…the future’s, driverless.
Driverless cars… whether you like the idea or not, they’re on their way.
I recently spoke to someone who didn’t share my enthusiasm, saying ‘It’s a bit creepy, like something out of the Terminator’.
While I love the idea of a driverless car, it wouldn’t always be my first choice – it all depends on what value I want out of my journey.
I love chatting to drivers, especially if I’m somewhere I don’t know well – there’s value added by finding out where the good places to visit are! But if I’m heading to the airport and I need to get there quickly, I’d go driverless.
You might relish the idea of not having to make small talk with your driver, but for a woman travelling late at night, would a driverless car make them feel more or less safe? Or an older person coming back from the shops, what would happen if they need some help with their bags?
We need to consider what the end user needs when we’re coming up with new and innovative ideas
– it’s not just about what the creator wants to create!
BUFD or MUFD?
If you’re wondering why Big Up-Front Design gets a bad rap, how would you feel about the following?
You’re building a new platform. You know what you need to achieve, but you’re not totally sure of how to get there. Nonetheless, you sit down, you spend a month planning it all out. Every single step of the way is documented. You estimate how long everything is going to take and you build a timeline and a budget around it. 30 days later you finish your roadmap and consider it a thing of beauty, a plan for the ages.
On Day 1 everything goes south and the whole thing needs to be reworked. Repeat, or rethink? BUFD works well if you’re building a rocket, but not for less mission critical stuff.
So what’s the alternative?
We need Medium Up-Front Design (or MUFD)! It gives you the strategic advantages of waterfall – timescales, budgets, an overview of a project, but the flexibility of agile – it gives you the breathing room to make small adjustments as you go.
The happy medium really does exist!
Productive or busy – which one are you?
What does productivity look like? In the UK, we have the mindset that if you’re not working your fingers to your bone from dusk till dawn, we’re doing work wrong. Well, that may have been true once upon a time. But you have to remember that ‘busyness’ doesn’t always equal productivity.
There can be a resistance to change though. “This is the way it’s always been done!” is a phrase I hear too often and it makes my heart sink.
Do we think that when ploughs were invented, farmers looked at them and went, “Too different, no, I’m not having it!”? Well, some might have done, but the advantages to the change soon made themselves known. If you looked at a farmer now, working in the same ways as 4000 years ago, you’d think they were mad.
Shouldn’t productivity be as simple as doing the best work we can, as efficiently as possible?
Xonetic
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