Technology for Technology’s Sake
As a well known geek this may look counter-intuitive but as much as I love my iPhone and webapps, I don’t need any of them to do my job. I just need a phone, a pen, and someone to talk to. The same is true for most jobs, and yet there are hundreds of tools and widgets and gizmos you can find out there to make it better, faster, stronger than before. Odds are most of them will get in your way. Today I saw someone discussing an iPhone app to replace using playing cards for planning poker.
So now you in order to do planning poker estimates, you need to not only have an iPhone for every person doing estimates, but they have to have this app installed as well. The old way required a small set of cards or index cards. Total cost for the cards is probably around $1 per person, the iPhone method will run you around $200 each for your iPhones plus whatever your AT&T service plan is. So what do you gain for the extra time and money of using your iPhone? Nothing measurable – you only get a “fun” way to do to it.
This is symptomatic of a problem that runs rampant in many industries, where you get technology in the way for technology’s sake. Rather than using a pen and paper to sketch out a wireframe you use a web tool to do it like Gliffy or Balsalmiq. In the world of programmers, they’ve been known to spend hours upon hours writing an application to manage something instead of just using tools they already have.
At Integrum we tried using a number of CRM systems to track our sales pipelin, but have devolved that down to a whiteboard and markers instead. It gives us a physical point to reference, and is painless to use. There’s no learning curve, everyone knows how to write. Try out any of the commercial CRMs out there and talk to me about learning curves.
Go low tech wherever you can without hurting your product or your process. Pen and paper to take notes, white board and marker then take a picture to sketch things out, email instead of fancy messaging system. Anytime someone puts a tool in front of you ask yourself “Can I accomplish the task this tool assists with something I already have? What will I really gain from using this?”
