I attended a seminar from VanUE tonight hosted at the Habaneros office downtown. It was a talk given by Paul Sherman, Director of User-Centered Design & Usability at Sage Software and also Vice-President of the Usability Professionals’ Association, on the topic of “Partnering With Change Agents in Your Organization: A Story About Collaborating With Six Sigma Practitioners To Make a Better UI”.

It’s always interesting to hear about the “battles won” when it comes to user-centered design. It would have been interesting to hear more about the team dynamics that emerge when you take a very business-centric process model such as Six-Sigma and combine this with UCD. Nonetheless, there was a lot of useful information to learn from.

Some of what I tought were the key tips were:
1. Collaborate: find natural partners, leverage your strengths, and present a united front to stakeholders
2. Build the business case
3. Manage the project well
4. Get over yourself (where “yourself” refers to “you” as a UCD practitioner — which I really like, because there really IS a tendency for those of us who pride ourselves on understanding user needs to be well, proud of what we think we know…)
5. Learn to influence
6. Be humble, respectful…and tenaciously persistent.

There were also some insightful comments made throughout the talk and the night about the interplay of different disciplines. One of the observations Paul had shared was that “very few of us (“us” as in UCD practitioners) can implement as well as we can research, evaluate & redesign”. Similarly, at another point it was also mentioned that having strong project management skills, in fact having skills grown out of formal training, can also be tremendously beneficial.

Indeed, this is where the collaboration and partnering becomes incredibly valuable. It can be very hard to be all things to all people. But it sounds like if you can do that, you’ll be a very valuable person to any UCD team.