#27971
I Wonder What This Button Does
We've all lost work to file overwrites and other minor disasters. There are remedies--and as Mike West explains, you don't have to have awe-inspiring technical skills to take advantage of them.
West, Mike. List Apart, A (2006). Articles>Project Management>Technology
#32790
A spiral of complexity, often called “feature creep,” costs consumers time, but it also costs businesses money. Product returns in the U.S. cost a hundred billion dollars a year, and a recent study by Elke den Ouden, of Philips Electronics, found that at least half of returned products have nothing wrong with them. Consumers just couldn’t figure out how to use them. Companies now know a great deal about problems of usability and consumer behavior, so why is it that feature creep proves unstoppable?
Surowiecki, James. New Yorker, The (2007). Articles>Project Management>Technology>Collaboration
#34877
The number of IT projects that end in failure is staggering. According to a 2007 study by researcher Market Dynamics, 62% of all IT projects miss their deadlines, 49% go over budget and 41% fail to deliver the benefits that were expected. That is worrying enough for IT departments. But for consultants and software vendors, keenly aware that project failure could well result in litigation, it is a constant concern.
Swabey, Pete. Information Age (2009). Articles>Project Management>Collaboration>Technology
#34989
Work activities that are mediated by information rely on the production of discourse-based objects of work. Designs, evaluations, and conditions are all objects that originate and materialize in discourse. They are created and maintained through the coordinated efforts of human and non-human agents. Genres help foster such coordination from the top down, by providing guidance to create and recreate discourse objects of recurring social value. From where, however, does coordination emerge in more ad hoc discursive activities, where the work objects are novel, unknown, or unstable? In these situations, coordination emerges from simple discursive operations, reliably mediated by information and communication technologies (ICTs) that appear to act as discursive agents. This article theorizes the discursive agency of ICTs, explores the discursive operations they mediate, and the coordination that emerges. The article also offers and models a study methodology for the empirical observation of such interactions.
Swarts, Jason. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2008). Articles>Knowledge Management>Project Management>Technology
