[Sigia-l] IA deliverables defined

[Timothy Karsjens]

My favorite deliverable of all time:

"Burn Polar Bear Book"

My project manager had become very, very soured with IA after working with one of the "big" shops out of New York.  The client had just filed a lawsuit against the IA shop (no longer around) for 4 months of work with nothing to show for it except incorrect user models and a 40" x 72" bubble diagram that had so many lines that spiders everywhere were blushing in embarassment.

Inserted into the project plan, after I got hired to fix the UI, was, and I crap you negative, an hour long  task to "Burn Polar Bear Book".

The PM brought in a disposable turkey roaster, a 5 gallon jug of kerosene, and the Polar Bear book.  For grins, the day before we put together a workflow which described the process by which we were going to burn things, including process mapping about how tightly to roll up the bubble diagram, how to fix it to the bottom of the pan, put the Polar Bear book in the pan, fill the pan with Kerosene, and light the top of the bubble diagram on fire and watch it burn down to the kerosene where there should be a rather large "woof".  The bad thing was that we were off on our time estimates for the burn cycle and we had to have a cigarette in the meantime to wait for the rolled up bubble diagram to burn down to ignite the kerosene.  The task was over budget and time and therefore, his project plan got tossed onto the smouldering pile of debris afterwards.

This was my introduction to Agile Methods and I have not looked back since...

*grins*

I used to have a video of that...

No offense, of course, to Lou and Peter.

--timothy karsjens

 -------- Original Message --------
> From: Davezilla <davezilla at gmail.com>
> Sent: Thursday, February 09, 2006 9:58 PM
> To: SIGIA-L <Sigia-l at asis.org>
> Subject: [Sigia-l] IA deliverables defined
> 
> IA deliverables defined. By me.
> 
> Stakeholder interviews and requirement analysis:
> Finding out who will fire me when the project goes sour
> 
> Content Inventory, also known as content survey or audit:
> Determines how much perfectly usable content the client has so I know
> how much to ignore, throw away and recreate from scratch
> 
> Heuristic analysis:
> A sacred industry term that means your navigation sucks and the type
> is hard to read
> 
> Competitive analysis:
> Determines why your competition sucks as much as you do
> 
> Cognitive mental models:
> Determines how out of touch with reality your users are
> 
> Personas and audience definition:
> Developing an artificial user to ignore rather than a real one
> 
> Card Sorts:
> Legalized form of IA gambling
> 
> Usability sessions:
> Proof that for $100 an hour, under-qualified people will agree to
> pretty much anything you put in front of them
> 
> Process flows and flow charts:
> Diagrams that prove on paper what no one can create in reality
> 
> Site Maps:
> Diagrams of a website that show precisely *where* on a site a user is lost
> 
> Wireframes:
> Unstyled, structural views of websites that are frequently mistaken
> for final comps
> 
> Prototypes:
> Working models of features that will later prove to be impossible to build
> 
> Design Reviews:
> Formalized reviews of IA research that will subsequently be forgotten
> by everyone
> 
> Final Report:
> A thick compendium of knowledge that proves scientifically why
> Information Architects are justified in adding another zero to the
> budget.
> 
> 
> --
> Color me gone,
> Davezilla
> http://davezilla.com/
> 
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