Brandon Luhring

Even highly capable teams with solid plans can fall into the same ol’ traps. It’s not really our fault, human biases are hardwired into all of us. Awareness helps, but under pressure and tight deadlines, it’s tough to recognize these mental pitfalls in the moment. Seven Common Human Bias Problem Areas Optimism Bias – Wanting […]

Building on my last post about Delighting the Customer, let’s dive into how to respond to client feedback. A strong feedback loop is mission critical. To keep your client relationships at their best, you need to know what they are thinking. Soliciting Formal Feedback You need to be intentional about requesting feedback regularly and systematically. […]

In the last decade, “delighting the customer” has been quite popular in digital marketing. Clients have focused on user experience both online and offline. A delighted customer becomes loyal with brand affinity and drives long-term growth through positive word-of-mouth. At Perficient, we manage two levels of delight: our clients and their customers. By delighting their […]

A friend recently shared a research paper from Oxford Academic about Large Language Models (LLMs) and their human-like biases. I found it fascinating. The article explains how some groups use LLMs to simulate human participants. Since these models are trained on human-generated data, they can emulate human responses across diverse psychological and behavioral experiments. It […]

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has exploded into the mainstream, largely through chatbots and agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs). Users can now have real-time conversations with multimodal AI tools that understand your text, voice, and images – even documents! The progress has been mind blowing, and tech companies are racing to integrate AI features into […]

I’ve spent almost 30 years in web and digital, starting way back when the “world wide web” was full of under construction GIFs, <blink> tags, and visitor counters! Nobody misses those things! While many bad user experiences have faded away, some daily annoyances still need to go. In the spirit of Seinfeld’s “airing of grievances,” […]

The emotional finale is here! Don’t worry, this isn’t about curling up in a ball and crying – we’ve already done that. This final installment of my series on project estimating is all about navigating the emotions of everyone involved and trying to avoid frustration. If you’ve been following this blog series on project estimations, […]

In this third installment of my blog series on project estimates, let’s dive headfirst into the murky waters of assumptions and uncertainty! Think of these as the gremlins of project planning – they are full of secrets and laugh along the way as they trip you up. If you’ve read my other blog posts, you’ll […]

Continuing our dive into project estimating, let’s talk about two more problem areas: dependencies and project creep. These two can turn your pristine project plan into a tangled mess. No matter the size or scope of your project – whether you have just a few dependencies or tight integration with multiple systems – you’ll be […]

Estimating is a precarious business – part science, a lot of guesswork, and a bit of psychic magic! The goal is to forecast the effort, time, and cost of a project with enough accuracy to avoid disaster. Project managers use some go-to methods to estimate projects. Some approaches are scientific while others are based on […]

“Double, double toil and trouble,” is a line repeated by the witches in Macbeth as they lay out the ominous prophecies of greatness and dire consequences for the titular character. Macbeth’s ambition envisions a perfect ending though desperate actions and moral weakness ruin it. So too are the misguided actions in pursuit of perfection which […]

In 1968, psychiatrist Stephen Karpman modeled what he called the Drama Triangle. With this, he illustrated dysfunctional mindsets that can derail social interactions. The three roles defined in this model are the rescuer (hero), persecutor (villain), and victim. This is another view of the lies we tell ourselves. Since the dawn of history, we’ve loved […]