[Sigia-l] the "small agency" syndrome

[Saffer, Dan]

Speaking as a former PM, back in 95-97, before the IA role had been established, it was usually the PM who did the IA work, especially at small agencies like the ones I worked for. There were typically four roles: front-end coder, back-end programmer, visual designer, and PM. Anything that the others didn't do, the PM (or Producer) did. This included IA, copywriting, business requirements, etc. 

It's not necessarily a bad thing to have someone like a PM with a grasp of the whole project doing the IA work--I usually end up having to know a little bit of everything about a project to do it successfully anyway--as long as the person can switch hats and can focus on user goals, not business (or technical or visual design) goals. As Jesse James Garrett pointed out in an essay recently (http://www.jjg.net/ia/recon/#part5) most of what we think of as IA work isn't going to be done by specialists, but by jack-of-all-trade types (like PMs).

Dan

d a n   s a f f e r  .  sr. ui architect
datek | big think    .  dsaffer at datek.com