Steve Neiderhauser

How to Improve Your Drawing Skills

Companies are seeking people with drawing skills for several reasons.

For one, Design Thinking uses drawing to create early prototypes. Think storyboards or visual diagrams. Graphic facilitation also requires some level of drawing skills.

And years ago, we entered the Age of the Artist so it is now important to artistically treat your work.

Finally, drawing helps you balance the body and the mind.

On Jen Reviews blog, Jen shares a well-written article that gives tips and tricks to improve your drawing skills. She mixes an intoxicating cocktail of brain science, research references, and practical exercises that will improve your drawing.

Take a look and let me know what you think.

Three Laws of Business Agility

In this presentation about business agility, Steve Denning describes the three laws of Agile.

1. The law of the customer
2. The law of the small team
3. The law of the network

Start with Subject and Verb

If you desire to improve your writing skills you may want to study Roy Peter Clark's book Writing Tools. The author provides 55 practical tools that you can add to your writing toolbox.

His first lesson advises us to start sentences with a subject and verb and the rest of the sentence, no matter how long, will follow and be easier to comprehend.

This medium article goes into detail about Clark's rule, write subject and verb first.

Scrum is an Object-Oriented Framework

When Jeff Sutherland says Scrum is a framework based on object-oriented principles, I don't think many people really understand what that means.

He designed Scrum using object-oriented(OO) principles in the same fashion as Java, C#, or Objective-C. OO languages use modular design, inheritance, and reuse. Apple's Core OS Layer is an example of an OO framework.

Sutherland did not include technical practices in Scrum to keep Scrum modular and loosely coupled. This design decision allows Scrum to be reused by business and other disciplines.

For software products, it's important to include technical practices so we maintain quality and deliver working software by the end of the sprint.