Natalie Hanson

Tag: lean

  • The Handbook of Business Anthropology

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    Natalie Hanson
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    Today I got a first glimpse at the announcement for the Handbook of Business Anthropology, edited by Rita M. Denny and Patricia L. Sunderland.  It will be available in May, but they are accepting pre-orders now with a 50% discount.  You can review the Table of Contents, and if you’re interested in buying your own…

  • Agile – Implications for UX Research

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    This Part 4 of a 4-Part series on Agile. As I mentioned earlier, one of the pleasures of working in both Lean and Agile working environments is that it’s extremely flexible, adaptable, and emergent.  There is lots of room for experimentation!  However, that also means that the summary in my prior posts is by no means exhaustive. It…

  • Principles & Practices of Agile

    Principles & Practices of Agile

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    This Part 3 of a 4-Part series on Agile. The Agile Manifesto resulted in a set of twelve principles which provide further guidance on how the goals of the Manifesto will be achieved, including early and frequent delivery of software, regular face-to-face collaboration between business stakeholders and developers, and fostering a self-organizing and motivating environment for developers to…

  • A brief overview of Agile

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    This Part 2 of a 4-Part series on Agile. The purpose of this post is provide a bit of background on what Agile is and the conditions under which it emerged.  Both this post and those that follow are targeted at UX professionals and researchers of all kinds who may be encountering these ways of working for the first…

  • Recognizing Agile

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    This Part 1 of a 4-Part series on Agile. Here is my list of the Top ways to know you’re working in an Agile environment: You hear people talking about Sprints, but no-one appears to be running around the office. You hear references to scrum, but people seem more interested in American football than rugby. You hear people…

  • Lean & User Experience, again

    Lean & User Experience, again

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    Over the years I’ve written a few posts about the relationship between Lean and User Experience.  But in looking back on those, I don’t feel like I ever did as thorough of a job as I would like in connecting the two domains.  So when I was asked last year to contribute to a new book…

  • Recognizing Lean

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    Here is my list of the Top 7 ways to know you’re working in a Lean environment: You keep hearing references to Lean that don’t refer to Cuisine or cuts of meat. You keep hearing Japanese terms like kaizen or muda. People are talking about Flow, but they are not referencing the positive psychologist Csikszentmihalyi.…

  • User Experience & Lean

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    Over the past few years I’ve written a few times about SAP’s internal transformation efforts.  We just pre-announced record Q2 results yesterday (35%+ growth in all regions – go SAP!), and so I thought it fitting to return to the topics of growth and change and talk a little bit about the good things that…

  • Greener, happier commute

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    This longish blog post describes how SAP could reduce it’s carbon footprint, while achieving the company’s goals of improved employee innovation, satisfaction, and productivity. Overview One of the gems in SAP’s current strategy is the company’s focus on sustainability.  I have been working for SAP for over twelve years, and for the most part I…

  • End-user or business stakeholder?

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    [This is a modified version of a post I made internally on SAP’s Lean Transformation blog.  I’ve removed a few of the details about sales compensation, the process diagram, and the system screenshots.] One of the significant challenges we face in the User Experience work we do at SAP is working with business stakeholders who…

  • Voice of the Customer

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    [As mentioned in an earlier post, SAP has embarked on a transformation journey with a focus on Lean principles.  Due to the contributions of my User Experience team into several of SAP’s COO-sponsored projects (COO Programs & Projects, or COO P/Ps for short), I have been invited to blog inside SAP about our journey to…

  • Putting Lean in context

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    [NOTE: This post was originally titled Deconstructing Lean. I renamed Putting Lean in context on 3/26/09, because the post got so long I never got around to the deconstruction of the Lean concepts. That’s coming in a future post, so stay tuned!  Natalie] When I first conducted ethnographic research at SAP as part of my…