I am a project manager in the IT services sector, and I have been delivering, and watching my colleagues deliver, software development projects to the UK public sector for the last ten years. Some of these projects were labelled “Agile” by the sales team, the intention being that that the customer’s rather vague ideas on what he wanted would be clarified as the project progresses with some give and take on scope. The end product would be a system that best meets the customer’s business needs given the resources that have been contracted.

Those were the intentions. However, on the whole, it did not work out that way. Initial collaborative harmony between customer and supplier is eventually replaced by embittered discussions on the scope of what has been delivered and its cost. The customer falls back to the ill-defined, all encompassing “scope umbrella” that was discussed at project inception; the supplier pleads that he has gone far beyond the call of duty, and now faces financial ruin, to meet the customer’s unreasonably demanding expectations.

Why does this happen? What causes this loss of trust between customer and supplier, and the relationship to sour?

The four principles of the Agile Manifesto¹ are

1.  Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2.  Working software over comprehensive documentation
3.  Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4.  Responding to change over following a plan

Surprisingly, it’s the first principle that causes the difficulty. Relationships between customer and supplier at the project level are often very good, with both parties eager to make the project a success. However, despite this, the flexible, responsive way of working vital to Agile is not achieved.

Individuals rarely have the freedom to act as such. Supplier project managers have to toe the company line, minimising commercial risk as much as delivering what the customer needs. On the other side, the customer project manager will live in a highly consultative world, with many stakeholders to satisfy underneath deep hierarchies. Consequently, the concept of autonomous decision-making is rarely realised. That’s even before taking into account that the lead customer representative is too over-stretched to commit enough time to development, because they are either still trying to do their day job or have wider responsibilities within the programme of which the software development is a part.

Even if some of the corporate constraints are shed, then the full benefit of working together may not be achieved until some time into the project. Customer and supplier will be coming together for the purposes of the project, and will probably not have worked together before. Indeed, the supplier’s team may also be newly formed. It takes time for teams to gel, and to become fully productive². If they are trying to follow a methodology like scrum, then everyone needs to know what that means, and have some practice doing it, before the full benefits can be reaped.

As for the other Agile principles:

2.  Few people nowadays will argue against the importance of working software over comprehensive documentation (unless, of course, they are independent “customer friends” eager to prove their worth, in which case they will demand both, usually in retrospect).

3.  Contract negotiation often wins over customer collaboration. Enough said here; there are reams written on public sector procurement practices elsewhere.

4.  Most customers and suppliers want to do the right thing by developing systems that meet current rather than historical business requirements, and will strive to do so unless stifled by surrounding bureaucracy.

So, if Agile development does not work, what should we do? Revert to the devil we know, Waterfall? Safe – Yes. Effective at delivering systems that meet current business requirements in a timely manner – No. Instead we should try to be nimble if not properly Agile:

A.  Develop in small chunks. Deliver capability incrementally rather than in a big bang, and let the business start reaping the rewards afforded by the new technology. A further benefit is that requirements for later development will be better articulated against the background of a working system rather than a blank page.

B.  Base projects on outline specs which fix the scope but not the detail. Detailed specs can be written when the project is in flight, close to development time. And specs need not be homogenous; use cases, wireframes, prototypes, etc – use the tool that conveys information best in context.

C.  Interact. Review progress regularly, not just by examing the time-line, but look at what has been built and gain feedback; the fewer surprises at delivery, the better.

D.  Engineer the software. Grasp Agile good practice such as continuous builds and continuous testing. The earlier that there is a “working” system, however narrow in scope, the greater the likelihood of a stable release.

1 http://agilemanifesto.org/

2 Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration by Keith Sawyer (ISBN-13: 978-0465071937) is an interesting and enjoyable read

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of getting a website to work better with search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK. There are a number of Search engine optimisation (SEO) principles which we observe when designing and building websites. The following checklist describes some of these high level principles and techniques:

1. Provide good Content

First rule for any website is to provide good content. Sounds obvious, but many websites struggle because they have poorly written content. Provide frequently updated content that people want to read. Incoming links are key and if you can provide content that people will read and get something out of, there is a good chance they will link to that content.

2. Write good HTML markup

There is more to content than just the keywords. The markup and code underneath can make your content even more attractive to search engines and help your visitors find what they are looking for faster. The general rule of thumb is to use the appropriate tags for the different types of information:

Semantic markup
Semantic markup just means “adding meaning to your content with tags.” For example, instead of formatting a headline with the <b> tag to make it bold, use a heading tag like <h2>, typically browsers and search engines can recognize headings <h1> through <h6>, and usually they expect them to appear in a logical order.

Meta data
Meta tags have never been a guaranteed way to gain a top ranking on crawler-based search engines. Today, the most valuable feature they offer the web site owner is the ability to control to some degree how their web pages are described by some search engines.

Meta Description tags, this should be a short concise description describing what the Page is about. Meta keyword tags, should list 4 or 5 individual keywords related to the Page you have created.

Example:

<head>

<meta content=”SEO, search engines, browsing, optimisation” />

<meta content=”Everything you wanted to know about SEO, but were afraid to ask” />

<title>The truth about SEO</title>

</head>

It’s important to create your web site with keywords and key phrases in mind and to put them in place as you develop the pages and content.

Single keywords are much more commonly entered by web users, which make them more difficult to target effectively than multi-word key phrases. Unless the single keywords are highly unique, your best results will be achieved using key phrases.

Create meaningful links in the markup
Use keywords in links to give them meaning. This is also good practice for increasing accessibility, especially where assistive technologies such as screen readers are concerned:

Example:

• Not good: Read more.
• Better: Read more about search engine optimisation.

Use the ‘TITLE’ tag in links
The ‘TITLE’ attribute is used to describe links, tables, table rows and other structural HTML elements. They’re more versatile than the ALT attribute and many search engine ranking algorithms read the text in TITLE attributes as regular page content.

Example:

<a href=”http://www.wtg.co.uk” title=”WTG is a leading technology consultancy and solutions provider to the UK Public Sector”>WTG a leading technology consultancy</a>

Use the ‘ALT’ tag for images
Always use the alt tag for images; additionally, ensure images are named well. This improves SEO as well as accessibility.

Example:

• Not good: <img src=”some-image.gif />
• Better: <img src=”seo_strategy_diagram.jpg” alt=”This Diagram represent an overview of the components of and SEO strategy: Content, Code, Community” title=”SEO Strategy Diagram” />

3. Don’t try and fool search engines

Whatever you do, don’t try to trick your way into generating more traffic. Duplicate pages, hidden links and other less-than-honest techniques can get you seriously penalised and ruin any positive work you’ve done. Search engines are quite clever!

4. Use obvious URL’s

An obvious URL is a great URL. If a user can look at the Address bar (or a pasted link) and make an accurate guess about the content of the page before ever reaching it, then you’re half way there. These URLs get pasted, shared, emailed, written down, and yes, even recognised by the engines. Many people underestimate how important a good URL is. Dynamic page names are still very frequent and no keywords in the URL, is more a rule than an exception. Yes, it is possible to rank high even without keywords in the URL but all being equal, if you have keywords in the URL (the domain itself, or file names, which are part of the URL), this gives you additional advantage over your competitors.

5. Include sitemaps

Provide a website sitemap, and link to it from your homepage as well as all your other web pages. Sitemaps that link to your main pages will help search engines find your content, as well as being helpful to web site visitors. If your sitemap contains more than about one hundred links, though, break it logically into pages.

6. Submit your site to search engines

A good way to advance your SEO is to build links intelligently. For example, submitting your site to trusted directories such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. We encourage establishing links to authority websites and professional affiliations.

7. Start a blog

Search engines, Google especially, love blogs for the fresh content and highly-structured data. Beyond that, there’s no better way to join the conversations that are already taking place about your industry and/or company. Reading and commenting on other blogs can also increase your exposure and help you acquire new links.

8. Take advantage of social media

There are significant benefits from combining search engine optimisation and social media marketing tactics ranging from increased social network discovery via search to the ability to attract links for improved SEO. With any social media site you use, the first rule is, don’t spam! Be an active, contributing member of the site. The idea is to interact with potential customers, not annoy them.

A central concern of interaction design is to develop interactive products that are usable. By this we generally mean, easy to learn, intuitive to use, and provides an enjoyable user-experience for its end users. User Experience (UX) has a number of disciplines associated with it. The three protagonists I’m concerned with here are:

1. The Information Architect (IA),
2. The Creative Designer (CD) and
3. The User Interface Developer (UI).

All too often the misconception is that these work almost independently. Actually, they probably can, but not without missing a trick. The trick in this case is to assemble a tight knit team that talk to each other about the finer points of all things related to what they’re designing. This in turn engenders a culture of collaboration and the team feels bold and empowered to make design decisions because they have the support of their peers. Sounds obvious, but in my stint in the freelance world not so long ago, this is usually far from the case.

Many projects don’t have the benefit of a fully assembled team from the start. Contractors are brought in as and when required. I call it the ‘house building mentality’, once the electrics are done, you call in the plasterer and then the painter decorator. Whilst this is a sensible and efficient way to build houses it comes with a few shortfalls when we’re thinking about designing for the web. I’m not suggesting we produce code before we’ve locked down the navigation, but merely trying to make the point that they are not as linear as common perceptions suggest.

Interaction design attempts to improve the usability and experience of a product. Whilst each of these disciplines addresses this problem they don’t go far enough on their own. A designer and user interface developer can give the benefit of their experiences to input into the IA work-stream and vice-versa. There is considerable overlap across the three areas. I think really successful projects succeed because of an inherent understanding between these three disciplines and when they are ‘worked’ collaboratively, as all three have something to say and contribute to each other. There should be open dialogue between the individuals owning them to define the interaction design. If a designer is asked just to concentrate on the presentation layer, then the designers job is just to apply a visual ‘skin’ on top of a wireframe. A waste of resource I would argue. What is often lacking is the environment where a designer, IA or developer has an input into areas that are not within their specific remit. Although there are a number of dependencies which dictate the order in which these work-streams happen, it’s about time the web design process is thought of in a non-linear and holistic way.

So what sorts of discussions happen between the three protagonists? Well, apart from the usual banter, flexing of web muscles and general tom-foolery, they have conversations on improving the interface and challenging each other’s thinking. It’s about validating each others’ ideas with the aim of arriving at good solutions. This goes quite some way to ensuring it’s usable, visually engaging and can be built robustly and with accessibility in mind. Of course all interfaces have to be validated with end-users as the ultimate test, but if you have a good team who appreciate the need for dialogue and are committed to providing the best user-experience they can, most of the foundation is laid.

Oh and as a practical measure of how this environment can be fostered, it helps if the three protagonists sit in close proximity to each other.

This is a piece I wrote for an internal audience towards the tail end of last year. By popular request we’ve decided to put it out there for everyone.  – Richard 22/01.

The Future.
It is 2014, and raining. I still live in a house and I still go to work, I still cook and I am still disappointed when my team loses. Our lives are almost the same as they were 5 years ago, though these days I am better connected, and, amazingly I am more a part of the local community than ever before. I write this as I sit on the bus home. I have just finished browsing through the council’s website and commenting on the proposed new developments for a local park on my smartphone. The request for consultation popped up on my personal feed earlier in the day and I’m taking the opportunity to review it in a spare moment.

This week I’ve been busy on the bus. I posted pictures of some graffiti to the council using what we used to call Twitter in the days before Google wave. My phone took the picture and tagged it with the GPS coordinates so I didn’t even need to describe the location, just posted it with a #offensivegraffiti tag. A central computer pulled the posting and worked out which council needed to action it just from the geocode. It is almost the exact reverse of the police appeals system, they post incidents with geocodes and my feed picks up the ones within 500m of my home address. Just before I get off I see that the local bus company has responded to a thread in the “bring back bendy buses” campaign space and my local MP has finally joined in the debate. Rumours are that we’ll even be able to vote electronically in the next general election.

I think back to how all this became possible:

In 2009 the government realised that social networking was a phenomena that they couldn’t afford to ignore. Andrew Stott was appointed as the Director of Digital Engagement¹, a small appointment which only had ripples in fairly confined circles at the time. Part of his role was to work out how to leverage the phenomenal growth and uptake of the social nets. At the time Facebook (remember that!) was the king of the social network and had over 250million registered users². Twitter was still growing strongly and had over 44 million users³, they were both converging and it looked like just a matter for time before Facebook went asymmetric⁴. Maybe the key turning point of the social media revolution was when the government released the much derided “tweet manual” suggesting government agencies should be using twitter and how they might do so⁵.  Retrospectively, after the publication of this document suddenly the local councils had a precedent from central government and from then on every new site had to ‘integrate with social networks’. This spawned a rash of new consultancies reminiscent of the dot com bubble. These social media consultancies were considered niche at the time but the continued demand from eGovernment projects and switched on business saw many of them grow rapidly to usurp the old school CMS integrators.

As 2009 wore on social media in government got more and more air time. The labour party was in power at the time and appointed Kerry McCarthy as a ‘twitter tsar’ who was to lead the charge in the upcoming election (dubbed ‘the new media election’) ⁶. Another remarkable and yet under reported event in the rise of the social network was the ‘we love the NHS’ trending topic on Twitter. Thousands of users updated their profile images to show their support for the NHS after an attack by the conservative MEP Dan Hannan⁷. Unlike the twitter usage in the 2008 US elections⁸ and the June Iranian Presidential Elections⁹ this was an early example of popular pressure being applied through networks in the UK.  Later in the summer of 2009 the Metropolitan police began using twitter to reach out to climate change protesters amid much fanfare from the press¹⁰. It was considered a bold move at the time and one that required the MET to lean heavily on emerging consultancies to support them through their transition to social media.

The latter half of 2009 was a period of consolidation where businesses and government agencies alike caught up with the social media trend. The buzz around social media freed up money for projects as perception shifted from “we can’t afford to do this” round to “we can’t afford not to do this”. To give context you’ll remember that 2008/9 was the big recession triggered by the subprime market in the US.  Money was extremely tight but social media was considered to be that important.

Back to 2009

We are on the cusp of a very exciting period of social media uptake and usage by central and local government. Many of the technology tools are already in place. What is missing is organisational knowledge and vision to leverage them. Many councils, MPs, Police Forces and other agencies have started tentative experiments with social media. There are a lot of opportunities out there for innovative consultancies to get their bright ideas noticed, to support and guide these organisations to tap into the power of social media. These bodies are looking for cheaper more efficient solutions in light of recessionary budget constraints. Twitter and Facebook are part of the jigsaw puzzle but the final picture isn’t clear and is constantly changing.

You probably already use a social network and you certainly use council and government services. It is only a matter of time before you can access and interact with one through the other.

References
1 Cabinet Office: Cabinet Office names director of digital engagement. http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/newsroom/news_releases/2009/090513_digital.aspx

2 Wikipedia: Facebook. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook.

3 Techcrunch: Twitter reaches 44.5 Million people worldwide. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/03/twitter-reaches-445-million-people-worldwide-in-june-comscore/

4 Bokardo.com: Relationship Symmetry in social networks: http://bokardo.com/archives/relationship-symmetry-in-social-networks-why-facebook-will-go-fully-asymmetric/

5 Cabinet Office blogs: Neil Williams. http://blogs.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/digitalengagement/post/2009/07/21/Template-Twitter-strategy-for-Government-Departments.aspx

6 Guardian.co.uk: Labour appoints Twitter tsar ahead of election: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/aug/16/labour-appoints-twitter-tsar

7 24dash.com:“We love NHS campaign” demonstrates the power of twitter: http://www.24dash.com/news/Health/2009-08-14-We-love-the-NHS-campaign-demonstrates-power-of-Twitter

8 politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com: Obama’s White House passes 1M followers on Twitter: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/08/23/obamas-white-house-passes-1m-followers-on-twitter/

9 Time.com: Iranian Protests: Twitter, the medium of the Movement: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1905125,00.html

10 Guardian.co.uk: Met police turns on charm ahead of Climate Protest: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/aug/18/met-police-climate-camp-twitter