Our design team at work consists of three basic groups: UX designers (like myself), Visual Designers, and Copywriters, with a bit of crossover for each. We have a couple of managers and then outside of our little club is an ever-expanding system of designers, marketeers and experience/project managers who all fall under the guidance and tutelage of a solid set of leadership that determine the direction for much of our work. In the trenches though, we still are able to keep our focus precisely where it matters most; on our customers. This however, can prove extremely difficult. It is precisely in these trenches, rubbing elbows, getting dirty, sweaty and just a bit stressed at times, when we discover that not everyone on the team has the same passion about the customer.

UX’ers, as the first responders to many a project crash scene, are sometimes engaged far too late in a project to affect the kind of good that we know we can. It’s not that the other teams engaged don’t want to do a good job, their talent is second to none, but their reality is very different from ours. Their passion for the customer is simply different. Their approach within their teams is varied and appears even chaotic to those of us on the conceptual side of the fence. IT in particular has to actually make happen what we conceptualize. On an epic scale of colossal proportions. This can be difficult. And worse, because they are pressed on all sides by a myriad of competing priorities, their attention can be so divided that they are not actually in attendance at meetings where they are physically, or at least electronically present. This has caused complications simply because they had knowledge and understanding about the connectivity of systems that we as designers would not normally know. Had those issues been raised during normal reviews, rework would not have been necessary. This happens more so in a waterfall-like flow of activity.

When the fire drill projects explode on the scene, the design ambulance that arrives is tasked with merely stabilizing the situation until such time that the patient is out of the woods and clearer minds can peel off the bandages and work toward a best-in-class solution that aligns with our brand and future goals. This is where I have come to appreciate the project manager the most. When I first started on this team, I began to work on some projects lead by a young woman who seemed rather tough on the surface and had a tendency to escalate. Over time though, I found her to be a fierce ally and one who appreciated everyone’s hard work. I have come to marvel at her skill in negotiating the dozens upon dozens of people and systems and objectives involved in a project while keeping the primary objectives and those assigned to them, squarely on task.

But how is this possible? We have used a number of project management systems over the years. We currently use Jira and the portion the projects that I concern myself with most focuses around resolving user stories. They act as a grand to-do list with parent jobs and the ability to assign work, watch other work, load documents and post updates so that documentation becomes a natural output to the entire project. This particular product, accommodates a variety of project management methodologies such as Kanban, Scrum and of course, Agile.

A few years back when I was in an IT department, everyone got trained in Agile. We don’t really work that way, especially when teammates are spread out all across the country. But we try to work in an Agile way. I used to work more silo’ed, preferring to take on the project, ask some questions along the way but do more of the big reveal on the date of delivery. To avoid added pressure and the potential for mistakes, I have taken to sharing even small, partially completed portions of work with shareholders in an informal fashion to get feedback, clarity, and correction of direction. This is more like the Agile style of work simply by working in short sprints, and testing and even sometimes prototyping. This helps get my vision across and where there are issues they can be worked through before I’ve invested too much time.

Just this past week I had one such hot potato. This had to be ready to go to production from design to development and testing by late October. It was not a complex request but I recognized during the introduction to the project, that I could streamline the processes dramatically, make it much more understandable for the customer, and easier on the eyes by being more brand compliant. However, after a full day-plus of designing, and being quite pleased with myself, I shared it with one of the stakeholders who understood that while this was great, there was no way this was going to fly by October. Mind you, it’s already the later half of September and we are just considering wireframes. Still, since we were re-using/combining some existing patterns, I though IT would have no problem. I was soon shot down by the group because they could see that new stuff would just take longer. So I begrudgingly yielded some ground and we arrived at a viable product that would suffice for now, meet the immediate goals of the project and still be an improvement over what was originally proposed. My earlier designs would not be a total waste because we parted with the understanding that we would need to revisit it later when the heat was not as hot. Had I waited to share full-blown wireframes, the date would have been in jeopardy and I would be working some very late nights. I’m getting too old for that.

So while Agile is more closely adhered to in a development environment where they will practically lock themselves in a room plastered with sticky-notes for weeks on end, with pizza boxes piled high on a near daily basis, we designers lean toward the more natural way that we think. Like the cool kids in the back of the bus, we are more apt to be animated, collaborate, and brainstorm with one another. Since each project usually only gets assigned one UX designer, we tend to wheel about and share what we have with each other. Some of us are more inclined to that than others, but without fail, each of us parts these little encounters with something more than we had. We quietly inspire each other. It is organic in its growth and lends its self to a methodology, Design Thinking, that is more suited in nurturing and developing our creativity. This is well supported now in our greater business, Experience Design, like the latest buzz word, but I can not be happier about such a development in the organization.

My old way of doing things

As a user experience professional, my primary concern is how I can help my customer discover, understand and act with confidence and efficiency. I want so bad to put the milk and bread at the front of the store! But I have business reminding me that we have to slip a few other priorities into that flow, and it is my job to do that with the least disruption to the end goal. I have enough confidence in our developers that I believe they can do anything. As a result, I am frequently given large, complex projects. Some can feel overwhelming. While the project manager is logging activities in Jira, there is no system that organizes my portion of the project.

Let me say right now, I am notorious for creating to-do lists. They are everywhere. I find them in random notebooks about the house, on the back of envelopes, at the bottom of my purse, literally everywhere. The irony is that my home to-do lists are nearly all the same. Clean the kitchen, bathroom, sweep and vacuum, go to Wal-Mart (which will generate a whole other list of items that looks awfully similar from one week to the next). I will even go so far as to assign times to my list of things to do in order to make it all fit in a day. I absolutely suck at estimating that time because I 1, have a family that is, like most families, distracting, and 2, my husband will have his own idea of what I should be doing that day, and 3, I get distracted by my devices.

This becomes a struggle for quality time that needs to be organized. While attending a Masters course at Quinnipiac University, I was challenged with idea of transferring the benefits of project management systems we might use at work to our personal lives and our coursework. I thought I was pretty set with my paper to-do lists. The idea of putting that onto a web-based platform seemed less thought-out to me. I liked sitting there each day with my cup of coffee, noodling over what I might accomplish this day. If I wrote it by hand, it meant more. Apps on my phone always had limited appeal. Like my Fitbit. I would do good for a while, syncing my activity with the app on my phone, but I quickly stopped logging my food, then my weight, (I didn’t want to look most of the time, anyway) and then if I hadn’t actually worked out, I would gradually stop wearing the device all together.

But then I considered that maybe I need to get out of that little coffee-clutching comfort zone and save myself some time. I reviewed a number of recommended applications and stumbled across a different one that for some reason, I really liked. Maybe because it was free. I support a family of six and one can never have enough money, so I always like that four-letter F-word, free. It was called freedcamp.com and I found the interface to be immediately intuitive. I quickly began building out my to-do list, assigning dates, and priorities. There is amble room for documents and I liked the calendar view that gave me a good bird-eye view of the coming days. I began adding my work projects into it too. I cannot add documents or anything proprietary, but for managing my action plans for various projects, this might help keep me from using my email as a daily agenda, and more focused on the work as a priority. I do use Google Calendar and Task List in the company Gmail, but when I am trying to organize the entire scope of my day, or at least the school work that I must attend to, I will have a way of managing my projects when the scope gets too deep and too wide. After all, I’m not God so I could use all the help I can get. He created the whole of existence in a one-week sprint project. He saw all that was made, and it was good. And then he made a calendar for the rest of us. Take a tip from God… after all that hard work, make sure you schedule in some well-deserved time off.

Figure 1. Freedcamp.com project management system

Figure 2. Freedcamp.com project management system

Figure 3. Freedcamp.com project management system

Freed camp Project Mgmt Application (pdf)