I created a simple map of the MSDN Developer Centers.  I’m doing a quick assessment and evaluation of the Information Architecture across the various Dev Centers.  I exposed the URLs so I could see at a glance, where the Dev Center actually lives.  Before I give my feedback on the Dev Centers, I like to do my homework and walk all of them and compare the site designs, the patterns, the antipatterns, and the user experiences.  

All I really care about is how well they help me know what’s going on with the given technology, and find the most relevant resources, including the product documentation, code samples, how tos, videos, training, etc. as well as what’s going on in the community.  Ideally, a Dev Center helps me understand the story for the technology, how it fits in with other technologies, and what the roadmap is.

Here are the MSDN Developer Centers at a glance …

MSDN Developer Centers at a Glance   

Category Items .NET Framework

• .NET Framework - http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/ 

Cloud

• Windows Azure - http://msdn.microsoft.com/azure/ 
• SQL Azure - http://msdn.microsoft.com/sqlserver/dataservices 
• Windows Azure platform AppFabric - http://msdn.microsoft.com/azure/netservices.aspx 
• Windows Live Services - http://dev.live.com/ 

Desktop

• Windows Client - http://msdn.microsoft.com/windows/ 
• Windows Presentation Foundation - http://www.windowsclient.net/ 

Data

• Data - http://msdn.microsoft.com/data/ 

Developer Languages

• Visual Basic - http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/ 
• Visual C# - http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/ 
• Visual C++ - http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/ 
• F# - http://msdn.microsoft.com/fsharp/ 

Developer Tools

• Expression - http://expression.microsoft.com/ 
• Visual Studio - http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/ 
• Visual Studio Express - http://msdn.microsoft.com/express/ 
• Visual Studio LightSwitch - http://msdn.microsoft.com/lightswitch/ 
• Team Foundation Server - http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/ff637362.aspx 
• Extending Visual Studio - http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/ff718165.aspx 
• SharePoint Developer Tools - http://msdn.microsoft.com/sharepoint/ee514561.aspx 

Games

• DirectX - http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/ 
• XNA - http://msdn.microsoft.com/xna/ 
• Xbox 360 - http://www.xbox.com/en-US/dev/regdev.htm 

Mobile

• Windows Mobile - http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/ 
• Windows Embedded - http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/ 

Networking

• Microsoft Sync Framework - http://msdn.microsoft.com/sync/ 
• Networking Developer Platform - http://msdn.microsoft.com/network/ 

Office

• Office - http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/ 
• Office Development with Visual Studio - http://msdn.microsoft.com/vsto/ 

Phone

• Windows Phone Portal - http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsphone/ 
• Windows Phone for Developers - http://developer.windowsphone.com/windows-phone-7/ 

Server

• BizTalk Server - http://msdn.microsoft.com/biztalk/ 
• Exchange Server - http://msdn.microsoft.com/exchange/ 
• SQL Server - http://msdn.microsoft.com/sql/ 
• Windows Server - http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsserver/ 

Web

• ASP.NET - http://www.asp.net/
• Silverlight - http://www.silverlight.net/  
• Internet Explorer - http://msdn.microsoft.com/ie/ 
• SharePoint - http://msdn.microsoft.com/sharepoint/ee514561.aspx
• Windows Live - http://msdn.microsoft.com/live/ 
• IIS.NET - http://www.iis.net/ 

Architecture

• Architecture - http://msdn.microsoft.com/Architecture/ 
• patterns & practices - http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices/ 

Performance

• Parallel Computing - http://msdn.microsoft.com/concurrency/ 

Process

• ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) - http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/ff625779.aspx 
• ATeam Foundation Server - http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/ff637362.aspx 

Security

• Security - http://msdn.microsoft.com/security/ 

Testing

• Tester Center - http://msdn.microsoft.com/testing/ 

General

• Dynamics - http://msdn.microsoft.com/Dynamics/ 
• HealthVault - http://msdn.microsoft.com/healthvault/ 
• Microsoft Robotics - http://msdn.microsoft.com/robotics/

 

A-Z List of MSDN Developer Center

• .NET Framework - http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/
• ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) - http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/ff625779.aspx
• Architecture - http://msdn.microsoft.com/Architecture/
• ASP.NET - http://www.asp.net/
• Beginner Developer Learning Center - http://msdn.microsoft.com/beginner/
• BizTalk Server - http://msdn.microsoft.com/biztalk/
• DirectX - http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/
• Data - http://msdn.microsoft.com/data/
• DevLabs Portal - http://msdn.microsoft.com/devlabs/
• Dynamics - http://msdn.microsoft.com/Dynamics/
• Evaluation Center - http://msdn.microsoft.com/evalcenter/
• Exchange Server - http://msdn.microsoft.com/exchange/
• Expression - http://expression.microsoft.com/
• Extending Visual Studio - http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/ff718165.aspx
• F# - http://msdn.microsoft.com/fsharp/
• Go Global - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/default.aspx
• HealthVault - http://msdn.microsoft.com/healthvault/
• Internet Explorer - http://msdn.microsoft.com/ie/
• IIS.NET - http://www.iis.net/  
• Microsoft Robotics - http://msdn.microsoft.com/robotics/
• Microsoft Sync Framework - http://msdn.microsoft.com/sync/
• Networking Developer Platform - http://msdn.microsoft.com/network/
• Parallel Computing - http://msdn.microsoft.com/concurrency/
• patterns & practices - http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices/
• Security - http://msdn.microsoft.com/security/
• SharePoint - http://msdn.microsoft.com/sharepoint/
• SharePoint Developer Tools - http://msdn.microsoft.com/sharepoint/ee514561.aspx
• Silverlight - http://www.silverlight.net/
• Speech Technologies - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/speech/default.aspx
• SQL Azure - http://msdn.microsoft.com/sqlserver/dataservices
• SQL Server - http://msdn.microsoft.com/sql/
• Team Foundation Server - http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/ff637362.aspx
• Tester Center - http://msdn.microsoft.com/testing/
• Visual Basic - http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/
• Visual C# - http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/
• Visual C++ - http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/
• Visual FoxPro - http://msdn.microsoft.com/vfoxpro/
• Visual J# - http://msdn.microsoft.com/vjsharp/
• Visual Studio - http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/
• Visual Studio Express - http://msdn.microsoft.com/express/
• Visual Studio LightSwitch - http://msdn.microsoft.com/lightswitch/
• Windows Azure - http://msdn.microsoft.com/azure/
• Windows Azure platform AppFabric - http://msdn.microsoft.com/azure/netservices.aspx
• Windows Client - http://msdn.microsoft.com/windows/
• Windows Embedded - http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/
• Windows Live Services - http://dev.live.com/
• Windows Mobile - http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/
• Windows Performance Analysis - http://msdn.microsoft.com/performance/
• Windows Phone Portal - http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsphone/
• Windows Phone Portal for Developers - http://developer.windowsphone.com/windows-phone-7/
• Windows Presentation Foundation - http://www.windowsclient.net/
• Windows Server - http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsserver/
• Xbox 360 - http://www.xbox.com/en-US/dev/regdev.htm
• XNA - http://msdn.microsoft.com/xna/

A theme of the economic downturn is that the world won't simply go back to "business as usual" -- it's a fundamental shift.

Gartner says the World of Work Will Witness 10 Changes During the Next 10 Years:

1. De-routinization of Work
2. Work Swarms
3. Weak Links
4. Working With the Collective
5. Work Sketch-Ups
6. Spontaneous Work
7. Simulation and Experimentation
8. Pattern Sensitivity
9. Hyperconnected
10. My Place

# 8 is especially interesting to me.  Gartner says:

"Gartner expects to see a significant growth in the number of organizations that create groups specifically charged with detecting divergent emerging patterns, evaluating those patterns, developing various scenarios for how the disruption might play out and proposing to senior executives new ways of exploiting (or protecting the organization from) the changes to which they are now more sensitive."

Lucky for me, patterns are my forte.

Some of the biggest shifts I see are:

1. temp work is the new job security
2. producers and consumers pair up … pull / demand-driven over push
3. intrinsic value over market value
4. self-preneurs and intra-preneurs rise
5. brand wins / the "IT" factor
6. king of the multiple mole-hills vs. king of the mountain
7. career development is an exercise in portfolio management
8. flexibility and agility thrive
9. the productive artist excels
10. the consulting mindset, skills, and abilities go up in value

I learned that in life, one of the best ways to roll with the punches is to look at the funny side of things.  Many thanks to Dilbert, The Far Side, and Calvin and Hobbes for adding fuel to that fire and giving me lots to work with.  Work also goes a whole lot smoother when you can find a way for it to amuse you (and you always can, if you decide to.)  Humor is a key way to stay curious, light-hearted, and avoid falling into the bitterness trap.

I’ve baked comedy into my life in various ways.  For example, I regularly go to comedy clubs.  You can learn a lot from comedians about timing, how to work a room, and how to be comfortable in your own skin.  You can also learn how to shift your perspective from a serious tone, to the lighter side of life, or at least the zany side.

One of my favorite comedians is Craig Shoemaker.  He’s a real pro and he’s funny in multiple ways, from his skits to his impressions.  I’m honored to have a guest post from Craig on 10 Lessons Learned in Comedy.

Enjoy.

One of the best ways for making sense of a space is to have a lens for looking at it.  The productivity and results space are well-traversed and the body of knowledge is enormous.  That’s part of the problem.  Without an effective lens, it can be difficult to find, organize, and share the productivity strategies, tactics, etc.

Knowledge Areas
You can think of a “frame” or a “lens” as a set of knowledge areas that make it easier to learn a space.  Together, the knowledge areas form a constellation of knowledge.  For example, the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) and SWEBOK (Software Engineering Body of Knowledge) use knowledge areas to cluster related topics, concepts, tasks, and terms to help share the information more effectively.  It’s a way to frame out the space.

Productivity Body of Knowledge
While working on Getting Results the Agile Way, one of the first things I needed to do was carve out the space into meaningful buckets.   By “framing out” the results and productivity space, I created a more effective lens to look at productivity.   This is how I created a “Productivity Body of Knowledge".   I named the collection of knowledge areas for productivity and results, the Results Frame.  Giving it a name and putting it into a simple table, made it easier to refer to and to share as a mental model with others.

The Results Frame (Productivity Knowledge Areas) 
Here is the Results Frame:

Hot Spot Description Action How you take action and manage your activities towards results. Efficiency and Effectiveness How you manage the cost and speed of your results, as well as how you manage the quality of your results. Energy Management How you manage your energy in terms of thinking, feeling, and doing, as well as how you take care of your eating, sleeping, and working out. Expectations How you set and reset expectations with yourself and others. Focus How you focus your time, energy, and attention. Goals and Objectives How you set meaningful goals and objectives for your results. Information Management How you organize and manage information, as well as avoid information overload. Learning How you find the lessons, improve, and correct course. Mindsets and Motivation How you get your head in the game. Planning How you map out the work to be done. Pioritizing How you choose what’s more important. Self-Awareness How to improve your knowledge about yourself in terms of achieving results. Self-Discipline How you correct your behavior. Task Management How you manage your tasks and action items. Time Management How you manage and schedule your time.

The key with these knowledge areas is that they are can contain insight and action.  They are great containers or buckets for productivity principles, patterns, and practices.  To create the buckets, I first gathered up all the “rocks” (the individual principles, patterns, practices, terms, concepts, etc.) , then I group the collections, and then I labeled the buckets.  This is the opposite of making up buckets and then looking to fill them.  I was more interested in creating buckets for proven practices and applied knowledge, rather than treating productivity as an abstract or academic exercise.

Not only did the Results Frame help with organizing my own body of knowledge for results and productivity, but it made it incredibly simple for me to very quickly parse just about any body of knowledge or significant work in the productivity space.  This frame also helped me quickly pressure test productivity systems against a more holistic view, as well as to find their more specific strengths and weaknesses.  Interestingly, you can also use the categories to help evaluate project management approaches and software development approaches.  The frame is useful whether you use it to organize your own knowledge base on productivity, or you use it for teams, or organization.  Don’t just take my word for it though … test drive it and you decide what works for you … you’re the ultimate expert on your context and scenario.

These are some of the best ways I’ve found to master time management, get great results, improve your productivity, and amplify your impact:

1. Monthly Improvement Sprints. Use Monthly improvement sprints to cycle through things that you want to focus on. For example, focus on getting in shape in January; use February to learn a new skill. By using a month’s chunk of time, you give yourself enough of a timebox to achieve meaningful results. By using monthly themes, you give yourself a chance to cycle through a variety of your key interests and goals.
2. Balance your time across your Hot Spots. Balance your results across your meaningful buckets. For me, I use a life frame: mind, body, emotion, career, financial, relationships and fun. Each Hot Spot can be broken down into more Hot Spots. For example, my career bucket includes execution, thinking, administration, improvement and relationships.
3. Build a library of reference examples. Collect working examples to learn and model from. Actively looking for the positive examples of successful people around you helps keep your mind focused on success patterns. If you want to manage your time better, model from somebody who is effective. If you want to mange projects better, find somebody with a proven track record and learn from them. Keep in mind that what works for them, may not work for you, but there is no need to start from scratch.
4. Diversify your results. Think in terms of a portfolio of results. This means both producing results in different categories (such as relationships, career, and fun) as well as having some results you count on and some that are risks. Balance this with quitting when you aren’t going to get good at something, or you aren’t getting the return on investment. Diversify your results to avoid having all your eggs in one basket. For example, at work, you might have your flagship project that you can count on, but then add a couple of experimental projects to test the waters.
5. Establish a rhythm of results. Don't let the tail wag the dog. Factor when you create from when you release. This frees you up to focus on creation, without the immediate burden of production or release. Your release rate should match absorption rate and demand. Your production and release can occur at different times and at varying rates. For instance, you could write your eight blog posts on Sunday, then trickle them out over the week.
6. Find a way to flow value. Chunk your results down. Deliver incremental value to yourself or to others. Focus on value-delivered, not backlog burndown. Don't settle for being productive but ineffective. Focus on delivering value keeps you asking the right questions and making the right calls on priorities. Remember that backlogs tend to suffer from rot over time. If you focus on value delivered you won't miss windows of opportunity when they do appear. The other secret here is that focusing on value can be more energizing than tackling an overwhelming backlog, even if all you really changed is perspective.
7. Improve your network. Who you spend time with probably has the largest impact on getting results, personal growth, your quality of life, your career, etc. Here’s a tip: build a mind map of your personal and professional networks and see where you need to tune, prune, or grow. Your purpose is your guide, whether it’s seeing others’ perspectives to keep creative juices flowing, connecting with others you can model and learn from, or simply providing you with the support you need.
8. Make it a project. If you want to get something significant done, make it a project. This includes anything that takes several stages to complete or something that you know probably won’t get done otherwise. List the work to be done and estimate how long it will take.Allocate enough time, energy, and resources to accomplish the work and establish a timeline. Dedicate time to your project and see it through. It’s a simple but proven practice for achieving results. By giving something a start and an end, and by getting your head around the work, you dramatically improve your chances for success. By packaging up the work as a project, you can also look at it in terms of investment and ROI (return on investment). If you don’t think it will be worth the investment, you can make that call. Making it a project provides a lens you can both evaluate the opportunity and manage the work more effectively.
9. Stay flexible in your approach. Be flexible in the "how." If you have a compelling "what" and "why," you'll find the strategies. If something's not working, change your approach. A good sanity check is to ask yourself, "Is it effective?”
10. Sweeping. Periodically sweep up the mess you’ve left behind. Sometimes it’s easier to go back and clean things up than to try and get things right up front. It can be more efficient to batch and focus your time at a later point, than to try and keep things in order the whole time through. Consider sweeping as a deliberate strategy to maximize your energy by batching the work at a specific point in time. Sweeping as a practice gives you a chance to go back and improve things as well as integrate new learnings.

For more patterns and practices for improving results, see my book, Getting Results the Agile Way.

patterns & practices Parallel Programming with Microsoft .NET is now available.  The book shows design patterns to help developers use the .NET 4 Task Parallel Library (TPL) to write parallel applications successfully.

Contents at a Glance

• Authors and Disclaimers
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Parallel Loops
• Parallel Tasks
• Parallel Aggregation
• Futures
• Dynamic Task Parallelism
• Pipelines
• Appendix A: Adapting Object-Oriented Patterns
• Appendix B: Debugging and Profiling Parallel Applications
• Appendix C: Technology Overview
• Glossary
• References

The Patterns
The book describes six key parallel patterns for data and task parallelism and how to implement them using the TPL.

The Book

• Free in HTML -  Parallel Programming with .NET (MSDN)
• Print / EBook -  Parallel Programming with .NET (O’Reilly)

The Code Samples

• Parallel Programming Code Samples (CodePlex)

The Talk

• Patterns of Parallel Programming (TechEd)

The Community

• Parallel Programming with .NET Community KB (CodePlex)

This is a behind the scenes look at my involvement in the creation of the MSDN Hub pages. 

The MSDN Hub pages you get to from the main “buttons” on the MSN home (pictured above.)   Specifically, these are the actual pages:

• Cloud Hub
• Desktop Hub
• Phone Hub
• Web Hub

The intent of the MSDN Hub pages to create some simple starting points for some of our stories on the Microsoft developer platform.  For example, you might want to learn the Microsoft cloud story, but you might not know the “building blocks” that make up the story (Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and Windows Azure platform AppFabric.)    A Hub page would be a way to share a simple overview of the story, a way to get started with the technology, common application paths and roadmaps, and where to go for more (usually the specific Developer Centers that would be a drill down for a specific technology.)

Why Was I Involved?
If you’re used to seeing me produce Microsoft Blue Books for patterns & practices, and focusing on architecture and design, security, and performance, it might seem odd that I was part of the team to create the MSDN Hub pages.   Actually, it makes perfect sense, and here’s why -- They needed somebody who had looked across the platform and technology stacks and could help put the story together.  Additionally:

• The purpose of the MSDN Hubs was to tell our platform story and put the platform leggos together in a meaningful way.  This is a theme I’ve had lots of practice with over the years on each of my patterns & practices projects.
• I was already working on the Windows Developer Center and the Windows IA (Information Architecture), and the .NET IA, so I was part of the right v-teams and regularly interacting with the key people making this happen.
• I shipped our platform playbook for the Microsoft Platform – the patterns & practices Application Architecture Guide, second edition.
• I had put together a map of our Microsoft application platform story, as well as created maps, matrixes, and drill downs on our stories for key clusters of our Microsoft technologies including the presentation technology stack, the data access technology stack, the workflow technology stack, and the integration technology stack, etc. 
• I had previously worked on specific projects to create a catalog to organize and share the patterns & practices catalog of assets. (Internally we called this the “the Catalog Project”.) 
• I had worked on an extensive catalog of app types, which served as the backbone for some downstream patterns & practices projects while influencing others, including factories, early attempts at MSF “app templates”,  our patterns & practices catalog (so we could  enable browsing our catalog by application type), and then of course, the Microsoft Application Architecture Guide.
• I teamed across product teams, support, field, industry experts, and customers to create a canonical set of app types for the App Arch Guide.  Here’s what Grady Booch, IBM tech fellow, had to say about the App Types work -- “an interesting language for describing a large class of applications.”  Naturally, this work fed into the MSDN Hub pages since we need to map out the most common application patterns, paths, and combos. 

My Approach
My approach was pretty simple.  I worked closely with a variety of team members including Kerby Kuykendall, Howard Wooten, Chris Dahl, John Boylan, Cyra Richardson, Pete M Brown, and Tim Teebken.  I started off working mostly with Kerby, but eventually I ended up working closest with Tim because he became my main point of contact for influencing and shaping the work.  That said, it was still a lot of mock ups, ad-hoc meetings, whiteboard discussions, and group meetings to shape the overall result.  Tim did a stellar job of integrating my feedback and recommendations, as well as sanity checking group decisions with me.

I also sanity checked things with customers, and I worked closely with folks on the Microsoft Developer Platform Evangelism team including Tim Sneath and Jaime Rodriguez.  They were passionate about having a way to tell our platform story, show common app pathy, and how to put our leggos together, and make technology choices.  I tried to surface this in the design and information model for the Hub pages.

The Hubs
For the Hubs, at one of our early meeting in November of 2009, I recommended a we use “deployment targets” as a way to help slice things up and keep it simple.  Specifically:

• Cloud
• Desktop
• Games
• Mobile
• Server
• Web

As you can see, it maps very well to the App Types set I created circa 2004, but I evolved it to account for a few things.  First, I included learnings from working on the App Arch guide (such as moving away from Rich Client to just “desktop.”) Second,  I tried to pin it more directly to physical deployment targets to keep it simple.  As a developer, you can write apps to target the Web (a “Web” browser app), a desktop (such as a Windows client, or Silverlight, or WPF, etc.), a game (game console), etc.   Third, I aligned with marketing efforts, such as recommending we use the “deployment target” metaphor and I renamed the “Mobile” bucket to “Phone” (which worked, because it extended the “deployment target” metaphor, was still easy to follow, and kept things simple.

I also kept the physical aspect of the “deployment target” metaphor loose.   For example, “Web” could run on server, or “desktop”, etc.  Instead, I wanted to bubble up interesting intersections of application types plus common deployment targets, and keep it simple.

The Server Hub
For the server hub, I recommended addressing our story from a few lenses.  First, we have server-side products that can be extended, such as SharePoint, Exchange, SQL Server, etc.  That lens is pretty straightforward.  Second, I recommended focusing on “Service.”  Here’s where it’s hard for folks to follow if they aren’t familiar with server-side development.  While you can lump “service” under “Cloud” (as a cloud developer, I can write a Web app, a service, etc.), the “service” story is a very special one.  It’s the evolution of our “middleware developers” and our “server-side developers.”  It’s the path that the COM builders and server-side component builders shifted to … a more message-based architecture over an object-based one, as well as a shift to replacing DCOM with HTTP.

So if we had a Server Hub, it realistically should address building on our server-side products/technologies (SharePoint, Exchange, SQL Server, AppFabric, etc.) and it should address “Services.”  Sure you could also lump SharePoint under Web or Services under Cloud, but you can also bubble up and give focus to some of the fundamental parts of our Microsoft application developer platform.

To be fair, a lot of folks moved around during the MSDN Hub page project, and as new folks came on board, the history, insights, and some of the work may have gotten lost.

How To Solve the Issue of Too Many Hubs
This was my suggestion for dealing with too many Hubs:

“I think one thing that helps to keep in mind is that different people will want different views – but I think it’s simpler to choose the most useful one across the broadest set of scenarios.   That’s why Burger King and McDonald’s have a quick simple visual menu of the most common options … then you can drill in for more with their detailed menu if needed.  I like that metaphor because it addresses the “simple” + “complete”  Platform is a pretty solid bet – with an orientation around “tribes” (I’ll walk you through when we sync live) – after all, we do competitive assessments against platforms and that’s where we need to win.”

I also made a few additional recommendations to deal with the problem of “simple” + “complete”:

1. Add an “Office/SharePoint”, and a “Server” (SQL Server, Windows Server, Exchange) – the Office/SharePoint platform tends to have a tribe of customers that speak the same language and share the same context … different than your everyday .NET dev.   It’s like BizTalk in that it’s a specialized space.
2. Use a carousel approach to feature the main 4, then a “view more…” pattern so show the full 6 or so top level – and leave breathing room.  I would go to a page that shows the full set at the top, but then shows the full set of products against a durable backdrop.  This would address the “AND” solution of both “Simple” and “Complete”

This would provide a “durable” + “expandable” … AND… “simple” + “complete” … and in the end, a “platform guidance” approach.

While I’m not a graphic artist, I had done some mockups to help illustrate the point …

Home with “View More >>”

View More … (full dev center against a durable backdrop, full tech stack, Roadmaps)

This is blowing up a section of the “Microsoft Developer Products and Technologies” map above that I had created to illustrate the point:

… etc.  and the map of course, continued with the technology stack, but used a robust backdrop.  The map would need to be vetted across product teams but that’s just the point … have a common map that shows our “catalog” of technologies that customers could easily browse, and that product teams stand behind, while providing simple jump points to either MSDN Developer Centers or Product Team sites.

The Information Model for the Hub Pages
I tried to be inclusive in the information model and I wanted to address and integrate customer pain points I’ve heard about how we tell our story over the years, as well as keep the pages simple and useful, based on what I know about customer usage patterns.   These are the main sections I recommended:

• Key Technologies
• Overview
• Common Paths
• Download and Install
• Build Your First Apps
• Arch / Design
• Roadmaps
• Developer Centers and Home Pages

A picture is worth a 1000 words (note this is a picture of the “Information Model” – NOT the page mockups):

My key customer scenarios and questions I used for test cases were:

1. Can I quickly make sense of the particular story? (cloud, web, etc.)
2. Can I figure out what technologies are relevant?
3. Can I figure out how to choose which technology combination to use?
4. Can I quickly install whatever I need to get up and running?
5. Can I build a quick Hello World app to get my feet wet and some quick confidence?
6. Can I figure out the roadmap for the technology or technologies?
7. Can I get a quick sense of the most common application patterns, app types, and design patterns?
8. Can I figure out my key architecture and design issues if necessary?
9. Can I figure out where to go for more? (which Dev Centers, which landing pages, which resources, etc.)

My key recommendations included:

• Provide  the most common application paths for the given stories (based on the App Arch guide and DPE feedback.)
• Start with text-based articles and if feasible, add video.
• If we have video overviews, then have the PG teams create them so that they stand behind them and connect with customers
• Keep the areas repeatable across the Hub pages
• For a metaphor, think of the Hubs as the centralizing story for our “building blocks” … and think of our building blocks as the technologies and the “Developer Centers”
• Name the articles “How To –“ and make them actionable and step-by-step
• Name the videos “Explained” if they explain a concept and “How To” if they provide a set of steps.
• Eventually create “Getting Started Guides” for each of the Hubs.

Tim Teebken and I had many late night discussions and drill-downs, which made the work interesting and exciting.  It’s always great to work with smart people.  We pushed each other, challenged each other, and ultimately we stayed on the same page on the journey.

Well, that’s the story in a nutshell.   That’s a behind the scenes look at the making of The Design of the MSDN Hubs and the role that I played.

If you have feedback on the information model, please feel fee to send my way.  You can use the contact form on my blog.

David Zinger has shared his take on Getting Results the Agile Way in a review on his blog at http://www.davidzinger.com.  You can check out David’s review of Getting Results the Agile Way at:

•  Employee Engagement and Getting Results the Agile Way

If you don’t know David, he’s a writer, educator, speaker, consultant, and all around good guy, that lives and breathes employee engagement, which is all about how individuals, teams, and leaders can be more engaged in the work that they do.   His passion and super skill is helping people get more out of their work, and unleash their passion on the job.

You can see David in action at The Employee Engagement Network and you can check out his amazingly concise and insightful book, Zengage.  In a nutshell, Zengage is a short powerful book to help you get more out of your work by getting more into your work.

Today was the final day of 30 Days of Getting Results, based on my book Getting Results the Agile Way.

It’s basically free training on many of the key skills for:

• Making meaning / Finding purpose
• Focus
• Productivity
• Time Management
• Energy Management

It’s the synthesis of what I’ve learned at Microsoft in the trenches and my travels in life, as well as from many very good mentors.  Mostly, it’s what I’ve learned from the school of hard knocks, trial and error, and necessity (I think of it as a collection of Microsoft Survival Skills in a box.)

Agile Results
Agile Results is a personal results system for work and life.  It’s a simple system for meaningful results that you can apply whenever you need it.  It’s a way to help you make the most of what you’ve got.  It’s a way to be the author of your life, and write your story forward.

Problems Addressed

• How to improve your personal productivity and personal effectiveness
• How to achieve work-life balance
• How to find your motivation and drive
• How to find your purpose and your passion
• How to deal with being overloaded or overwhelmed
• How to change a habit and make it stick
• How to focus and direct your attention with skill
• How to manage your time
• How to spend more time on the things that really matter to you
• How to play to your strengths and spend less time in weaknesses
• How to make the most of your your moments, days, weeks, months, and years

It’s been a fun ride and I’ve heard some amazing stories from people around the world.  I’ve enjoyed the emails and stories from people who have used the system to enhance their life, a day at a time, a story at a time.

30 Lessons on Getting Results the Agile Way

• Day 1 – Take a Tour of Getting Results the Agile Way
• Day 2 – Monday Vision – Use Three Stories to Drive Your Week
• Day 3 – Daily Outcomes – Use Three Stories to Drive Your Day
• Day 4 – Let Things Slough Off
• Day 5 – Hot Spots – Map Out What’s Important
• Day 6 – Friday Reflection – Identify Three Things Going Well and Three Things to Improve
• Day 7 – Setup Boundaries and Buffers
• Day 8 – Dump Your Brain to Free Your Mind
• Day 9 – Prioritize Your Day with MUST, SHOULD, and COULD
• Day 10 – Feel Strong All Week Long
• Day 11 – Reduce Friction and Create Glide Paths for Your Day
• Day 12 – Productivity Personas – Are You are a Starter or a Finisher?
• Day 13 – Triage Your Action Items with Skill
• Day 14 – Carve Out Time for What’s Important
• Day 15 – Achieve a Peaceful Calm State of Mind
• Day 16 – Use Metaphors to Find Your Motivation
• Day 17 – Add Power Hours to Your Week
• Day 18 – Add Creative Hours to Your Week
• Day 19 — Who are You Doing it For?
• Day 20 — Ask Better Questions, Get Better Results
• Day 21 – Carry the Good Forward, Let the Rest Go
• Day 22 – Design Your Day with Skill
• Day 23 — Design Your Week with Skill
• Day 24 – Bounce Back with Skill
• Day 25 – Fix Time. Flex Scope
• Day 26 – Solve Problems with Skill
• Day 27 – Do Something Great
• Day 28 – Find Your One Thing
• Day 29 – Find Your Arena for Your Best Results
• Day 30 – Take Agile Results to the Next Level

Key Links

• 30 Days of Getting Results (All 30 self-paced lessons and nuggets)
• The Book – Getting Results the Agile Way
• Getting Started with Agile Results

If you visit just one lesson, check out Day 27 – Do Something Great.   If you check out two, check out Day 10 – Feel Strong All Week Long.

I've been sharing this lens with some of the people I mentor and they've been finding it helpful.  It's a simple lens for looking at the organizational culture you’re in and helping make sense of what you see:

• Results - This is a focus on results (what, why, outcomes, measures/metrics, tests for success, scorecards, etc.)
• Social - This is a focus on the people (It's who knows who, friends, enemies, politics, and agendas, etc.)
• Process - This is a focus on the process of things (how, charters, roles, policies, procedures, etc.)

You can usually get a sense for what an organization values by looking to the writing on the wall.  The key word here is “valued.”  You need to know what’s valued so that you can tailor your behavior and expectations for the context.  It helps you more effectively adapt your behavior, adjust the situation, or avoid situations with skill.

The ideal scenario is a balance of the results + social + process.   In my experience, I’ve found that usually an organization tends to be out of balance – they lean more towards one end than another.   Here are some of the symptoms you see when an organization is skewed toward one end:

• Too much “Results” focus -- leaves too many wakes and a trail of bodies
• Too much “Social” focus -- turns into the “old-boys club”, “mafia management”, favors, and back-door deals.
• Too much “Process” focus -- comes at the expense of good people, death by 1000 paper cuts.

When you know the context of the org you are in, you know what counts and what does not.  This helps you reshape your expectations and your behavior accordingly which leads to your success.

I’ve been coaching individuals, teams, and leaders on getting results.  Basically, for several years I’ve tested and applied various patterns and practices for improving focus, improving motivation, improving time management, and improving personal productivity.  I’ve also applied these practices to distributed team settings for several years (I’ve lead distributed teams since 2001, working with Argentina, UK, India, etc.).  The system itself is a combination and synthesis of proven practices learned from project management, software management, positive psychology, and sports psychology.  It’s also battle tested in some of the most extreme scenarios.  It’s ultimately a simple system for meaningful results that scales up and down, from individuals to teams and leaders.

At the heat of the system is a story-driven approach or a “3x3” approach:

By using three stories to drive your day, your week, your month, and your year … you identify your most important results, you connect to your values, and you flow value on a regular basis.

I’ve wrapped up and shared this getting results system as a guide.  The book is called Getting Results the Agile Way and you can read the testimonials which includes people inside and outside of Microsoft (it’s generalized to work beyond the Microsoft context.)  It’s one of my most important contributions back to the community … distilling all the of the best of the best of what I’ve learned about getting results from my various mentors, my multiple projects over many years, and from the school of hard knocks.  It’s the playbook I wish somebody gave me when I started.

For this month, I’ve been doing a Monthly Improvement Sprint to help teach you the system and to learn how to improve personal productivity, improve energy, and improve time management.  Basically, I want you to get the system on your side.  Monthly Improvement Sprints are one of the core practices from the system, so I’m effectively, using the system to  teach the system.  Each day, I share another nugget in the form of a post on my personal effectiveness blog.  Each nugget is self-contained so you can pick up from anywhere. 

Here is a description of the project:

• 30 Days of Getting Results

Here are the daily lessons so far on improving personal productivity, time management, focus, and prioritization:

• Day 1 – Take a Tour of Getting Results the Agile Way
• Day 2 – Monday Vision – Use Three Stories to Drive Your Week
• Day 3 – Daily Outcomes – Use Three Stories to Drive Your Day
• Day 4 – Let Things Slough Off
• Day 5 – Hot Spots – Map Out What’s Important
• Day 6 – Friday Reflection – Identify Three Things Going Well and Three Things to Improve
• Day 7 – Setup Boundaries and Buffers
• Day 8 – Dump Your Brain to Free Your Mind
• Day 9 – Prioritize Your Day with MUST, SHOULD, and COULD
• Day 10 – Feel Strong All Week Long
• Day 11 – Reduce Friction and Create Glide Paths for Your Day
• Day 12 – Productivity Personas – Are You are a Starter or a Finisher?
• Day 13 – Triage Your Action Items with Skill
• Day 14 – Carve Out Time for What’s Important
• Day 15 – Achieve a Peaceful Calm State of Mind

Join anytime and pick up from wherever you are.  The most important theme is this:

Be the author of your life and write your story forward … a day at a time, and a moment at a time.

Heuristic evaluation is one of the most common types of expert reviews for Web sites.  It was developed by Jakob Nielsen.  In the book, The Design of Sites, by Douglas K. Van Duyne, James A. Landay, Jason I. Hong, the authors explain heuristic evaluations.

What Is a Heuristic Evaluation
Van Duyne, Landay, and Hong write:

“The basic idea is to have three to five expert judges independently evaluate a site, using a list of usability heuristics or principles.“

How To Perform a Heuristic Evaluation
Van Duyne, Landay, and Hong write:

“In a heuristic evaluation, the judges go through the site, often with a set of sample tasks as a guide, looking for violations of the heuristics.  They note each violation and make a suggestion for fixing it. ... The judges also rate each violation with a level of severity.  Severity levels are usually assessed on the basis of the expected customer impact and frequency of the violation.”

7 Design Principles / Heuristics (The Design of Sites)

1. Be consistent throughout.
2. Offer informative feedback.
3. Rely on recognition over recall.
4. Help customers prevent and recover from errors.
5. Support customer control and freedom.
6. Help frequent customers use accelerators.
7. Strive for aesthetic and minimalist design.

10 Usability Heuristics (Jakob Nielson)

1. Visibility of system status.
2. Match between system and the real world.
3. Use control and freedom.
4. Consistency and standards.
5. Error prevention.
6. Recognition rather than recall.
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use.
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design.
9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors.
10. Help and documentation.

For an explanation of Jakob Nielson’s 10 usability heuristics, see Ten Usability Heuristics.

When it comes to prototyping Web site design, paper prototypes tend to have an advantage.  In the book, The Design of Sites, by Douglas K. Van Duyne, James A. Landay, Jason I. Hong, the authors explain some of the advantages.

Iterate and Explore the Design with Paper Prototypes
Van Duyne, Landay, and Hong write:

"Research shows that designers who work out conceptual ideas on paper tend to iterate more and explore the design space more broadly  whereas designers using computer-based tools tend to take only one idea and work it out in detail."

Low-Fidelity Prototypes Over High-Fidelity Prototypes
Van Duyne, Landay, and Hong write:

“Nearly every one of the designers we have talked to has observed that the discussions is qualitatively different when people are presented with a high-fidelity prototype.  Clients often respond with comments like, 'I do not like your color scheme,' or 'These two buttons need to be aligned correctly.'  When presented with a low-fidelity prototype, however, clients are more like to say something like, 'These labels on the navigation bar do not make sense to me,' or 'You're missing a link to the shopping care here on this page.'  In other words, with low-fidelity prototypes, which lack irrelevant details like color, font, and alignment to distract the eye, people focus on the interaction and on the overall site structure. “

However, it's worth noting that software that emulates paper prototyping can be very helpful.  One example is Balsamic Mockups.

When you’re prototyping sites in the early stage, the three main artifacts are: sitemaps, storyboards, and schematics.  In the book, The Design of Sites, by Douglas K. Van Duyne, James A. Landay, and Jason I. Hong describe the three artifacts as follows:

• Sitemaps - a high-level diagram showing the overall structure of a site.  You use it to reflect an understanding of the information structure or architecture of the site as it's being built, and the navigation structure or flow through the entire site, at the macro level.
• Storyboards - a sequence of Web pages depicting how a customer would accomplish a given task.  You can use storyboards to show important interaction sequences or flows through  a site.
• Schematics - represent the layout of the content that will appear on individual pages.  They don't usually include images, instead they have placeholders and labels.

There’s often confusion over the distinction between information architecture, navigation design, and graphic design.  One of my favorite books that explains what these terms are and the distinctions is the book, The Design of Sites, by Douglas K. Van Duyne, James A. Landay, Jason I. Hong.

Van Duyne, Landay, and Hong define the terms as follows:

• Information Architecture - Identifying, structuring, and presenting groups of related content in a logical manner.
• Navigation Design - Designing methods so that customers can find their way around the information structure.
• Graphic Design - Developing the visual communication of information, using elements such as color, images, typography, and layout.

Note that information and navigation design are typically done before graphic design. 

Also note that the authors mention that there's often a debate in the design community about the boundaries between information architecture and information design.  They point out that information architecture focuses more on structure and language, while information design focuses on presentation and perception.  At the end of the day, the key point is that the two disciplines are about helping customers find, understand, and manage complex information.

It’s also worth knowing the terms “Information Model” and “Data Models” since they often come up in discussions regarding information architecture:

• Information Model -    A model of the concepts, relationships, constraints, rules, and operations for a given domain, and it can provide a sharable, stable, and organized structure of information requirements.  See Information Model (Wikipedia)
• Data Models – Describes how the data are represented and accessed and defines the data elements and relationships among data elements for a given domain.  See Data Model (Wikpedia)

So many Web sites fail at helping users complete tasks or find the information they need in a simple way.   E-Commerce sites like Amazon tend to do a better job than a lot of sites here because they have a tight feedback loop for customers completing their tasks.  Basically, they keep the score on their customer success against their goals.  If customers can’t find what they need, perform their transactions in a fast and simple way, easily give feedback, or provide useful reviews to the community at large, then Amazon fails and customers look for alternatives.  It’s a self-re-enforcing loop and Amazon does a lot of A/B testing to find the most effective way to improve customer success on their Web site.

The good news is  … Success leaves clues in the form of principles, patterns, and practices.

There’s really no reason for Web sites to fail at basic user experiences, given that so many problems are already solved.  Not only are the problems solved, but user experience solutions even have names in the form of patterns.  Better yet, you can check each pattern against live examples on the Web.   It’s effectively a living catalog of success.

Lessons Learned on Site Design
While working on one of my information architecture projects, I analyzed more than 350 Web sites, mostly in the consumer space, to learn interaction patterns, site design, and user experience patterns.  I apply these lessons to many of my CodePlex sites, Wikis, SharePoint sites, and blogs within the bounds of things that I control.   For example, on my personal effectiveness blog Sources of Insight, I regularly test site design principles, user experience, and interaction patterns.  The downside during all of my research is that I didn’t think to name all the patterns I learned.  Because I didn’t name the patterns, it’s difficult to share the lessons learned or to create a simple catalog of the cornerstone concepts.  All is not lost though …

User Experience Patterns for Effective Site Design
When you need to design effective user experiences for Web sites, you don’t have to start from scratch.  You can model from the success patterns of existing sites.  However, distilling all the successful principles, patterns, and practices can be a challenge.  One of my favorite guides that does the distillation for you is The Design of Sites.   It’s a comprehensive catalog of proven practices for designing effective Web sites in terms of customer-centered design, information architecture, interaction patterns, and task-completion.

Patterns Catalog from The Design of Sites
You can actually browse the full catalog of patterns from The Design of Sites book.  I like to be able to scan the patterns in alphabetic order by category, so I put them into a summary table to do so:

Category Patterns Homepage

• HOMEPAGE PORTAL
• UP-FRONT VALUE PROPOSITION

Site Genres

• BLOGS
• COMMUNITY CONFERENCE
• EDUCATIONAL FORUMS
• ENABLING INTRANETS
• GRASSROOTS INFORMATION SITES
• NEWS MOSAIC
• NONPROFITS AS NETWORKS OF HELP
• PERSONAL E-COMMERCE
• SELF-SERVICE GOVERNMENT
• STIMULATING ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
• VALUABLE COMPANY SITES
• WEB APPS THAT WORK

Content

• CONTENT MODULES
• DISTINCITIVE HTML TITLES
• HEADLINES AND BLURBS
• INTERNATIONALIZED AND LOCALIZED CONTENT
• INVERTED-PYRAMID WRITING STYLE
• PAGE TEMPLATES
• PERSONALIZED CONTENT
• PRINTABLE PAGES
• STYLE SHEETS
• WRITING FOR SEARCH ENGINES

E-Commerce Basic

• CLEAN PRODUCT DETAILS
• EASY RETURNS
• ORDER CONFIRMATION AND THANK-YOU
• ORDER SUMMARY
• PAYMENT METHOD
• SHOPPING CART
• QUICK ADDRESS SELECTION
• QUICK-FLOW CHECKOUT
• QUICK SHIPPING METHOD SELECTION

Advanced

• CROSS-SELLING AND UP-SELLING
• FEATURED PRODUCTS
• GIFT GIVING
• MULTIPLE DESTINATIONS
• ORDER TRACKING AND HISTORY
• PERSONALIZED RECOMMENDATIONS
• RECOMMENDATION COMMUNITY

Mobile

• LOCATION-BASED SERVICES
• MOBILE INPUT CONTROLS
• MOBILE SCREEN SIZING

Navigation

• ALPHABETICAL ORGANIZATION
• BROWSABLE CONTENT
• CATEGORY PAGES
• CHRONOLOGICAL ORGANIZATION
• HIERARCHICAL ORGANIZATION
• MULTIPLE WAYS TO NAVIGATE
• POPULARITY-BASED ORGANIZATION
• SITE ACCESSIBILITY
• TASK-BASED ORGANIZATION

Navigation (Simplifying)

• ACTION BUTTONS
• DESCRIPTIVE, LONGER LINK NAMES
• EMBEDDED LINK
• EXTERNAL LINKS
• FAMILIAR LANGUAGE
• HIGH-VISIBILTIY ACTION BUTTONS
• JUMP MENUS
• LOCATION BREAD CRUMBS
• MEANINGFUL ERROR MESSAGES
• OBVIOUS LINKS
• PAGE NOT FOUND
• PERMALINKS
• PREVENTING ERRORS
• UNIFIED BROWSING HIERARCHY
• NAVIGATION BAR
• SITE MAP
• TAB ROWS

Page Layouts

• ABOVE THE FOLD
• CLEAR FIRST READS
• CONSISTENT SIDEBARS OF RELATED CONTENT
• GRID LAYOUT
• EXPANDING SCREEN WIDTH
• FIXED SCREEN WIDTH

Performance

• FAST LOADING CONTENT
• FAST-LOADING IMAGES
• HTML POWER
• LOW NUMBER OF FILES
• REUSABLE IMAGES
• SEPARATE TABLES

Search Relevancy and Speed

• ORGANIZED SEARCH RESULTS
• SEARCH ACTION MODULE
• STRAIGHTFOWARD SEARCH FORMS

Task Completion

• ACCOUNT MANAGMENT
• CLEAR FORMS
• CONTEXT-SENSITIVE HELP
• DIRECT MANIPULATION
• DRILL-DOWN OPTIONS
• FLOATING WINDOWS
• FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
• GUEST ACCOUNT
• PERSISTENT CUSTOMER SESSIONS
• PREDICTIVE INPUT
• PROCESS FUNNEL
• PROGRESS BAR
• SIGN IN/NEW ACCOUNT

Trust and Credibility

• ABOUT US
• E-MAIL NOTIFICATIONS
• E-MAIL SUBSCRIPTIONS
• FAIR INFORMATION PRACTICES
• PRIVACY POLICY
• PRIVACY PREFERENCES
• PREVENTING PHISHING SCAMS
• SECURE CONNECTIONS
• SITE BRANDING

Not only are the names intuitive but when you use the book, you can drill into each pattern for concrete examples, as well as the design philosophy behind it.

Windows Azure Security Notes (PDF) is a collection of our notes and learnings from exploring the cloud security space and working through Windows Azure security scenarios.   Note that this is not a guide and it’s not a Microsoft patterns & practices deliverable.  It’s simply a way to package up, hand-off, and share what we learned during the exploration stage of our patterns & practices Windows Azure Security Guidance project.

The key things you’ll want to explore in the notes are the various application scenarios, the cloud security threats and countermeasures, and the checklist.

Download

• Download Windows Azure Security Notes (PDF)

Contents at a Glance
Here is a quick look at the Windows Azure Security Notes:

• Ch 1 - Our Cloud Security Approach
• Ch 2 - Cloud Security Threats and Countermeasures
• Ch 3 - Design Guidelines for Improving Cloud Security
• Ch 4 - Choosing Web Application Security Architectures
• Ch 5 - Web App Security Scenarios
• Ch 6 - Choosing Web Services Security Architectures
• Ch 7 - Web Services Security Scenarios
• Ch 8 - Choosing Data Security Architectures
• Ch 9 - Data Security Scenarios

Reference

• Security Checklist for Cloud Applications
• Visual Threats for Web Applications
• Visual Threats for Web Services
• Cheat Sheet - Web Application Security Threats and Countermeasures
• Cheat Sheet - Web Services (SOAP) Security Threats and Countermeasures
• Cheat Sheet - Web Services (REST) Security Threats and Countermeasures
• Cheat Sheet - Data Security Threats and Countermeasures
• How To - Use Forms Authentication with Azure Table Storage
• How To - Use Forms Authentication with SQL Azure
• How To - Enable SSL with a Self-Signed Certificate on Windows Azure

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the following folks for sharing their time and expertise along the way:

• External contributors and reviewers: Adam Grocholski; Andy Eunson; Bill Collette; Christopher Seary; Jason Taylor; John Daniels; Juval Lowy; Kevin Lam; Long Le; Michael Smith; Michael Stiefel; Michele Leroux Bustamante; Norman Headlam; Rockford Lhotka; Rudolph Araujo; Sarang Kulkarni; Steven Nagy; Terrance Snyder; Will Clevenger
• Microsoft contributors and reviewers:  Akshay Aggarwal; Alik Levin; Andreas Fuchsberger; Babur Butter; Bharat Shyam; Dave Brankin; Danny Cohen; Diego Dagum; Don Willits; Eugenio Pace; Gabriel Morgan; Jeff Mueller; John Steer; Julian Gonzalez; Mark Curphey; Mohit Srivastava; Pat Filoteo; Rahul Verma; Raul Rojas; Scott Densmore; Sesha Mani; Serena Yeoh; Sriram Krishnan; Stefan Schackow; Steve Marx; Stuart Kwan; Terri Schmidt; Tobin Titus; Varun Sharma; Vidya Vrat Agarwal; Vikram Bhambri; Yale Li

While we’ve been thinking through content strategies and content experiences, one of the phrases I started using to quickly share an idea is “CRUD for Content.”   It’s modeled after CRUD operations for applications – CREATE, READ, UPDATE, DELETE.  It’s simple, but it quickly helps folks relate to the simple operations you can do with content as a user:

• Browse it
• Search it
• Save it
• Share it

Sure there are plenty of variations off of that, but it’s a helpful backdrop to start from when thinking through experiences for finding, searching, saving, and sharing content on MSDN.

At the end of the day, if I’m going to throw my time and energy at something, I want to know that it will make impact.  I also want to make sure that I’m on path, meaning it connects to my values and my purpose, and that I’m using proven practices to make things happen with skill. 

There is a lot of science and wisdom of the ages but it’s tough to pull everything we know about thinking, feeling, and taking action in the most effective way.  Add to that the challenge that we’re all different and we have to apply any principles, patterns, or practices to our specific scenario or context.

Getting Results the Agile Way is a way to pull it all together and get the system on your side.  It’s the system I’ve honed over years and it’s principle-based, which means you can tailor it very easily to yourself or the situation.

To make it easy to learn some of the key ideas, I created three short slide shows to share the three key parts of Agile Results:

• The Rule of Three Slide Show - The Rule of 3 is a simple concept.  Think in three’s.   The Rule of 3 helps us deal with information overload.  It’s a simple way to set limits and chunk things down.
• Hot Spots Slide Show - Hot spots are a simple metaphor for thinking about what’s important.  Imagine your life as a heat map with Hot Spots.  Hot Spots are the key investment areas or choice points that need your attention.  Hot Spots are a lens and each Hot Spot can represent pain or opportunity or pleasure.
• Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, Friday Reflection Slide Show - Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, and Friday Reflection is a simple pattern for weekly results.  It's a way to use stories to make your week more meaningful and spend more time achieving what you want.

For August, I’m putting a strong emphasis on sharpening and honing my execution skills – a tune up of the system.  As part of the process, I decided to make my August theme all about getting results.  You can follow along at 30 Days of Getting Results where each day I will share another nugget from the book of getting results.

"I love it when a plan comes together." -- Colonel John "Hannibal" Smith, The A-Team

Project plans are tough.  No matter how many times you do them – they are always tough.  I’ve been doing them for years, and yet the path from zero to a "good enough" plan is always a lot of work.  But it's worth it.  It's often what separates the failed projects from the successful ones.  When a project fails, you can usually find clues in the plan (or lack of.)

Regardless of how you get there or how you share the plan, the following are essential elements:

• Problem statement
• Customer / who’s it for
• Vision / strategy
• Goals
• Outcomes
• Deliverables
• Timeline
• Tests for success
• Measures / metrics
• Scenarios / stories
• Resource map
• Risks
• A map of the work (work breakdown structure)

In question form, some simple checks are:

• What are the most important outcomes?
• Do we know what good looks like?
• Who's doing what when?
• What's the minimum we need to accomplish or it's not worth it?

It's worth noting that projects often fail because

• Lack of clarity on the goal
• Lack of understanding the work (work breakdown structure)

Interestingly, I know of some executive reviews that boil down to two cutting questions:

• What's the investment?
• What are the results?

It helps answer the higher question -- “Why are we doing this and does it make business sense?”