Who You Calling A Jesse?

This past week I have had my calendar and task list hijacked by a cold virus that hasn’t even found its way to make me ill but it has decided to drive up the internal temperatures of the two little things in the house. The upside to this is that I have an excuse to hang out with them during the week, the downside is that this unplanned vacation is anything but and I am sinking into declaring inbox and task list bankruptcy.

How do you balance kids with work?

Honestly, how do you? You don’t, kids win every time. However, how do you deal with coworkers that find your unplanned absence annoying? The situation for my wife and I is extra fun as she just recently returned to work from maternity leave and they are already down one staff member in their group, I am working on a startup when I am not working my more than full time job at VeloCity, and I still have responsibilities as Past President of the UW Staff Association. Thankfully we both have understanding coworkers but not everyone does.

I don’t have an answer for those that don’t have a supportive work environment but here is my two point strategy for not letting the big things slip (and it may help contribute to having understanding coworkers):

• Work with your partner—even though you both won’t be sleeping and probably have short fuses
• Prioritize the big things and find an hour in the day to triage (see it as being forced to focus on value, not volume – that might help)

Then repeat the following every time you think you are about to drive yourself crazy with thinking about the things you should be doing:

Nobody on his deathbed ever said, “I wish I had spent more time at the office.” – Paul Tsongas

When you are busy second guessing your decisions about going to the doctor or not going given temperature, time, colour of the boogers/poo, should they go to daycare, or damn daycare for the bug sharing, etc you find work is a pleasant distraction but don’t let it guide your decisions. Once in a while I find myself heading that way and I have to keep coming back to what is most important and it isn’t work.

Over the past week we tried something different at VeloCity – we opened up the term not with speakers but instead engaged the students in a serious of brainstorming evenings followed by a weekend focused on starting their startup. Amongst the group discussions, team formation, development, and business planning have been a number of local entrepreneurs that have wandered around the residence talking to students and offering some insights—at least one mentor really enjoyed the experience.

The goal for the week evolved a bit but what I wanted to do is give all 65 students at the residence an opportunity to participate early on by challenging them to have a pitch and a demo by Sunday night. Keeping in mind that most (if not all) of the students here have never had an opportunity to work towards building a business with their peers.

The result? About 50 of the 65 students at VeloCity participated this weekend in fleshing out some ideas and most of the teams actually built a usable application. One of them, the room booking application, will be used at VeloCity starting this week!

At the moment I am a bit tired from the 80+ hour work week to write a big post but I can confidently say that we have exceeded out goals for this week and moved VeloCity clearly away from simply a space for innovation to a community that is actually doing something.

At the end of 2009 it is worth a look back at a decade that just happens to be the first 10 years since I was a full-time student. I entered the naughties in a job based out of Thesselon Ontario working for the Community Development Corporation trying to get small business on the web and into our crazy new web site (which was updated only recently to a much better site). Now I am part of a small team of folks trying to get students at the University of Waterloo connected to people that will help build something awesome at VeloCity.

I would have never guessed the decade would close the way it has and I have to say I feel extremely lucky. While all the madness of the world was going on I met my wife, bought a house, experienced a part-time grad program, I have kids, and lots of other fun stuff.

What have I learned?

• I knew nothing in my 20s
  
  • …and spent way too much time worrying about things
  • …and I let that worry guide too many decisions
• experience is important, embrace every experience good or bad but don’t let experience limit you
• always take calculated risks and be ready for Plan B (because you are wrong about plan A most of the time)
• how not to take things personally instead of just saying that I don’t

I hope that the next 10 years are just as fun as the last 10. Just like in 1999 when I thought I would be old in 2009, I think I will really be old in 2019… hopefully wiser ;)

Over on the VeloCity blog is a request for support from students at U of Waterloo for what we are calling a Centre for Student Innovation. The idea is to provide an office somewhere on campus that is more accessible to students that we could offer things like co-working, office hours for off campus entrepreneur resource/mentors, and find out more about the amazing entrepreneurial community here in Waterloo. Sorta like a VeloCity club office of sorts.

What we need are email from U of Waterloo students(to velocity at uwaterloo.ca) in support of this idea. It seems a bit crazy to think we need that but we really do as there are a lot of good groups on campus competing for very limited office space. I think VeloCity has the best idea but I am biased. It would be great (and easier) if a few really successful entrepreneurial UW Alumni wanted to maybe donate some resources to expand or build something for VeloCity, any out there reading my blog?? ;)

Until those investors arrive, we do need those emails to make that happen. Please spread the word, retweet, make a facebook group in support!

It is that time of year again and a number of students have been asking for advice on which job offer they should rank. Their motivations for accepting a job (or ranking it in UW terms) are diverse but there are two general things I think employers might not think of. It could cost them hiring the student that they think will fit the best in the role they have available.

1. Students aren’t totally motivated by money but don’t offer pay below the average wage for their program. With the number of programs out there to help you pay for a student, what does 1 or 2K more for a term really cost you? If you really can’t pay any more then focus on the next point…
2. Sell the value they are bringing to your organization. For coders the allure of their code being used by their peers is huge. For others it is similar—they want to do things that other people will find valuable in the time they are working for you.

I haven’t spoken to one student that took a job simply because of the pay but I have spoken to many that have not ranked a job because they felt they would not bring value to a group or project or learn something from the person they would report to. I am certain they appreciate each and every employer that comes to interview them and offer them an opportunity but at the same time they faced with pressure from family, friends, and mid-terms… and I wouldn’t call it a gen Y thing because the same motivators existed 10 years ago that exist today… It is simply a confident, intelligent, and capable student thing. I think anyway.

Btw, this is no way official advice from my employer. It is simply advice based on my experience. It might not work for everyone.

One thing that really been highlighted to me by the University of Waterloo logo fun (#uwlogogate) is that committees are overused in higher education and the quality of the work could be suffering. Even if the quality might not improve I can’t see how committee work isn’t contributing to an increase in work load and stress. This happens because (using this current issue as an example) a committee (or a series of committees) appears to be responsible for:

1. requirements, strategy, and execution of the branding work
2. logo research, design, and approval
3. communications planning

How the day to day works is that you have a number of staff from different departments with different reports and interests doing their normal job and working on the branding stuff essentially on the side. Focus is not 100% on the task, it can’t be. The result, a decent logo but one that meets the needs of very specific, unfocused, and likely insular interests.

A project needs to be a real project

What I think is wrong is that a committee of staff with other jobs should be responsible for:

1. high level requirements, strategy, and oversight of project

Then a project team is to do the work, report back on how what they are doing is inline with the vision/values, and get the job done. A project team that is doing it full time reporting to one Project Manager and sharing a common interest.

The project team will have the added advantage of spending enough time on something to develop expertise that it might be missing. It is really hard to be really good at something that you don’t have the time for. It is likely the quality of the work suffers because the expertise just isn’t allowed to develop with the project.

This actually gets really bizarre when you look at things like hiring committees and search committees. The membership is made up of ‘representation’ but not by people that are qualified (or likely) to understand the requirements of a job for which they are hiring someone. Their positions don’t offer them the context or the expertise yet they are drawn together to represent what are arguably irrelevant interests.

That is why I am not arguing for broader consultation on projects (like logo making). That doesn’t work. I think broader consultation on higher level principles is ideal but when it comes to doing the work let the people you are paying to do the work produce the best work they are capable of. If it is truly sub-par work then something is wrong and something needs to be done.

A committee that is tasked with doing real work removes all responsibility and accountability for the quality and delivery of the work.

You can’t apply good project management to a committee

Can you actually apply project management techniques to committee work? I don’t think so. Sure in MS Project you can claim an asset (person) has 20% of their work week for a project but it doesn’t take into account that with one day a week of time you are probably getting 1/3 productivity on that. The inevitable 1/3 of your day getting your mind focused and working, 1/3 doing work, 1/3 for interruptions.

Too much time is spent on updating progress, lingering issues that aren’t solved, politics in the office back in the home department, etc.

Highered needs to create more temporary project teams and less committees

I believe we need to stop using a faculty influenced process and go to a more business focused way of running projects with a twist. The twist being the project has committee oversight that agrees on the goals and the measure of the project is its adherence to the goals (committees can not say things like “moar lazerz”).

This is a rough thought of course… more discussion is welcome and required but in general we need to change how we do projects in higher ed or continue to put out sub-par work and over stress staff in the process.

Today I had the pleasure of presenting at the regional Higher Ed Web Conference that was held at Cornell University over the past two days. What a great conference put together by Jason Woodward and his team at Cornell. The speakers started off yesterday with a heavy focus on how to get the user involved in your web project from user testing to engaging folks through social media story telling.

Today we moved into an actual project aimed at a particular set of users at Cornell, into project management (my presentation), and off into the high level thinking about the future of higher ed with Mark Greenfield. My head is swimming with ideas and issues but even more focused on the purpose of the web in higher ed.

My presentation slides are here, thanks everyone for the great feedback and I look forward to continuing many of the conversations online and maybe even at the big Higher Ed Web conference in Milwaukee in the Fall:

Higher education institutions need to make far more clear separations between the core business that occur on a higher education campus. Research and education isn’t the same thing and neither is training. The public seems to blur education and training as do the institutions themselves. Institutions have made changes, smudging the definitions/roles, for funding reasons and higher education has failed the public in not even trying to explain it’s role (or doing such a bad job at it they might as well not have been trying).

Research is about the pursuit of something for the sake of it

Research can be seen as the endless pursuit of something for the sake of the research (generalization yes, but for the love all things we need to talk on more simpler terms in higher education). Research in Higher Education terms is gaining knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Spin off discoveries usually appear and the research projects may iterate many times before it becomes something tangible or it may just stop. Generally it generates revenue over a much longer term. It may develop expertise as well. It can be value-added to education but it is separate, it is expensive, and creating an environment for a wild range of research to occur is the whole reason a higher education institution exists.

Education is about learning how to learn

To an undergrad student in higher education is about learning how to learn. That includes skills like assessing the quality of a source, finding quality sources quickly, and packaging up your argument/research in a way that the target audience can understand it. The truth that no one seems to admit is that, except in special cases, it really doesn’t matter where you get your first four years done. Undergrad is generic, grad school is a different story.

As you move to graduate work you are applying that skill and developing expertise. That is where research plays a huge role in my mind. You can only develop certain type of expertise in a field if you are allowed to dedicated your time researching it. Higher Education has students so that there will be people to utilize the infrastructure and continue to pursue knowledge in a protected environment (what protected means to me – safe from dramatic government, corporate, or economic oversight).

That isn’t for everyone and far fewer students go on to graduate studies then enter the process out of high school. That is good. The skills are transferable to many jobs in the real world and civilization as a whole benefits from having critical, efficient thinkers that can communicate outside of the academic environment. The truly dedicated move on up the rungs of academia and hopefully have the passion that be shared with students in the future. Sadly I think many loose a certain passion and hide in higher education but they are exceptions.

Skills training is for corporations or is it?

Skills training for a specific job is something that I don’t think works well within Higher Education as it is currently designed. In Ontario we had clear division between College and University where one was skills training and the other was essentially academic training. The government and the public fails (or chooses not) to see the difference in practical terms. Pressure mounts on Universities to train students for real jobs and Colleges have lifted their educational profile by teaching academic courses.

I think Colleges have made the transition towards ‘academia light’ better than Universities have towards skills training and largely because the underlying culture conflict. Universities are run by academics that were trained as academics with the belief Higher Education just exists to pursue knowledge and the value to community is assumed, while College is run as a business. I think Higher Education shouldn’t be exclusively about the academics and it should stop trying to mix the two and be honest about what is being offered.

Globally we see specialty schools doing specific skills training for safety, nursing assistants, etc. There is a market for more specific training everyone and generally Higher Education (besides Colleges in Ontario) have not taken a lot of interest in exploited the market. Instead they try to train skills as well as have students explore their education. I think that is not being true to what the experience is supposed to be about and has created some bizarre dependency between Higher Ed and many companies.

Next: How can staff in higher ed help these three areas?

Part of the Higher Education revolution.

Note: This is all based on observations, experiences, thoughts, etc from working in Higher education for 8 years and being a student for another 5 in undergrad at two different schools. I did my Msc and my wife did her grad work through distance education for the last 3 years. My stint as President of the Staff Association at U of Waterloo is over and I find myself all fired up about how Higher Education needs to change. I am also really tired of seeing academics research problems and hiding that research in journals were only other academics will find it.

Karlyn Morissette has set her ’biggest problem in Higher Education’ on the total inefficacy of higher education institution and how that is enshrined in the culture. I agree. From my viewpoint, Staff and Faculty in Higher Education spend far too much time in committees that have no mandate or authority (or even an agenda or a chair). The "building of consensus" for every little thing paralyzes progress and forces what I see as a continuous pursuit towards mediocrity.

Examples given in Karlyn’s post we see every day in higher ed (committees, endless pursuit of a pet project). The problem gets a lot worse when you look at some of the typical decision making processes that have layers of committees that stretch over months with 12 or so people on each of them. In the case of grad admissions or research funding, committees don’t make decisions but instead push an application up to another committee to consider. Finally someone might make a decision but usually that some one is in no position to make a proper decision as they have no idea what they are deciding on. They just sign the paper and move on.

Time is money except in Academia where time builds authority

To me this boils down to a lack of appreciation for people’s time (at least in Canada, specifically Ontario). It is understandable from the academic viewpoint, you have been in school all your life. Getting a phd is a long process and that process works. An academic’s time has little value over simply having their presence on campus as their entire purpose is to think and do research. Their work hours are open, this is their life. Unless the committees get in the way of their research or teaching there is no real cost.

However, staff time is different. At a guess, historically higher ed (being run by academics) hired clerical staff for clerical tasks. They weren’t required to make decisions as the academics were in charge. With 1000 or so students that might have made sense. As institutions grew they hired more professional staff. Professional staff hired more professional staff to help manage the business of the institution. These professionals are often more skilled and necessary to ensure a level of service. However, academics ensured the committee processes remained in place and that they had final say. This does nothing to empower staff and the skilled professionals that couldn’t accept that left higher ed in the 80’s (at Waterloo anyway). Larger, older institutions seemed to simply professionalize phd/academic roles which laid down the academic committee process that leaves decisions with academic chairs and Deans.

Note: The evolution of academia in North America and beyond is a thesis topic methinks… so my abridged assumptions shall end here ;)

The culture was enshrined over the 1990’s and the insane cut backs that higher education had to deal with. New staff didn’t come in, culture took over. I would assume that the reality of ‘it is easier to beg forgiveness’ always has been present but I found when I started working in Higher Ed that it was the only way to get anything new done. Sadly that approach is wrong (most of the time). It is wrong because sure you change things but you don’t have lasting change. You simply embarrass other people and get shut out of any future process. On the rare occasion you succeed in sparking lasting change but you have still marginalized yourself and others to get there. That isn’t a good way to do things.

Identify value, document process, and stop doing things that don’t need to get done

In order to have lasting change you need to participate in the process, ask questions, understand why people fear change, and give them a big nudge in the right direction. Lead by example, act professional, and be kind to those that will attack you for what you doing. It isn’t easy but in the medium term you will see change. After 8 years working in Higher Education I am convinced that no amount of positive change is worth treating people poorly. If someone makes it impossible to do anything then bulldoze them but I doubt you will have to fight the bully if you build support by other means.

There are a few simple things you can do that borrow from the world of Project Management, Drucker, Roberts Rules, and others:

• Ensure a committee meeting always has an agenda
• Identify the Chair, support the Chair in keeping the meeting on track
• Identify who makes decisions and what is required in order to have a decision made
• Identify who will carry out the decisions
• Do not take things personally even in the face of obvious personal attacks
• Track your time on task, report it to your manager on a weekly basis
• If you are working on a project, get agreement on what ‘finished’ means (open ended projects are probably the worst specific waste in higher ed)
• Identify what you expect to get out of the project
• Figure out what doesn’t need to get done and stop doing it

All these things help identify value in what you are others that are working with you are doing. That value will help make people feel better. If they feel better about what they are doing they are more likely to take risks on the current project or one in the future.

Organizational waste, inefficiencies, etc will not be fixed over night in higher education. But making an effort now (especially in the face of cuts) will help in the future.

Email is something higher ed institutions have been providing to students since the beginning of email. Many long-term staff and/or faculty believe it to be a perk while others now simply see it as essential communication. With phones and paper no longer practical ways of official communication, higher ed has been approaching email like corporations when the client (students) see it in a completely different way.

The problem (and my assumption for this post) is that students have an email address before they get to higher ed and they will have it after. For the four years they aren’t going to use some feature crippled email and they aren’t going to switch their primary contact address.

There was an argument a number of years ago for higher ed to provide top notch email to students and encourage them to switch. They will then retain that service as Alumni and retain a great connection with campus. I am not sure that would work anymore.

What students (and Alumni) currently use is their @hotmail or @gmail or @yahoo and that creates a problem. Computers on campus can get compromised, when they do they usually result in the campus domain being blacklisted which means no email is received for a while. IT thinks you fix this by forcing students to use campus email. But that doesn’t change the fact that the higher ed institution can’t contact the rest of the world.

My thought: move your email to a different ‘email’ only domain or move machines on campus to a special domain and stop forcing students to use a bad service. Also stop spending money on a service that no one uses. Email services should be for staff, faculty, and grad students (optional) with forwarding to undergrads email address of choice.

Just a thought.

How can you explain the state of mobile development (both web based on device installed) to non-mobile folks that are use to a windows dominated world that makes ‘adjustments’ for Mac from time to time? Here are my basic assumptions:

• CDMA devices are in some walled garden most of the time.
• Carriers don’t want to be a service provider, they want to control and profit from the whole experience.
• Long term contracts from carriers in North America slow down new device uptake.
• GSM devices are common and low barrier targets.
• Software on phones is rarely updated.
• No device is ‘easy’ to develop for, in fact most are like putting together an entire house worth of Ikea furniture along with all the little things.
• Mobile browsers suck.
• Microsoft doesn’t yet get mobile, but it will.
• RIM changed the game (with email, utility, service) but forgot about changing the rules.
• Apple changed the game further and re-wrote the rules (utility, Application store, touch it).

From those assumptions I am still at the same place I was over a year ago: supporting ‘all devices’ with regards to mobile development is not practical in North America. This includes mobile focused web sites and device installed applications. That isn’t to say there isn’t a market worth going after. Apple gives you access to a lot of people through it’s App store and you can target their browser easy enough. You can target Blackberry as well and if you target both I think you will hit a pretty good market.

The trick in my mind is defining where the market is. What developers need is good (unbiased, up-to-date) research on who is using what devices for what. Not because mobile developers don’t know their audience but because their paying clients, understandably, deserve some real numbers to decide what they need.

Last week I had the pleasure of participating in a meeting between a local mobile start-up and a mobile marketing start-up based out of Toronto. A major chunk of the meeting was spent discussing the various issues of platform and carrier issues.

The marketing group have a client that wants an app on ‘all phones’ – Bell, Telus, Fido, Rogers – but the local start-up can not justify the resources nor can they even think they could support all devices. The client wants to support all phones not because it thinks that is where their target market is but because they don’t know what devices their target market uses. If they new it would be easier for everyone.

This leaves me wondering… is it even possible to collect accurate information on device usage? Is it easier to just target the iPhone since they have data plans and are more likely to have users that want to try out stuff?

I don’t think people in larger organizations (maybe people in general) are use to the development processes of anything that could be considered ‘2.0’ so when they are participating in the early stages you need to be sensitive to that.

The system my team is building is essentially an enterprise 2.0 application for the higher education business of co-operative education. It is like some odd form of dating. It can seem like students are pimping their skills to the highest bidder (employer) but it’s not just about money. For students money can talk but so does being able to find a place to live for four months, having a job that isn’t just mindless work, nice office, helping their career afterwards, etc.

Oversimplifying the explanation of the project: Our goal is to create a web based application that does everything from building a resume to a job posting to applying to jobs and setting up interviews. We are designing it as a self-service collaborative environment that will eventually place the university staff in a position of oversight instead of direct service provision. This has to hook in with other university business applications.

When trying to be agile and include the user in our early stage development we have run into the fact that people that are use to business applications are not use to seeing a rough application. They treat it like it is production quality at the earliest of stages and in turn can bog down development. What happens is an overload of feedback and emotion which just takes the steam out of the user advocate and front-end team.

To add to the fun, we are an internal team so a loud backlash has political implications. We can actually get frozen in time until something at least is close to production level in the stakeholders eye. The result can be a big time sink but it may be a necessary evil of building an enterprise 2.0 application.

If you have an internal team that is replacing a Peoplesoft-like ‘take what you get’ mantra in enterprise application development you will need to account for the reality that end-users in business are use to that. In the past if they saw ‘early stage’ they didn’t see much difference once it hit production. I think it is unlikely that business users in general have been involved in truly early stage development.

January first is upon us and after what was a hectic Christmas break I can sit down and reflect on the year that was 2007 and what might come technology wise for 2008. All this happened in my life:

• I became a Dad on January 19th
• finished my course load on my Msc
• changed jobs
• cities I visited outside of Ontario: Las Vegas, London, Cambridge, Oxford, Leeds, Harrogate, York, Liverpool, Wigan, Deddington, Buffalo, Quebec City, Montreal
• Drove 30 000 km (or so) and I live 2 km from work
• instigated 4 BarCampWaterloo’s and one StartupCampWaterloo meeting a load of really interesting people at all of them

…and that is what I remember. Last year I set some goals for myself and had a few comments on technology. If I wouldn’t have changed jobs all those could have been met (I think) but I didn’t foresee that I have an opportunity to work with an extremely talented team on an impossible project with technology I hadn’t ever worked with. That fuels my excitement for 2008.

For this year my goals are just as simple as last year:

• Finish my msc (I have to by April)
• Focus on user experience and UI development
• Spend every moment possible with my son

As far as web technology goes. I thought last year that Spry sucked and AJAX might be more accessible by year end. I think as the year went on Spry got better and folks like Derek figured out some best practices for more accessible AJAX experiences.

This year I think the big technology fight will be between Flash and Silverlight. Microsoft has to figure out how to convince Flash developers why they should forget all they have learned and change technology while Adobe needs to figure out how not to step in it and be seen as an arrogant company that doesn’t deserve the loyalty Macromedia had built. The buzz and reaction over the whole user tracking thing or updates is going to piss people off. How dare customers get upset? Indeed.

Microsoft’s UI with Silverlight trump card might be Sharepoint. This beast of a CMS is (I think) the most extensive and customizable business class CMS out there. It is the best of a really bad bunch and Silverlight could make it suck less from a UI perspective. We shall see.

Should be an interesting year ;)

Ever had a bit of technology your use dictated to you by an IT department? Does it not even come close to meeting your expectations or requirements? Is it usually web based technology that is letting you down? This type of problem stems from what I call a ‘square peg, round hole’ philosophy in IT – when decisions of what technology to deploy is based solely on the ability to provide support, not the requirements of the project and/or an analysis of features required by the user. It seems to happen far more often with web based technology.

In a conversation with a colleague over a beer I tried to understand why this happens. Sadly I still don’t understand why, but I do better appreciate the position of people that decide to hammer that square peg in. But I think it because they don’t understand or have an actual use for the web themselves (that is a totally different post).

I believe this happens in every IT department and it stems from the environment. IT finds itself in a situation with limited resources to hire new staff even though they are tracking time on/and tasks and there is an expectation that IT needs to support everyone regardless of expertise. There is a project or group or department that has decided to use a particular technology. Reality kicks in and the service end has to learn to support the technology so a decision is made to apply that same technology to others that have similar but not the same requirements as that project group.

What happens next is ugly. The clients expect something that usually different because they may want the same features but they would apply a different priority to the features they use/need. This influences their expectations on the total experience. Take a content management system (CMS) for example. One group might put a high priority on workflow management, another on user management, another wants a templating scheme, another wants a forum, and another group really wants a wiki. A CMS can do all these things but I can’t think of a CMS that can do them all as well or anywhere near as good as specialized software.

However, CMS vendors will promise support and the ability to meet the demands of the user. This pulls on the support strings of IT. Rarely, if ever, will you find a CMS that delivers to a diverse groups expectations. What happens is that any number of groups become disenfranchised with the software and the overall project of deploying that technology is doomed to failure or mediocre success at best. The CMS vendor comes off either not being paid and/or looking really bad. The IT department comes off looking unprofessional at best which puts pressure on them to produce, and the cycle continues.

What should happen is that the IT department assesses the features as well as the priorities. They evaluate the technology providers based on that clear idea of what are ‘deal killer’ features for people. If it reaches a thresh hold that makes it impossible to please even 70-80% of the clients then IT needs to break down the technologies and groups not force them all onto one.

The web offers the opportunity for this to be easy. Web services, web sites as your API, universal log ins, etc. all make it possible to integrate different solutions on the data level. Sadly I think IT still approaches web apps as black boxes that work in silos.

The moral of the story for anyone building a web based service is that to really be a hit with medium to larger organizations you need to offer integration and openness in your apps. If you can be the folks that develop the integration tools as well as offer your product you can likely charge more based on a successful track record. At least from where I am sitting ;)

My role at work has me looking at a UI for a fairly complex application (known as jobmine) that has three distinct audiences with three distinct reasons for using the web app. The web application is the primary business tool for the co-operative education process at the University of Waterloo. This process sees anywhere from 10-25K people using it at least a couple times every four months. Staff in the CECS department use it for their day-to-day activities.

What is a co-op system? My definition is based on being a student and now an alumni, it is no way the ‘official’ take. Co-operative education is an approach to education that gives students a chance to learn outside of the classroom (and in the case of UW, make some good money) and gain experience in the ‘real world.’ If you are a student you look for and apply to jobs, manage your resume/CV, and find out about interview times and locations, accept and decline job offers. For an employer you post jobs, sort through applications, arrange interviews, and offer jobs. For staff you make sure this all works by supporting both students and employers, generating reports, manage a massive amount of data. Generally speaking.

It would seem easy enough if you walked up to it from a user perspective. You have your role, an idea of what needs to get done, and off you go. The expectations aren’t a whole lot different than say Workopolis or Monster.com.

Post continues, click to read more...