Managing challenging deliverables:

For some reason, perhaps the panic of year end budgets, the second half of the year is almost always crazy busy for us with internationalization services projects. In each of the last three years, our late summer and fall workloads have taught us how to efficiently operate at new capacities. While a fat backlog of work may sound great, you can’t let quality suffer and you have to do the work and hit milestones. The lessons are not rocket science, but require a daily focus on what’s most important. Top three points would be:

1. Have good developers – they should be resourceful and enjoy aligning and working with one another. Camaraderie should be fed with good pizza and coffee (our office is located directly above the best pizza joint and coffee shop in Boulder).

2. Manage your milestones – While I wouldn’t call us an Agile methodology shop (Agile typically wouldn’t often line up well in terms of parallel development with our clients’ respective development teams), we do break down all our work into very clear smaller milestones. Usually there are several milestones per developer per week. This helps us manage our success by keeping on track with day to day tasks, as well as watching the broader release goals. We know if we’re flirting with trouble well ahead of an event or crises, and then individual developers can step in and help team members get through trouble spots. Of course to make this work, you need very clear and accurate internationalization scoping, estimation and design.

3. Keep it positive and constructive– cause life’s too short. It’s important to keep a focus on what’s needed as well as progress made. It doesn’t help to get upset in the throes of a deadline because someone has made a “stupid” mistake. Learn from it, have that person correct it, and keep things moving forward. Managing milestones actually makes keeping things positive a bunch easier, and managing with positive responsibility is better for everyone over the long haul rather than using milestones like a battle axe on everyone’s head. Positive and accountable team members are much more likely to initiate project responsibility as each member takes pride and ownership in the teamwork.

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Webinar: Managing Internationalization and Localization

When: Thursday, October 30, 2008, 12:00PM Mountain Daylight Time (GMT -06:00)
Where: Watch from Your Computer
Duration: 1 hour
Registration: Visit the Enlaso registration page please

Want a crash course in managing internationalization and localization efforts? This no charge webinar is packed with detailed information on everything from gaining project and company backing, to managing design and implementation efforts while dovetailing localization for highly efficient global releases.

Please join us for our free October 30th Webinar: Managing Internationalization and Localization, presented in partnership with Enlaso. We’ll be getting into the details of issues like analyzing requirements, scoping the effort, getting organization backing, running concurrent i18n and new development and keeping your code internationalized over the years. We know that’s a lot of information to promise, and this promises to be a highly impactful opportunity. Did I mention it’s free?

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Internationalization Stakeholders and Decision Making

Understanding i18n Stakeholders by Adam Asnes, President, Lingoport
As appeared in Multilingual Magazine

In pretty much all of our client engagement opportunities at Lingoport, we quickly arrive at a common discrepancy in how people within organizations view the decision process for internationalization and localization.

On the one hand you have a VP or CEO saying, “We must have this product ready for such and such market by year end!” and on the other extreme, you might have an engineer plotting out her decision process based on technical task oriented details – like locale frameworks, database changes and the like.

One mindset is event or strategic driven. The other is focusing on the minutia of the process. Neither approach is wrong, but I always feel the client is best served when both mindsets come together.

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