the best option to stay in the “Pomodoro mood” is getting a tomato-shaped kitchen timer (here’s a perfect one from Amazon). Set it to 25 minutes and start the clock.
STEP #3: Work on the first task until the timer rings, then take a short break. At the end of each cycle, add an “X” next to the current task.
STEP #4: After 4 “pomodori”, take a longer break of 30 minutes.
To become a “Pomodoro Master”, you should complete a series of increasingly difficult objectives. Note that you should never skip to the next level if you have not completed the current one.
OBJECTIVE #1: this is the entry level and to pass it you only have to (successfully) use the Pomodoro Technique for you daily tasks, following the 4 steps listed before.
OBJECTIVE #2: to reach this level you must be able to focus on your tasks without any interruption while the Pomodoro timer is going. No phone calls, no Facebook, no emails.
People who start applying the Pomodoro Technique are always amazed when they measure the Pomodoros spent on work and study (without unhandled interruptions) and those used for organizational activities (which in part come from dealing with interruptions). In some teams, members start off with no more than 2-3 Pomodoros actually dedicated to work per day per person; the remaining Pomodoros are spent on meetings, phone calls, and emails.
OBJECTIVE #3: now you should be able to make accurate extimations on how many “pomodoros” a task will require.
OBJECTIVE #4: at the beginning of each “pomodoro”, add a small recap of what you have done so far (3-5 minutes); at the end, add a review of the work you’ve done in the current “pomodoro”. Note that its total duration should not change.
OBJECTIVE #5: set up your personal timetable. It will set your limits, motivating you to do your best to complete the tasks without exceeding the available time. And, more importantly, it will separate clearly your work time from your free time.
A timetable measures the results of the day. Once we’ve written up the To Do Today Sheet, our goal is to carry out the activities listed on it with the highest possible quality within the set timeframe. If time runs out and these activities aren’t done, we try to understand what went wrong. In the meantime, we already have an invaluable piece of information: how many Pomodoros we managed to work that day
OBJECTIVE #6: now that you mastered all the fundamentals of the Pomodoro Technicque, it’s time to define your own personal objective, like being more productive and efficient, producing higher quality deliverables or maybe applying the technique to your team!
Are you interested? Then you should read the complete and original Pomodoro Technique paper by Francesco Cirillo.
I consider myself a WordPress evangelist, but for a long time I hadn't found a reason to install that glorious content platform on my good old website. Now that shame has ended. In this blog I want to share some interesting stuff about topics I love, such as UX design, digital project management and anything else I'd like to write about. Read More »
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