Rich Cowtan of WTG shares the successful and delicious WTG recipe for Secret Sauce -the secret ingredient in making public sector web projects a success, which is a must in these days of Austerity.

So you’re the one charged with getting together a new internet site for your organisation and making it a success.  You know what to do to get the thing built, but how to get people using it?  That’s where you reach for the secret sauce squeezy bottle.

There are three aspects to any IT deployment – the technology, the process and the people. Technology is all in hand – its about making sure the system we build fits with what you’re trying to do. The Business processes that are being refined are key to understanding the effect on the people, and in some ways, should be looked at first. Understanding the people affect of any IT deployment is the true secret to its success, and the secret sauce is understanding process while not overlooking the ‘people’ aspects of your project.

Process

You may be responsible for the intranet site development, but who’s going to update or create the content? How do they go about doing that? Some definition work is essential here – need to understand how content is created now, and how it may be created in the future. If your site interacts with the public, what are they going to do, and what process do you follow to interact with the public via the web? This is partly about how the pages are designed and what they look like, but its more the process that follows that content from inception to publish. It’s also about ensuring the web system you’re building fits snuggly with the rest of your organisation – that people know what to do when web things happen, and where the web system starts and finishes.

At WTG we hear a lot of “It’s just a website” – but in many organisations these days, web systems are becoming more powerful, more encompassing, and so need some careful consideration on how a normal days work interacts with them.

People

A new way of doing things inevitably brings changes to peoples’ work lives.  As an important asset in any organisation, ensuring that your colleagues hit the ground running is possibly the most important aspect of any new web system. If you have a new content management system, your colleagues need to know how to use it, but also need to know how it affects their job. Importantly they need to be firmly behind the new system, understand the need for the system, and be ready to accept it into their daily work lives. It’s about communications: awareness through to buy-in, and its about learning – knowing ‘how’ and ‘why’ the system does what it does.

I’d advise that for any new process or system, a programme of ‘change management’ is instigated. What I mean here is some management of the people involved, decent communication, and view of who needs what learning and training and finally support over the duration of a go-live period.

Secret Sauce

The secret sauce therefore is a decent people and organisation change management programme to go alongside the development of the IT (from the outset). This kind of programme ensures that the process and people side of any project are firmly taken care of – giving a sense of whole to the efforts to bring in a new system.  Doing so will realise benefits quicker and will generate a return on investment.  If you planted a tomato plant in your vegetable patch, you’d prepare the soil first and ensure the plant was well watered wouldn’t you? If you didn’t you may kill the plant and certainly won’t get any nice ripe tomatoes to make secret sauce with.