VolkerFrank

Hello all,

AYE 2005 is my first time getting connected with this community and I am so glad I did!

For the last 10 years I have worked as a consultant and designed the user experience (GUI) for client and web based line of business applications. My background is in graphic design and visual communication, which I extended in grad school to include cognitive psychology and learning theories. I spend a lot of time understanding the people, who use the software I design, to establish mental models in their domain, information architecture, and the broader context of their work environment so that my designs meet their requirements and ends up being easy to learn and easy to use. In my mind this leads to good usability characteristics on the micro-level, i.e. for everything that shows up on a computer screen.

In recent years I have been paying a lot more attention to usability on the macro-level, i.e. how the tool fits into the broader work context and is adopted by the organization as a whole. Software development projects often are vehicles to force change on the organization, make processes more efficient, eliminate roles and peoples, and the more drastic those changes the more secretive are the decisions around the software design. This leads to poor "user acceptance" and the software and invariably it falls way short of the promises made to business sponsors. These observations have gotten me interested in organizational development and change management in order to facilitate more useful approaches to focus on the necessary changes first and then supporting those changes with well designed software.

I provide business sponsors with a way to understand the systemic patterns of their organizations and low risk experiences of change initiatives and their likely effects. I use an approach called "Systemic Constellations" which has some similarity to Virgina Satir's model, to make systemic group dynamics accessible experiencially, and my NLP training to help individuals deal with change on a personal level.

I would love to hear from anybody with experience in the area of social systems and organizational change management. I can be reached at my Gmail account: VolkerFrank

Volker, as you know, you and I share so many of the same interests and points of view. If there are other AYErs out there, perhaps we can organize a BoF this year. Let's see if we get any nibbles on SocialSystemsBof. - JerryWeinberg 2006.08.17

Updated: Thursday, August 17, 2006