Some painful lessons seem to require periodic re-learning. Lessons about unintended consequences come around again and again, like an ugly pony on a carousel. People familiar with the merry-go-round of implementing change without regard to business consequences recognize these lessons as they reappear. For those new to the project carnival, Payson Hall describes a ride on the ugly pony and how you can avoid it.

Projects collapse in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. Fortunately there are things you can do to stabilize and rebuild your project before the dust settles. With these expert tips and a little elbow grease, you'll have the tools you'll need to renovate almost any failing project.

So what happens when interaction designers are put to work on an Agile process? Meet "Dan Means," a system administrator persona developed to represent and emphasize customer requirements. Find out how one development team used him and other personas to blend interaction design and Agile development to deliver a product the customer really wanted.

If your customer interview questions focus too narrowly on a problem that must be solved, you run the risk of missing information that could be critical to a successful outcome. In this column, Naomi Karten says playing detective improves your ability to gather information. To improve the odds of success, it's important to ask questions from multiple perspectives—and to pay attention not only to the customers' response, but to how they say it as well.