Gerette has hit the nail on the head

Thank you both John and Chris for your thoughtfulness.
Hopefully, as the hours and days go by, you will all continue to feel better about this “Brave New World” and come to embrace it ever further.

URID will, of course, continue to live among the ongoing collaboration of all of us that Erika will be coordinating—and URID.org will be an essential part of that.
And, Chris is exactly right that each of you will continue to be usability professionals, and you will not only be able to, you are expected to, make a greater impact by working from a position that gives you greater control over the product development lifecycle.

It has been—and I expect it to continue to be—a source of great personal joy and pride to work with all of you, individually and collectively. I’m very proud of each of your professional development, professional accomplishment, and contribution to Fannie Mae’s success, and I anticipate continuing to have reason to feel that way far into the future.

Thanks,

Bill

After sleeping on it...

Well, the shock has begun to sink in, and after some thinking, some amusing distractions (i.e., The Daily Show), and singing along — loudly — to Wilco I’m feeling a good deal better about what John accurately describes as a Brave New World.

A few random thoughts:

• Many of us have often joked that URID sounded either like the name of a disease or a Balkan nation (as in URIDstan). Well, in keeping with the nation metaphor, I think it’s appropriate to think of URID’s future as a loose confederation of states that will continue to work closely together to achieve common goals.

• In many ways, URID.org becomes more important in this brave new world. Because we will be decentralized, there is an even greater need for a single place where we can exchange and archive information.

• For me, at least, the key to making peace with this new world is to continue to see myself as a usability professional who will be able to make a greater impact by working from a position that gives me greater control over the product development lifecycle. I think a big part of my reaction yesterday was in thinking that this identity as an expert was going to disappear and that we would just be assimilated into the product management machine. I now realize that this doesn’t have to happen.

A final comment. When I was talking to Gerette last night about the fact that one of the goals of these changes was to bring a more user-centered design perspective to the product/project management process, she said “It’s like Usability Eye for the Project Guys”. I laughed, but she said — quite accurately it turns out — “I guarantee you’ll be using that line at some point tomorrow.”

Jessica's Schedule

Again, it seemed that rather than random emails it might be better to keep this all in one place.

Thursday Sept. 25 & Friday Sept. 26 - Vacation

Monday, Sept. 30 - OUT in the AM, in ~1PM
Tuesday, Sept. 31 - OUT in the AM, in ~ 1PPM
Wednesday, Oct. 1 - in the AM, OUT ~3PM
Thursday, Oct. 2 - in the AM, OUT ~ 3PM
Friday, Oct. 3 - in the AM, OUT ~3PM

If you need me while I’m out, please call on h: 703.938.2777 or c: 202.549.1508.

Official Repository for Wireframes?

I wrote an email and then thought…hey! I could use urid.org!! Here goes…

I spoke w/Rich today re: what the issue is w/TWiKi & Visio, and it seems that the problem may be CVS. At least for DO/DU, CVS is the official repository for ALL documentation (according to Rich). So…the wireframes were checked into CVS and then Leon created a link for TWiKi so that the document could be viewed in CVS from TWiKi. Rich said that when he tries to access the doc from TWiKi his system hangs. He’s going to talk w/Leon and see what the issue is and if it can be fixed.

Assuming it can, this raises at least one question—where should the repository of record be UR+ID docs? Should we try and get all teams to agree that TWiKi is the place? Or should we use established repositories where they exist and TWiKi where they don’t? And provide a link in TWiKi to the CVS docs when that is the repository of record?