Beyond Requirements

Author: Kent J. McDonald
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
ISBN: 0133039854
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 502

Book Description
Satisfy Stakeholders by Solving the Right Problems, in the Right Ways In Beyond Requirements, Kent J. McDonald shows how applying analysis techniques with an agile mindset can radically transform analysis from merely “gathering and documenting requirements” to an important activity teams use to build shared understanding. First, McDonald discusses the unique agile mindset, reviews the key principles underlying it, and shows how these principles link to effective analysis. Next, he puts these principles to work in four wide-ranging and thought-provoking case studies. Finally, he drills down on a full set of techniques for effective agile analysis, using examples to show how, why, and when they work. McDonald’s strategies will teach you how to understand stakeholders’ needs, identify the best solution for satisfying those needs, and build a shared understanding of your solution that persists throughout the product lifecycle. He also demonstrates how to iterate your analysis, taking advantage of what you learn throughout development, testing, and deployment so that you can continuously adapt, refine, and improve. Whether you’re an analysis practitioner or you perform analysis tasks as a developer, manager, or tester, McDonald’s techniques will help your team consistently find and deliver better solutions. Coverage includes Core concepts for analysis: needs/ solutions, outcome/output, discovery/delivery Adapting Lean Startup ideas for IT projects: customer delivery, build–measure–learn, and metrics Structuring decisions, recognizing differences between options and commitments, and overcoming cognitive biases Focusing on value: feature injection, minimum viable products, and minimum marketable features Understanding how analysis flows alongside your project’s lifecycle Analyzing users: mapping stakeholders, gauging commitment, and creating personas Understanding context: performing strategy (enterprise) analysis Clarifying needs: applying decision filters, assessing project opportunities, stating problems Investigating solutions: impact and story mapping, collaborative modeling, and acceptance criteria definition Kent J. McDonald uncovers better ways of delivering value. His experience includes work in business analysis, strategic planning, project management, and product development in the financial services, health insurance, performance marketing, human services, nonprofit, and automotive industries. He has a BS in industrial engineering from Iowa State University and an MBA from Kent State University. He is coauthor of Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility (Addison-Wesley, 2009).

Beyond Obamacare

Author: James S. House
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610448499
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Book Description
Health care spending in the United States today is approaching 20 percent of GDP, yet levels of U.S. population health have been declining for decades relative to other wealthy and even some developing nations. How is it possible that the United States, which spends more than any other nation on health care and insurance, now has a population markedly less healthy than those of many other nations? Sociologist and public health expert James S. House analyzes this paradoxical crisis, offering surprising new explanations for how and why the United States has fallen into this trap. In Beyond Obamacare, House shows that health care reforms, including the Affordable Care Act, cannot resolve this crisis because they do not focus on the underlying causes for the nation’s poor health outcomes, which are largely social, economic, environmental, psychological, and behavioral. House demonstrates that the problems of our broken health care and insurance system are interconnected with our large and growing social disparities in education, income, and other conditions of life and work, and calls for a complete reorientation of how we think about health. He concludes that we need to move away from our misguided and almost exclusive focus on biomedical determinants of health, and to place more emphasis on addressing social, economic, and other inequalities. House’s review of the evidence suggests that the landmark Affordable Care Act of 2010, and even universal access to health care, are likely to yield only marginal improvements in population health or in reducing health care expenditures. In order to rein in spending and improve population health, we need to refocus health policy from the supply side—which makes more and presumably better health care available to more citizens—to the demand side—which would improve population health though means other than health care and insurance, thereby reducing need and spending for health care. House shows how policies that provide expanded educational opportunities, more and better jobs and income, reduced racial-ethnic discrimination and segregation, and improved neighborhood quality enhance population health and quality of life as well as help curb health spending. He recommends redirecting funds from inefficient supply-side health care measures toward broader social initiatives focused on education, income support, civil rights, housing and neighborhoods, and other reforms, which can be paid for from savings in expenditures for health care and insurance. A provocative reconceptualization of health in America, Beyond Obamacare looks past partisan debates to show how cost-efficient and effective health policies begin with more comprehensive social policy reforms.

Beyond Information

Author: Tom Stonier
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1447118359
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
Preamble The emergence of machine intelligence during the second half of the twentieth century is the most important development in the evolution of this planet since the origin of life two to three thousand million years ago. The emergence of machine intelligence within the matrix of human society is analogous to the emergence, three billion years ago, of complex, self-replicating molecules within the matrix of an energy-rich molecular soup - the first step in the evolution of life. The emergence of machine intelligence within a human social context has set into motion irreversible processes which will lead to an evolutionary discontinuity. Just as the emergence of "Life" represented a qualitatively different form of organisation of matter and energy, so will pure "Intelligence" represent a qualitatively different form of organisation of matter, energy and life. The emergence of machine intelligence presages the progression of the human species as we know it, into a form which, at present, we would not recognise as "human". As Forsyth and Naylor (1985) have pointed out: "Humanity has opened two Pandora's boxes at the same time, one labelled genetic engineering, the other labelled knowledge engineering. What we have let out is not entirely clear, but it is reasonable to hazard a guess that it contains the seeds of our successors".

Beyond Sticky Notes

Author: Kelly Ann McKercher
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780648787501
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
This book includes a deep-dive into the mindsets and methods of Co-design. It draws on the authors' experience across Australia and New Zealand, as well as design, trauma-informed practice, collective learning and social movements.

Getting Beyond Better

Author: Roger L. Martin
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
ISBN: 1633690695
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
Who drives transformation in society? How do they do it? In this compelling book, strategy guru Roger L. Martin and Skoll Foundation President and CEO Sally R. Osberg describe how social entrepreneurs target systems that exist in a stable but unjust equilibrium and transform them into entirely new, superior, and sustainable equilibria. All of these leaders--call them disrupters, visionaries, or changemakers--develop, build, and scale their solutions in ways that bring about the truly revolutionary change that makes the world a fairer and better place. The book begins with a probing and useful theory of social entrepreneurship, moving through history to illuminate what it is, how it works, and the nature of its role in modern society. The authors then set out a framework for understanding how successful social entrepreneuars actually go about producing transformative change. There are four key stages: understanding the world; envisioning a new future; building a model for change; and scaling the solution. With both depth and nuance, Martin and Osberg offer rich examples and personal stories and share lessons and tools invaluable to anyone who aspires to drive positive change, whatever the context. Getting Beyond Better sets forth a bold new framework, demonstrating how and why meaningful change actually happens in the world and providing concrete lessons and a practical model for businesses, policymakers, civil society organizations, and individuals who seek to transform our world for good.

Sdlc 3.0: Beyond a Tacit Understanding of Agile: Towards the Next Generation of Software Engineering

Author: Mark Kennaley
Publisher: Fourth Medium Press
ISBN: 9780986519406
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Book Description
The world of software development methodology has become a bit of a cottage industry. Philosophical divisions and dogma laced with branding and driven by profit motive are commonplace. Re-invention replaces integration due to a lack of collaboration. A pragmatic perspective however would be to leverage all past experience in context when approaching modern software engineering challenges. For example, issues faced by the Agile community related to agility at scale and technical debt have already been addressed before by other communities. SDLC 3.0 represents the rationalization of modern software engineering methods into a Complex Adaptive System of practices. It leverages Control Systems Engineering theory to explain Agile beyond a tacit and anecdotal basis such that the pace of modern practice adoption can accelerate. With "more for less" now being as important as "being agile," it articulates blueprints of the Lean IT Enterprise. Who should read this book: . - If you are an Agilist and tired of having to pause when asked the question "What is Agile.." - If you are a Traditionalist and you would like to learn why Agile is a better approach - if someone would just explain "why it works" in a credible way.. - If you are an Executive and you are faced with a fiduciary duty to influence IT investment outcomes. A blueprint of a Lean IT Enterprise is valuable to you. . - If you are a Researcher and you are tired of fads and brands, and want to ground Agile in applied science and rigorous mathematics. . - If you are a Methodologist and you believe that the cottage industry must stop, and that we must get past fragmentation and tacit or anecdotal evidence.. - If you are a Practitioner and you can't afford to pontificate on which "pure" wholesale method to leverage when faced with the "realities on the ground." . - If you are an independent thinker, a centrist. - If you are a pragmatist. Winner 2010 Dr. Dobbs Jolt Productivity Award

Beyond E-Learning

Author: Marc J. Rosenberg
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 9780787982881
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Book Description
A follow-up to his best-selling E-Learning, Beyond E-Learning explains the most current thinking on how organizations learn and apply what they know to be successful, and explores the increasingly important role that technology plays, not as an end in itself but as a vital means to get there. The book also provides a clear path for helping to integrate learning—including e-learning—knowledge management, and performance support, and will help training professionals and the organizations they serve go beyond common myths and misconceptions about training and e-learning, focus training/learning activities directly on organizational know-how, and implement a framework that can (at last) be a catalyst for true organizational learning.

Mankind Beyond Earth

Author: Claude A. Piantadosi
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231531036
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 383

Book Description
Seeking to reenergize Americans' passion for the space program, the value of further exploration of the Moon, and the importance of human beings on the final frontier, Claude A. Piantadosi presents a rich history of American space exploration and its major achievements. He emphasizes the importance of reclaiming national command of our manned program and continuing our unmanned space missions, and he stresses the many adventures that still await us in the unfolding universe. Acknowledging space exploration's practical and financial obstacles, Piantadosi challenges us to revitalize American leadership in space exploration in order to reap its scientific bounty. Piantadosi explains why space exploration, a captivating story of ambition, invention, and discovery, is also increasingly difficult and why space experts always seem to disagree. He argues that the future of the space program requires merging the practicalities of exploration with the constraints of human biology. Space science deals with the unknown, and the margin (and budget) for error is small. Lethal near-vacuum conditions, deadly cosmic radiation, microgravity, vast distances, and highly scattered resources remain immense physical problems. To forge ahead, America needs to develop affordable space transportation and flexible exploration strategies based in sound science. Piantadosi closes with suggestions for accomplishing these goals, combining his healthy skepticism as a scientist with an unshakable belief in space's untapped—and wholly worthwhile—potential.

Beyond Sound

Author: Scott L. Phillips
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019983766X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Beyond Sound is a must-read for anyone who loves music technology and wants to build a career in this competitive, fast-paced world. Author Scott L. Phillips draws on his seventeen-year career as a technology trainer and educator, and his extensive network of music technology professionals, to present an intimate view of the exciting world of music technology. The book offers an in-depth consideration of music technology education, including looks at specific programs and a clear explanation of different types of degrees. Moreover, it provides practical guidance on career preparation, including how to get a great internship, how to land that first job, and how to make connections and move up in a variety of businesses from recording to television and film to video games. And Phillips brings stories from successful professionals, who share their experiences, advice, and suggestions.

Information Appliances and Beyond

Author: Eric Bergman
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
ISBN: 9781558606005
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Book Description
A growing focus on product usability is creating demand for usability specialists and prompting companies of all kinds to hire developers and designers who are well versed in this way of thinking. This book takes a look at the unique usability issues surround information appliances and other interactive consumer products.