Any of us can be that irrational colleague who makes for an interesting day at work. All it takes is low confidence and high anxiety—and that comes with the territory. Brandon Gregory shows us how we can bolster and validate our coworkers and strengthen our own emotional resilience so we can avoid unnecessary drama and produce happier relationships.
Topic: Project Management
Insisting on Core Development Principles
The expectations for our work have matured significantly over the last couple of decades. If this overwhelms those of us who build the web day in and day out, imagine how our clients must feel. And yet time and again, we fail our clients by offloading too much responsibility for the development process onto them. We need to build best practices into our workflows from the start, Kendra Skeene reminds us—not wait for our clients to request specific core practices.
Promoting a Design System Across Your Products
Our industry has gotten really good at making living style guides out of parts: reusable components like color, typography, buttons and forms, voice and tone. We’ve also learned how to map skills to these parts by mobilizing the best people to make decisions across platforms. But, argues Nathan Curtis, a third element is crucial to any design system mission: products. What products will use our system? How will we involve them?
Aligning Content Work with Agile Processes
Times (and job titles, and platforms) have changed. Agile has the potential to liberate content strategists from obsolete ways of working, and developers and designers can help. Brendan Murray identifies four key areas—iteration, product, people, and communication—where designers and devs can find common ground with their content counterparts and usher them into to an agile world. The open and collaborative approach of modern agile development is a framework within which content work can refine itself, test, and learn.
Defeating Workplace Drama with Emotional Intelligence
Workplace drama, coworker and client irrationality: these seem like forces of nature that we have no way to prevent or control. Brandon Gregory shows us the emotional calculus at the heart of the tempest. Try this formula on any behavior that makes no sense, and it will help you understand what’s going on and what you can do to help.
Using Roleplay to Prepare Design Managers
Practice makes perfect, but how do you help your team practice difficult conversations? Senongo Akpem shows how roleplay can help new managers learn useful techniques and gain confidence for those tough discussions ahead.
“Buy Him A Coffee”
Doing effective work often depends on the cooperation of colleages. Many of us struggle with this aspect of our jobs. Our very reasonable explanations fall on deaf ears. We’re not charismatic or extroverted, and people tune us out. We’re good at what we do, but we’re not “born leaders.” Actually, it’s not arcane knowledge or inborn talent that gives you the ability to win friends and influence people. Nishant Kothary realized that being influential is a skill that you can (and should) develop.
The Art of Creating Accurate Estimates
If you make a living in client services, you know how daunting the estimating process can be. Somehow, you have to predict how much time and work will go into completing a client’s project before it even begins. Clients have to trust your estimates in order to commit funds to a project. You have to trust your estimates in order to commit to the next project on your schedule. Matt Griffin shares some tips to make estimating a bit more methodical and a bit less fraught.
80/20 Practitioners Make Better Communicators
Approaches that are either too general or too specific can easily overwhelm practitioners—and derail budgets. Fresh from recent experiences with two large-scale redesigns, Katie Kovalcin suggests that flexibility and open communication can transform all team members into what she calls “80/20 practitioners,” creating a more effective balance of time and resources.
There Is No Data vs. Intuition
Heads/Tails, Left/Right, Church/State, Engineering/Design, Logic/Emotion. Oh wait—the flipside of logic isn’t emotion. It’s fallacy. Another fallacy is feeling obliged to join either the faction of the sensibly-clad engineers or the faction of the crayon-toting creatives. Nishant Kothary has found that research is on the side of trusting your gut (then backing up your instinct with testing).
