[Sigia-l] IA deliverables defined

[Peter Morville]

If it took an hour, it must have been the second edition, which burns much
longer than the first.


Peter Morville
President, Semantic Studios
http://semanticstudios.com
http://findability.org

 


-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On Behalf
Of Timothy Karsjens
Sent: Friday, February 10, 2006 11:04 AM
To: Sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: re: [Sigia-l] IA deliverables defined

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