Bermon Painter

Somewhere, a project is failing. It may be your project and you aren’t even aware yet. More than likely the project isn’t failing because it’s difficult, or the budget ran out, or because there wasn’t a market fit. The project is failing because of people. People are anything but stable and introduce communication problems, staffing problems, politics, disenchantment with the client or stakeholders, and often result in lack of motivation on projects. It doesn’t matter what methodology you use to scope, design, and implement a project if you’re unable to deal with the underlying people issues because people are hard and people are what cause project failures.

5 things:
1. The irrational, impulsive, and emotionally driven challenges people introduce on projects
2. Overcoming different communication styles
3. Guidelines to effectively handle conversations
4. Communication techniques to help overcome people problems
5. Understand how to overcome biases and reduce project failures

Finding highly-qualified professionals and then managing them successfully is one of the most difficult tasks leaders face. Just a small number of poor performers can bring down a team and impact delivering a great product. On top of poor hiring practices, when leaders fail to inspire, enable and provide an environment where their team can collaborate and thrive, they will consistently produce mediocre results.

In this sessions you’ll discover:

* how to successfully research potential candidates;
* writing effective job descriptions;
* recruiting, interviewing, and hiring techniques;
* keeping recruits interested, growing, and contributing back to the team;
* leadership techniques to help you be more effective

A style guide is a great collaboration tool to bridge communication gaps between business stakeholders, designers, and developers. Static or living style guides are a great place to start but become increasingly difficult to maintain because style guide generators are dependent on parsing comments in CSS in order to generate HTML patterns and documentation. In short, there is no single source of truth for the HTML leading to maintainability problems. In this session we will discover creating a truly reusable module by creating a pattern API.

Five things audience members will learn:

1. modular template patterns
2. dependency management and versioning per module
3. turning modules into the “single source of truth” through a module API
4. how to call the API to create a style guide
5. how to call the API to create templates and pages within an application

Technologies used:
Node, Angular, React, Component, Sass (Libsass)

One of the largest problems that we face on teams and within organizations is the illusion that communication has taken place. In most cases, when we are faced with the necessity to confront emotionally or politically risky issues we tread lightly in order to avoid hurting feelings. Conflict plays an important and necessary role in the design process. Healthy conflict increases trust, creates effective dialog and improves collaboration.

During this session we will discuss examples and key skills that will help you:

- argue effectively while maintaining the correct level of candor and respect
- approach difficult issues like dealing with an unrealistic scope/schedule, holding teammates accountable when they perform poorly, or stakeholders that aren't providing sufficient leadership for a project
- create successful conflicts that get relevant information in the open
- encourage teammates to effectively share their opinions and articulate theories

What is the best way to think through challenging problems, recognize areas for innovation, generate market opportunities, and enrich customer value? Design thinking is a creative problem-solving methodology that helps transform complex problems into valuable opportunities by putting the customers’ needs first. By being people centric, design thinking refocuses our efforts on the customer (internal or external) and offers enormous potential for innovation and competitive advantage in our solutions. 
 
In this hands-on workshop you’ll discover:
* The fundamentals of the design thinking methodology
* The fallacy of innovation
* Ways to bring greater collaboration among business, technology, and design teams
* Tactical exercises that you can apply to your client projects to get to the root of their challenges to help craft the right solutions to the right problems
* Practical methods to integrate design thinking activities into the full development lifecycle