The Objective Blog

Keep up with what we're thinking, reading, and doing.

Interactive Agencies

March 20th, 2008 - by Brett Derricott - Salt Lake City, Utah

I just read an interesting article on the Advertising Age website. The author, Phil Johnson, talks about the trend toward agencies wanting to incorporate more interactive capabilities and provides some insights from his own efforts.

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5 Reasons to Break it Down

March 10th, 2008 - by Brett Derricott - Salt Lake City, Utah

My company recently began releasing updates to our content management system on an almost-weekly basis. Previously our approach was to determine which features should be included in the next release, compute a timeline appropriate for the requirements, and then get to work. Most of our timelines were at least a month long, while some approached 2 or 3 months.

Our new approach, inspired in part by the open source community’s “release early, release often” mantra, involves setting a regular release schedule (weekly in our case) and then prioritizing the features into these weekly buckets. Our goal is to deliver “business value” each week in some way. If a desired feature can’t be built in one week, we find a way to break it into smaller portions that can each be done within one week.

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Defining Project Boundaries (and Keeping Your Client Within Them)

April 10th, 2007 - by Brett Derricott - Salt Lake City, Utah

I suspect most of you have experienced “scope creep” before. Scope creep begins at the moment when your client asks for something outside of the scope of work for which you’ve contracted (you do have a contract, right?). Naturally, they’re asking for this thing to be included at no extra cost. Actually, they’re probably not asking. They’re probably acting like it’s always been understood that this thing will be included. Duh.

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Google Calendar is Now Available

April 13th, 2006 - by Brett Derricott - Salt Lake City, Utah

Google’s much anticipated calendar program is now available (although still in Beta). As you might expect, Google Calendar is free, fast, and well integrated into their Gmail software. The ability to create and share multiple calendars makes this a possible solution for scheduling project milestones with clients. Read the rest of this entry »

A Tool You Must Use

April 4th, 2006 - by Brett Derricott - Salt Lake City, Utah

The larger the pile of information on the Internet, the harder it is to find what you want. If you need some information, chances are you Google to find it.

What if you’re interested in finding information over and over again, though? Are you going to run the same query on Google every day? Sounds a bit tedious. I have a better way to keep up on important information. Read the rest of this entry »