“How can I provide a faster service to my customers without taking on more people?”
What does “work smarter not harder” really mean?
A common mistake in many workplaces is to take on too much work at the same time. The more products or projects being worked on in your organisation, the longer will be the average lead time (the start to finish time for the product or project to reach the customer). This is a mathematical inevitability (Little’s Law for those who want to delve deeper). Working harder won’t get everything to the customer more quickly if there are just too many products or projects in the system.
“How does the Theory of Constraints help me?”
Nowadays the largest use of lean thinking and Six Sigma is in information processing (transactional processes such as finance and insurance) and service industries (such as travel & vacation businesses). You may well be in this sort of industry. Silicon Beach provide excellent training courses on Lean Six Sigma with many participants from transactional and service organisations. In this training we learn that the “Theory of Constraints” is an essential partner to Lean Six Sigma and has a several powerful messages for supervisors and managers. One of these is about how many products or projects to have in the system at one time, and how to organise the work. Read the rest of "Theory of Constraints Part 1: Relay Runner"
Due to an unprecedented number of entries to our Street Photography competition, our judge Eric Kim certainly had his hands full deciding a winner. He has sifted through all 579 photos and come up with a winner and five honourable mentions.
It was not just the number of entries that was high but also the quality so thank you Eric for judging the contest and thank you onOne Software for providing the prize, a copy of Perfect Photo Suite 6.
If you want to edit your photos and graphics to look professional then check out our Photoshop Training and Advanced Photoshop Training courses. The courses are designed to immerse photographers and artists into the intricate world of post-photography editing. We also have a dedicated Photoshop resources website where you will find loads of great tutorials, news, tips and downloads all for free!
Watch the video below to reveal the winner and honourable mentions or scroll down to view the photos.
Scrum is an increasingly popular framework for software development projects used by companies including Microsoft, Nokia and Yahoo. With that in mind we are delighted to announce our brand new range of Scrum Training Courses. These include:
Both courses run for 2 days and cost £950 + vat. The next available dates are:
Certified Scrum Master Training
16-17 January 2012
21-11 January 2012
13-14 February 2012
25-26 February 2012
14-15 March 2012
24-25 March 2012
16-17 April 2012
21-22 April 2012
8-9 May 2012
19-20 May 2012
Certified Scrum Product Owner Training
9-10 January 2012
10-11 April 2012
Call us on 01273 622272 to further discuss the courses and to book a place.
What is Scrum and why is it important?
Scrum is an agile framework for managing projects that is becoming popular in business due to its simplicity and ease of use. The lightweight process allows for a flexible project that is always open to change and is seen as a sought after alternative to other rigid project management strategies. Read the rest of "Scrum Training Courses Launched"
Social Media Networks provide effective tools for Project Managers
“Did you know that we provide some of the best PRINCE2 training courses in the UK? Don’t forget to ask your provider about class sizes before booking. We pride ourselves on quality, we’ll never pack you in! “
As a Project manager you need to keep in touch with messages from clients, stakeholders, developers and team members, arranging meetings, keeping up with project updates. This takes a lot of time, in fact you could say that this makes up most of your job. There are emails to check and send, phone calls to make, meetings to attend, information and reports to chase.
Having done all the above, you then need to update your project plan, communicate the updates to senior managers and stakeholders, creating reports, communicate the progress of the project. Knowing the importance of personal relations, you probably wish you had more time to talk face to face with important clients, but your time gets eaten away with endless e-mails, phone calls and meetings. Not only that, you will need to keep on top of being able to locate and distribute the latest updates of documents for yourself and for your team.
This will not only eat up your time, all the emails and updates need to be read by your team members and it will subsequently eat up their time too. If they are unsure about whether they have the latest updates they must contact you directly, probably by email again to make sure they are up to date with project changes and deadlines. They may lose emails or miss them in the ocean of updates. This will keep you even busier as you may feel the need to check receipt of messages. Read the rest of "Using Social Media for Project Management"
The four morning keynotes at BDMF were crammed in to a 2 hour session with no breaks – so it was an intensive morning with some numb-bums by the end, but covered a wide range of digital marketing disciplines well, including social, mobile, and eMail marketing.
Our round up of these sessions is below, and we’ll be writing up some of them in more detail soon with some video too…
Mark Kelleher from BBC Technology at BDMF
Keynote – Mark Kelleher, BBC Technology Social CRM Approaches, Risks and Futures
In his very energetic and highly entertaining keynote, Mark Kelleher shared some of his experiences of Social CRM (SCRM) at the BBC, and gave us some advice on the challenges of implementing a social CRM strategy, along with some thoughts on its future.
How is Social CRM different from ‘standard’ CRM’?
Mark started by summarising what sets SCRM apart from the ‘database-of-customers-to-market-to’ approach of traditional CRM. They key difference he highlighted was that with SCRM you are no longer the sole voice of your brand.
He used Dr Who as en example – in the 11 years between the ‘old’ series and the series with Christopher Ecclestone, hundreds of videos had been posted on YouTube and fans had taken ownership of the Dr Wh0 brand. This generated a huge buzz around the launch of the new series which worked in the BBC’s favour.
We’ll publish video with a full write up of Mark’s session later – but the key takeaway points were:
Create a buzz and let go – people will find their own value in your messages and content – you can’t tell them what you want them to think any more – “customers don’t know how they are going to behave”
Accept that it won’t always work – SCRM is much harder to predict, so its very hard to forecast ROI effectively – you have to stick stuff out there and see how it develops – some things will flop!
You can’t be everywhere any more – Because a lot of the channels you use in SCRM are ‘free’ its tempting to want to be on all of them – but there are so many now that this simply isn’t possible. Explore your brand and your consumers’ target channels and prioritise your investment
Mark also provided some good advice on managing the risks of SCRM:
Try to make sure that your customers want you to have an SCRM presence before you invest heavily in it – this can be hard to ascertain but make sure that what you are doing adds value.
Prepare to be flexible – Don’t invest all of your time and effort in to one channel or network – be prepared to shift focus as new things emerge
Don’t wait too long – your brand will be seen as old fashioned if your customers are waiting for you to arrive and you don’t – they’ll take their business to the companies that are there
Your brand doesn’t have to answer all of the questions people have about you. People like to find things out for themselves (and that’s cheaper for you!) and there are other customers out there who will answer questions for you in the social sphere.
This is the third and final part of our review of the Update 2011 Conference in Brighton on mobile development and usability on Monday 6th September. You can also check out our posts on BrightonSEO Friday 9th - see #BrightonSEO 2011 – Attracting Quality Links
Are you looking to get into mobile app development? If so it is unlikely you’ll be able to as you need a whole new set of skills. Lucky for you we’ve just launched iOS App Training, a practical course that teaches developers how to create, style and market iPhone and iPad apps. Don’t miss out on the exciting and lucrative world of mobile app development by booking yourself a place on our course today.
Following the enthralling interview with Apple co-founder Ronald Wayne, we heard from Joachim Bondo – who Chess fans may be interested to hear is the creator of the Deep Green game – originally for the Apple Newton, and latterly for iPhone and iPad. So a clever chap!
Joachim Bondo at the Update 2011 After Party
As with some of the previous presentations at Update 2011, Joachim’s focus was on user experience. He stressed that ‘delicious’ apps give users more pleasure and are likely to be used and shared more than those that are ‘undelicious’
Joachim is a watch collector, and his presentation essentially used watch design and manufacture as an extended metaphor for app design and development.
In his view – although Apple’s products are designed by ‘dudes’ in California and manufactured on production lines in China where ‘people kill themselves’ (rather than being hand crafted in Switzerland like the watches he loves) – that they are on the right track with their attention to detail and ‘delicious’ product design and user interfaces.
However Joachim maintained that app developers have the opportunity to go beyond delicious – i.e. to look further than just a sleek user interface, and make sure that every component and every line of code is perfect.
His overriding point was that quality takes time – like the manufacture of a carefully crafted wristwatch, if you want your app to go ‘beyond delicious’ take the time to test every component, and that users will flock to a great product.
If I’m honest, I think Joachim’s presentation took rather a long time to make one point via an extended metaphor – and many of the other presentations at Update 2011 provided much more in the way of practical advice. However he’s clearly passionate about attention to detail in both watches and app development, and I’m sure his passion made some of the developers in the audience think twice about rushing half-baked apps to market.
Closing Keynote – Cennyd Bowles – The Things of the Future
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So… having enjoyed a very pleasant lunch in a nearby cafe we returned to the Dome refreshed for the afternoon session.
Jonathan Hammond - Kinect Jam
The afternoon kicked off with another music act, this time from Jonathan Hammond – a musician and developer who has developed a really innovative live performance tool which uses the XBox Kinect.
With a music video playing behind him, along with a wireframe of his own body, Jonathan played along to a dance tune using the Kinect to play virtual instruments and apply effects by grabbing them out of thin air.
Whilst the performance seemed a little bit glitchy – the concept is brilliant, and when it worked well it looked and sounded stunning.
People tend to be a bit lethargic just after lunch at a conference so this was a great bit of scheduling to wake everybody up. As was…
Seb Lee-Delisle – Angry Birds Corona Workshop
Graphics from Seb's Corona "Angry Birds" clone
Local coder Seb Lee-Delisle treated us to a hands on demonstration of Corona, a mobile app framework and simulator.
Corona is especially effective for game development – with its built in physics engine making it easy for coders to move vectors and bitmaps around fast. The simulator also allows you to see your work represented real time on a simulated device – and what’s more it allows you to develop for both iOS and Android.
In his 30 minute slot, Seb managed to hand-code a simple Angry Birds clone from scratch – starting from a blank page (albeit with some pre-prepared graphics) and demonstrated it live.
I’m not a programmer myself – so to me Seb made this look really easy – first creating some objects (a ball, the floor and some blocks to knock over), applying the built in physics to them all, and then added If events to the circle to enable it to be manipulated and fired at the blocks.
He then added some simple graphics that his nephew had drawn for him, and in 30 minutes had made a passable effort at a (very) simple Angry Birds type game. Impressive stuff indeed.
This post contains our review of the Update 2011 morning sessions, including:
Matt Gemmell – Unusability
Jeremy Keith – The One Web
Chris Evans-Roberts – Ithaca Audio
Debate – Geek Ninja Battle – Web Apps vs Native Apps
New Course Update!… iOS App Trainingis our brand new Mobile Development course. This 5-day, hands-on course teaches developers how to design apps for iPhone and iPad. Take advice from all the speakers at the Update 2011 event and enter the mobile app market.
Closing Keynote – Cennyd Bowles – The Things of the Future
Subtitled “The Human Touch: iOS and Beyond” the event featured a range of presentations, debates and workshops around mobile development and design, both native and web based – a subject we discussed on this blog recently.
The day was brilliantly organised and compered by iOS app developer Aral Balkan, and as the title of the conference suggests, an overriding theme of the day was keeping user experience at the forefront of all mobile design and development work.
We shot lots of video and took lots of photos, and we’ll be writing up a lot of the presentations in more detail in due course. You can also check out our Update 2011 Photos on Flickr - more will follow soon.
After milling about the foyer of the Dome for a while and chatting to some developers (and admiring the floating balls – pictured above) – we took our seats. The lights dimmed, and the Update 2011 video played.
We couldn’t have had a livelier start – as Aral took to the stage with his backing band and belted out a rocking rendition of Fifth Dimension’s Let the Sunshine In.
Aral’s enthusiasm is infectious, rather like Steve Jobs in his presentation style, and he set the theme for the day nicely – asserting that mobile developers and designers are ‘makers’ with the skills to influence, empower and inform.
No sooner had he finished, then on strode Matt Gemmell’s evil twin, and shot him! As Aral exited stage left, Matt took the mic – smoking pistol in hand….
We’ve already written up our summary of Matt’s presentation, which was a really entertaining illustration of how to achieve great usability in App design, by looking at the exact opposite – Unusability!
Matt is a freelance iOS developer, and delivered the presentation in the guise of his evil twin, who gave us a “worst practice” toolkit on how to “really piss off users” with clumsy, useless, non-user-centric apps.
This was a really entertaining way to deliver some good advice, and he flipped things round at the end with some really useful best practice takeaways, that were of course the opposite of his evil twin’s advice! Read the rest of "Update 2011 Brighton Conference Review: Morning"
What does “work smarter not harder” really mean?
Certified Scrum Master Training
This is the third and final part of our review of the Update 2011 Conference in Brighton on mobile development and usability on Monday 6th September. You can also check out our posts on BrightonSEO Friday 9th - see 
So – continuing our review of the Update 2011 Conference in Brighton – here’s our summary of the afternoon’s first few presentations including:
Intro – Aral Balkan
