Blog posts by Rick Arter | Arter Kirkwood & Associates

Rick is Managing Director of Arter Kirkwood & Associates, a developer of custom mobile apps for business. His areas of expertise include strategy, project and program management and all things lean and agile. He is a Scrum Master and is certified in User Experience (UX) by the Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g).

Maintaining a focus on the look and feel of content

April 21, 2015 / by Rick Arter / Uncategorized / 0 comments

The creation, publishing and ongoing governance of content is an extremely important component of user experience (UX) design. Not only from an editorial standpoint but also from a visual and interaction design standpoint. Often, editorial dominates the governance agenda once content has been created and published. The governance of the look and feel of that […]

Sprint Retrospectives: making them impactful and meaningful

March 17, 2015 / by Rick Arter / Uncategorized / 0 comments

I’m stating the obvious when I say the first step to making Sprint Retrospectives impactful and meaningful is holding them in the first place. Many projects go straight from Sprint Review to Sprint Planning for the next Sprint (undertaking release activities in between, aside). Sprint Retrospectives seem to be ‘one of those things’ often forgotten […]

Keep moving! …Iterating to results through an effective time box process

February 15, 2015 / by Rick Arter / Uncategorized / 0 comments

Process is part of any endeavour, whether conscious or not. The key is to navigate those processes and steps as effortlessly and efficiently as possible to achieve a goal or benefit. Lumbering through or lingering around process steps, or worse yet, stopping at them, delays the goal and intended benefits. Those delays can be disastrous. […]

Never too late for user research and usability testing

January 2, 2015 / by Rick Arter / Uncategorized / 0 comments

We’ve heard countless times from those in the user experience (UX) community dreading that call from nervous managers seeking assurance that the App they have laboured over and is near ready for release will in fact be useful and useable. Understandably, by then it’s generally considered to be too late. UX considerations should play a […]

Build-Measure-Learn…and quite possibly Pivot?

December 1, 2014 / by Rick Arter / Uncategorized / 0 comments

We have been captivated lately by The Lean Startup movement and the mainstream traction it is gaining, particularly in organizations you would not consider to be a startup, such as General Electric. It doesn’t take long, however, to appreciate that these well established corporations experience many of the same pressures and challenges startups do when […]

Analysis-Paralysis: When Strategy Becomes Crippling

November 5, 2014 / by Rick Arter / Uncategorized / 0 comments

We have an extensive amount of experience developing information technology strategies for organizations that reaches back long before our exploits into the mobile application development space. Strategies of all size and scale: everything from broad organizational strategies to lower level program-specific strategies and now to mobile application development strategies (helping organizations determine what mobile Apps […]

Successful partnerships…and when they are not

August 20, 2014 / by Rick Arter / Uncategorized / 0 comments

When striking out on your own to establish a name for yourself, should you resist or embrace partnering with other organizations to deliver your service? The fear being that you might dilute your presence (your name) in the marketplace. There’s definite pros and cons to either answer but on the balance, and based upon our […]

A Place for Traditional Project Planning?

July 15, 2014 / by Rick Arter / Uncategorized / 0 comments

In this age of agility and ‘getting things done’ over ‘talking about getting things done’, it’s often asked if there is still a place for traditional planning, particularly at the outset of a project or consulting engagement. For us, the answer is yes. We find it particularly useful to commission each project or consulting engagement […]

Beyond Break-Fix: Keeping Company Developed Apps Relevant and Prevalent

June 16, 2014 / by Rick Arter / Uncategorized / 1 comment

Most think of managing company mobile Apps beyond their initial development as simply keeping them running, defect-free. But what about how relevant those mobile applications are to those using them? And are those using them representative of the target market, i.e. audience and size, whether those Apps are for internal or external company use? Apps […]

Can you still be agile when your customers cannot?

May 19, 2014 / by Rick Arter / Uncategorized / 0 comments

The short answer is “yes”. Definitely, yes!! We follow an agile approach to mobile software development (Scrum, in particular). Occasionally, we find ourselves in situations where our customers are not able to be agile. The reasons vary but more often than not relate to established internal processes that must be followed, whether that’s willingly or […]

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