Written by Alora on December 14, 2009 – 11:58 am
As a business owner, part of my job every day is to stay on top of the news — particularly as it relates to both my community and my industry. Once upon a time, that would have been courtesy of a subscription to a local business journal or a few targeted trade publications. But these [...]
Written by Alora on July 21, 2009 – 12:55 pm
I often find myself frustrated dealing with people who sell themselves as “high level strategists.” I am not talking about consultants who are hired to help hone and build out a strategic vision for an organization; nor am I talking about internal specialists who are dedicated to researching and advising on strategic direction. What I [...]
Written by Alora on June 30, 2009 – 4:36 pm
I’ve had an interesting few weeks. My husband and I have been dealing with a lot of things at home, hence my absence from blogging for much of the past month, and I have started a new project with the New Media (a.k.a. “web”) team at KXAN-TV here in Austin. Between getting settled into the [...]
Written by Alora on May 6, 2009 – 7:41 am
I had an interesting conversation yesterday after I gave a presentation. I was talking about the necessary functions — particularly when it comes to communications, documentation, change management and entry/exit criteria — of project management in an Agile development process. The “interesting” conversation I had afterward was because one of the attendees (in a private [...]
Written by Alora on April 21, 2009 – 11:41 am
It’s been years since the evangelism for Agile development started truly gaining momentum. Super sexy buzzphrases phrases like “reduce time to market,” “improved ROI,” and “lower development costs” have all been invoked to support the case for adopting an Agile methodology over the old-school Waterfall approach. The fact is, most experienced professionals have lived through [...]
Written by Alora on April 15, 2009 – 7:03 pm
As noted in my previous blog post on this topic, the first quality I believe is necessary in a great speaker is for them to be educational in some way. In my recent bout of conferences, I have seen speakers who fall all over the quality spectrum, but the ones that were truly good ensured [...]
Written by Alora on April 13, 2009 – 4:16 pm
Over the past few months, I’ve been more closely aligning myself with the Enterprise 2.0 community of professionals. Though I have been in technology for my entire career, and in Web 2.0 for at least part of that time, and implementing Enterprise 2.0 solutions quite extensively in recent years, I had not previously made a [...]
Written by Alora on April 13, 2009 – 1:49 pm
At South by Southwest, Brazen Careerist author and CEO Penelope Trunk was quite emphatic that, when starting a new business, having a geographically distributed team is rarely possible. She said this on her panel, as well as again when we spoke in person. She was a strong advocate of the notion that, for the first [...]
Written by Alora on March 30, 2009 – 9:27 pm
It’s probably a weird thing for a vocal atheist to quote, but there is something about the famous prayer that has been resonating with me more and more lately. Well, maybe not the “God” part of it, but the recognition part. Grant me strength to accept the things that I can’t change, the courage to [...]
Written by Alora on March 30, 2009 – 9:23 pm
A year ago, Austin-based Convio launched a company blog: Connection Cafe. Unlike so many other company blogs, Convio decided to take a slightly different approach with the hope of gaining slightly different results. While many organizations opt for a CEO blog — particularly companies with in-demand CEO’s, like Convio’s Gene Austin — or a blog [...]
