The Valve Employee Handbook, a must read for anyone sick of the traditional workplace and dreaming of a better way. It looks like at Valve, they have the courage of their convictions to put the ideal of the Enterprise 2.0 movement into actual practice, to not constrain themselves by the fetters of doing things the way they have always been done. Interestingly, the first step in pulling this off is hiring the right people, then getting out of the way and letting them do their jobs.

Why do so many organizations get this last part wrong?

Read the Valve Employee Handbook

Mediacom, this is why you suck. In fact, it might be at the very heart of why you are evil. First you introduce this non-standard “Website Redirect Service” that redirects me to your stupid page, but then you don’t let me opt out of it.

In the past, at least you respected my selection and let me opt out…but only for a while. Eventually, you always come back.

You are a blight on internet standards and really, you need to stop doing this to your customers.

This is awesome. It’s Netflix’ Guide on Freedom, Responsibility and Culture.

Parts of it seem frightening and unfair and draconian, other parts seem absolutely spot on or even, amazing. It’s kind of a chiral reflection of how things work at Valve: very careful hiring, very specific cullings, very little of most of the garbage that comes from Taylor…

OK, so we’re going to be with the default theme for awhile. I’ve just migrated a few properties over to WordPress from Drupal, and this one comes from a Drupal site _and_ an old Blogger site. So, I’m going to stick with the stock 2013 theme for a bit until I get everything else going on in my life sorted out.

Gabe Newell is one seriously awesome dude. It’s not so much that he runs, Valve, one of the most significant video game companies in the world; but that he runs it as a flat organization without traditional “management” roles.

It’s a fascinating organization because their practices fly in the face of many other practices you find in the software industry today. Amongst some of the more interesting facts about life at Valve include,

• Management is for n00bs
• Everyone in the organization is expected to talk with customers. It’s not the roll of a special department…
• Projects are expected to recruit interest internally. There’s not someone telling you what to work on…
• More…

Oh really?

The following links were provided on the last slide of my Surviving Agile presentation given on 9/11/2012 at the Eastern Iowa chapter of the Society for Technical Communication.

• Gavin Austin’s Slides From STC12
• Gavin’s Scrum Alliance Whitepaper
• Agile Modeling Lots of great info, horrid IA. You’ll have to click around and explore. Worth it.
• Just Barely Good Enough
• The Agile Manifesto
• 12 Principles of Agile Software
• Knowledge Centered Support
• Principles of Net Work
• Joe Justice: WikiSpeed. My response when people tell me that agile could never work in their group/department/company/industry.

mjoneill

October 20, 2011

Tell someone what to do, and you’re a tech writer or trainer.
Tell someone why they should do it, and you’re a consultant.

Seems like a false dichotomy to me. Talking about What to do without the Why is insipid. Regardless of your title, the job is to make sure your client experiences the most value from the product, the most value per word.

Let’s be clear. Your job as a designer is to improve the customer experience in some measurable way, right? If you do a complete redesign, and every designer you know loves it, and it wins awards from experts, but every single one of your users hates it and leaves and stops giving you money, then that’s a failure for the company.

Laura Klein, Smashing Magazine: How Metrics Can Make You A Better Designer

Design without testing, decision without measurement…when it comes to websites, it’s kind of like buying ads, but never bothering to track their performance.