[Sigia-l] at what point does IA et al. become meaningless?

[Stew Dean]

At 05:31 17/08/2005, Skot Nelson wrote:
>The list seems to be populated by people who are primarily working on
>large projects, with (presumably) sizable budgets.
>
>I'm wondering if there's a point at the bottom end of budget where
>people simply abandon any pretense of dedicated IA? I'm not referring
>to it as a job, but rather as a role and critical path point.

There is a need for a 'producer' role - that is some one who has the 
vision  can put that down in such a way as the rest of the team can 
understand it.   Yes there is always a need for this but the deliverables 
will change from project to project as you have no doubt experienced. On 
some projects a content matrix is vital to keep a track of all the content 
and which stage it is at, on other user journeys (UCD and UML friendly use 
cases) are vital. On some projects these 'deliverables' may just be kept on 
a white board (no one says they have to be on paper).

As the project shrinks the most obvious thing that happens is roles shrink 
so one person will take on many roles. Therefore it's more likely that the 
user experience design work is done by someone who doesn't have the job 
title IA. It could be a producer who also manages clients, it could be the 
project manager or it could be the visual designer or even front end coder.

I feel that dedicated IAs work best on medium to large projects (200+ pages 
with a good amount of functionality). For smaller ones then they can be 
borrowed for a while :)

Stew Dean