Busy
I feel the urge to blog something, but I’m afraid I’m too tired to write anything meaningful. Let’s see what happens, though.
Work is really picking up. In addition to my usual usability work, I’m trying to get the rest of my company to adopt more usability and user-centered design practices. I am one person doing this work in a company of around 4000 people, so it’s about time I got some help! (Besides me there is one other person focusing on usability for one small group.)
I’ve been getting some excellent feedback from project engineers I’ve worked with in the last year and a half and that helps adoption, but I’ve learned that you also need to get buy-in from the top. Only from the top can you change the company’s high level processes that control important items like budgets and head count. Luckily, our COO knew the importance of usability before I could get more than a sentence or two into my “pitch”. So, I have a senior executive on board willing to jump in when necessary, but it’s still slow going. Now, the real work is starting as I attempt to educate more and more people in usability and its benefits.
This is a very risky endeavor in many respects, but it’s incredibly exciting to both change development practices and build a group from scratch. I hope I’m up to the challenge.