Mags Hanley is an information architect and UX Manager living in the UK. Originally from Melbourne, she has worked across the world developing deep information architectures for content heavy web sites, while managing teams of User Experience professionals. She has worked from companies as diverse as Sensis and Telstra in Australia to Argus Associates in the US and BBC, Avenue A | Razorfish and Time Out in the UK.
As a manager she has lead teams from 3 to 50; developing team members to enhance their skills, creating a UX practice where there was none and leading the work within projects.
Strategy
Many people, who move into Management roles within a User Experience (UX) group, are left to work out by themselves ways to lead, manage and develop both their team and their practice. We are not given the guidance on how to create favourable circumstances for our teams or shown how to “enable” our staff to design and develop the web site or products that we are tasked to create.
This course helps provide managers, at whatever stage of their career, the ability to put in place procedures and environments for development. The course will also help managers to work out Personal Development Plans with team members; identify the correct skills mix for a team; and talk through common problems as a group.
The workshop is divided into two parts; developing the right team for your situation and management of individuals. The course will be taught as a combination of lecture, exercises and discussion.
A number of “management challenges” will be explored, from non-performing staff to resource allocation; from dealing with becoming a manager – not a practitioner, to realising that the organisation cannot provide senior practitioners with a continued development path. In this course, a number of case studies based on those challenges will be provided that the participants will firstly discuss in small groups and then discuss as a whole group identifying ways to address the problems.
