Why We Love SCRUM!

 Why We Love SCRUM!

image  www.scrumalliance.org

By Alejandro Gomez (@zemogalejo)

How would you build a great product that responds to the rapidly changing needs of your customers and the market? Would you take your time, plan every detail meticulously and wait till all portions of the project were finished before you began testing? Or would you map out your goals, build individual parts of the project first, and constantly adapt your build to react to problems or changes in the environment that occurred while you were completing your development?

If you were a 14 year old kid impatiently waiting for a video to download, you would choose the second option. After all it’s the guiding principal behind BitTorrent. And surprisingly, if you were a best practices digital developer like Zemoga, you would choose the second option as well.

While perpetual Beta has become a commonly accepted practice in the digital world (think of how many years Google labeled Gmail with that status), the idea that projects wouldn’t be built as a wholly formed entity and then tested for quality and performance is a fairly new one. But as our industry has learned more about building products to ever tighter deadlines, an “agile process” has often been identified as the best practice for creating materials.

 

Zemoga's 2010 Wish List

Wish List

By Alejandro Gomez

Our good friend, Chris Brogan recently posted his business wish list for 2010 and invited others to do the same. The timing seemed very appropriate to me as we are planning our holiday party here in Bogota and also continuing our month long focus on strategy for the coming year.

As I look back I find that many of my wishes for our business grow out of some of the things we started in 2009. It’s been an amazing year of growth for our company and I sincerely hope to build on that in the coming year. Here’s my wishlist for Zemoga in 2010: Read more

 

How’s Your Web Strategy?

162798520 834f840cc2 225x300 How’s Your Web Strategy?

In today’s fast moving digital world, companies must feel a need to roll out innovative initiatives that will significantly improve their web communication platforms. Every web project must become an intricate and critical component of every company’s plan to optimize achievement of business goals, customer needs, and process flows with true and measurable returns.

Unfortunately, this fast moving world is causing companies to rush the implementation of web initiatives to secure online presence as fast as humanly possible. As a consequence, it is very common to see implementation that delivers very little or no strategic support at all.

 

Book Review: The Back of the Napkin

napkinfin 350 Book Review: The Back of the Napkin

Simple sketches are often more compelling than technically adept Power Point slides.

The book is broken up into four sections and two technical appendices. Interspersed with the text are countless line drawings to be used as reference. Ironically, as the reader begins to accept the central thesis of the book, it actually becomes quite difficult to read through the text, pause