I experienced a sudden shift in gears on my work. I spent about a month putting together my Affinity Diagram on Power in the Data Center, when all of the sudden, I was given a new assignment. This was slightly overwhelming at first because I spent so much time focusing on Power, and I wasn’t going to have the same amount of time to research my new subject. Fortunately the work I did is not going to be thrown out, I am just going to work on this new project first.
In order to get my bearings on this new assignment. I decided to look into creating a Knowledge Map of the functionality that needed to be incorporated into a new framework. I had downloaded Cmap tools ages ago, and never really took the time to figure out how to use it. I have to admit that I was a little overwhelmed by this task also. Strangely enough I figured out how to use Cmap tools in about 5-10 minutes, so I have no idea why I was so intimidated by it. Once I figured out what I was doing, it was actually a lot of fun.
The concept of creating a concept or knowledge map is very easy. You just put all of your nouns in circles, and connect them by verbs. Pretty soon you will have a tree of information sprouting, and it can help you figure out how things should work. I hope to use this new knowledge map that I created to help me figure out the information architecture, the new navigation for this project, and to figure out how all of the products in the product line will integrate together.
On another frontier I finally recieved my copy of Adobe CS4. I’m very excited to get to work using it. I had to upgrade my OS with the latest service patch. I intend to have some feedback on that after I start using it. I hope everyone has a great weekend, over and out!