Pre-conference workshop

UX Management: developing and growing yourself and a team of user experience professionals

Margaret Hanley

22/03/2007 (Thursday). Full day.

Janice Fraser the ex-CEO of Adaptive Path in a recent podcast describes management and leadership as having two parts

1. Creating favourable circumstances where managers can do things like providing buildings and offices, and organising and structuring a workplace
2. Activating or enabling people by providing them with the confidence and know-how and trust that they can do the work required

Many people who move into this role within a User Experience (UX) or Information Architecture group are left to work out by themselves ways to lead, manage and develop both their team and their practice. We are not given the guidance on how to create those favourable circumstances that Janice describes or shown how to “enable” our staff to design and develop the web site or products that we are tasked to create.

This course helps provide managers, at whatever stage of their career, the ability to put in place procedures and environments for development. The course will also help managers to work out Personal Development Plans with team members; identify the correct skills mix for a team; talk through common problems as a group and remember that they need to take time for themselves and their development.

The workshop is made up of four parts; three focusing on the development of the team, the individual and the manager and the last focusing on the development and leadership of the UX practice.

The course will be taught as a combination of lecture, exercises and discussion.

A number of “management challenges” will be explored, from non-performing staff to allocation; from dealing with becoming a manager - not a practitioner, to realising that the organisation cannot provide senior practitioners with a continued development path. In this course, a number of case studies based on those challenges will be provided that the participants will firstly discuss in small groups and then discuss as a whole group identifying ways to address the problems.

As well as questions being taken throughout the workshop, there will also be question times at the end of each session. This gives participants a chance to write down their burning questions throughout the course, which can be reviewed and answered at the end of the day.

There will also provide as a supplement to the core notes for the course

• A list of links to key management books for UX professionals
• A list of web sites and discussion groups for UX management issues
• Documents that can be used as templates for development like Personal Development Plans, Skills audits and Interview questions and exercises