cathycarleton.com

A Marketer’s Guide To Agile Development – When a Turf War Is Justified

cathy — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 04:51:09 +0000

Marketing and Technology both play for the same team – the organization that employs them. Turf wars between the two departments sap efficiency and impede progress. Turf wars are bad. Turf wars should be avoided. Except in the rare cases when they need to be fought. When’s that?

Agile Humor – What Your PM Really Means

cathy — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 05:15:14 +0000

Your Project Manager is probably very polite. Maybe too polite…

Happy New Year!

cathy — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 01:22:30 +0000

Holidays bring salutations.
Agile process brings iterations.
Wishing you New Years Day felicitations,
Sans headaches from excess libations!

Cheers!
Cathy

Agile Humor – There Goes That Damn Lightbulb Again…

cathy — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 03:31:42 +0000

How many CTO’s does it take to change a lightbulb?

Two. One to screw in a new lightbulb and the other to retroactively declare it a planned outage.

How many help desk engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A Marketer’s Guide To Agile Development – Translated from the Original Marketarian

cathy — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 04:09:25 +0000

Marketarian: “Hot! Hot! Hot! This project is so amazingly important it absolutely has to be squeezed into the next release!”

Geek: “So this project is so amazingly important it has to squeeze out the amazingly important project you came to me with yesterday that absolutely had to be squeezed into the release?”

A Marketer’s Guide to Agile Development – Translated From The Original Geek

cathy — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 03:58:09 +0000

Geek: “That bug? We’re looking into it.”
Marketerian: “That bug fix has been prioritized just behind retrieving the Nerf dart out of the atrium soffit.”

Geek: “Put it on the backlog – perhaps it will be prioritized into the next sprint.”
Marketerian: “Perhaps it will be prioritized in 2013 assuming the Mayan Calendar doesn’t end the sprint early.”

AGILE HUMOR – Top Ten Reasons Why the Zombie Apocalypse Isn’t Agile

cathy — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:11:32 +0000

1. Zombies don’t iterate well.

2. A zombie can declare a project dead and move on.

3. Scrums aren’t productive because the answer to every question is the same. “Brains.”

4. Pair programming…well, trust me, it just doesn’t work out.

A Marketer’s Guide to Agile Development – Requirements

cathy — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 02:13:34 +0000

CRANIAL REQUIREMENTS

You’re too busy to sit down with the BA. You’ve blown off the last four scrums. You haven’t returned the PM’s calls. You can never remember how to get on that Wiki thing. Yet you whine, because the Dev team doesn’t build what you want? Developers are hired for their coding chops, not their clairvoyance. Jot it down, friend. When the requirements they must have to start coding are still in your head, what do you expect them to do? Drill a hole in your cranium to pry them free? They can’t do that. But they’ve thought
about it.

Agile Humor – The Definition Of Done

cathy — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 01:17:27 +0000

The CMO: When the new functionality reduces the bounce rate from 40% to 4%.

The CIO: Done? When’s the release, 11:45? 11:46.

The PR Director: 11:45? I told ClickZ and TechCrunch it went live last Tuesday.

THE CIO/CMO RELATIONSHIP – A Marketer’s Guide to Agile Development

cathy — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 18:59:04 +0000

Some observations from the Forrester CIO/CMO Conference last week:

A COMBO CIO/CMO – LONELY AT THE TOP, BUT AT LEAST HE HAS EACH OTHER

Ponder the possibilities of one person serving as both CIO and CMO of the company. I have heard of two examples of executives doing this so far, one of whom I met at the conference. Leadership of both Technology and Marketing is a formidable reponsibility to shoulder on one’s own, but it does yield some advantages. For one thing, if you need to bogart some budget dollars, you don’t have to strongarm or cajole your counterpart. You just reach into the other pocket.