Clients are becoming choosy in the recession about who they want to develop and maintain their digital media offerings. Maybe it’s time to review your company’s proposals because it is at the initial stages that you can win new business with new clients who won’t make your life hell. How’s that, you may well ask? You need to cover all the bases in the questions you ask upfront to ensure that the new business doesn’t hide any nasty dark corners that you haven’t costed in the quote. Equally, the clients need to have complete understanding of the processes you’ll employ and then you ought to have a relatively easy ride.
It’s the misunderstandings that cause the problems. So, if you clearly explain upfront how you will assess the needs, how you will develop, what you will develop, how you will communicate the process to the client, and what their role is, you will start on safer ground.
SpeckyBoy Design Magazine has put together a really good set of resources to help you with web site proposals. It came out on 18th Jan 2010 and has already had lots of positive comments posted. Worth a long hard look.
See: speckyboy.com
Thursday, 21 January 2010
Thursday, 14 January 2010
iMedia Project Management and time, cost and quality issues
Sorry about not posting something last week – we were without power for 2 days! Anyway Happy New Year etc.
The fundamentals of time, cost and quality project management in developing interactive media continue to feature in any interactive add-ons such as developing mobile apps. It seems that the mantra of the time, cost quality triangle applies to all projects, of course. But, people get fazed by thinking ‘this is an incidental add-on to our main project’ when clients want mobile apps, a viral campaign, micro-sites or other spin-off projects from their main web site. These extras need to be considered as separate projects and scoped and costed accordingly remembering that if anything affects either of the elements of time, cost or quality then there is an impact on the other two. (And you have educated your clients to know this, haven’t you!)
Yes, iPhone Apps are different because they are bespoke, subject to Apple inspection and have a leaning to the software/database skill set rather than web design. But Tim Ocock, VP at Symsource has strong advice on developing iPhone apps that reflect time, cost and quality issues at: technologyweekly.mad.co.uk
His costs were a bit startling until he explained the overheads of these micro projects. However, the article seemed to have a ring of truth about it. What do you think?
The fundamentals of time, cost and quality project management in developing interactive media continue to feature in any interactive add-ons such as developing mobile apps. It seems that the mantra of the time, cost quality triangle applies to all projects, of course. But, people get fazed by thinking ‘this is an incidental add-on to our main project’ when clients want mobile apps, a viral campaign, micro-sites or other spin-off projects from their main web site. These extras need to be considered as separate projects and scoped and costed accordingly remembering that if anything affects either of the elements of time, cost or quality then there is an impact on the other two. (And you have educated your clients to know this, haven’t you!)
Yes, iPhone Apps are different because they are bespoke, subject to Apple inspection and have a leaning to the software/database skill set rather than web design. But Tim Ocock, VP at Symsource has strong advice on developing iPhone apps that reflect time, cost and quality issues at: technologyweekly.mad.co.uk
His costs were a bit startling until he explained the overheads of these micro projects. However, the article seemed to have a ring of truth about it. What do you think?
Friday, 18 December 2009
Usability for web sites - where?
This is the last posting for this year and we'll be having a 2 week break then leaving Yahoo and moving exclusively onto this blog site in 2010.
Don't forget to set up your RSS feed so that you can get the postings automatically just like the Yahoo Group. We're moving because it allows us more flexibility for archiving the posts under relevant headings which makes for a better resource for searching for information when you want it.
So, usability guidelines. How have these changed ? Yes, there are more resources now and they are more extensive. As the web has grown, and the number and range of sites expanded, the intelligence on what helps people view information - and make sales - has grown too. You can drill down under about 20 sub-headings about various usability aspects at: www.usability.gov
This is a US government site that offers advice to web designers about how to design sites. But they do have a caveat:
Although considerable effort has been made to base the guidelines on research from a variety of fields, including cognitive psychology, computer science, human factors, technical communication, and usability; other disciplines may have valuable research that is not reflected in these guidelines.
That's a nice heads-up and shows the tenor of their guidelines.
Some people love him and some hate him, but whatever your view, Jakob Nielsen is a leading light in Usability. See his site for the latest at www.useit.com.
Finally, for a more recent and UK centric view, and one with online Christmas shopping at its centre, have a look at the article from Imprezz. A staggering 42% of people abandon their online shopping because of a perceived or actual slowing of the site.
Merry Christmas and a fantastic 2010 from us.
Elaine and Andy
Saturday, 12 December 2009
RACI/RAM charts - do you need them?
You'll be forgiven for not knowing about these charts as we don't cover them on the general training course but we do cover them in our book. They can give a part answer to some of the problems that beset project teams particularly if people always seem to be countermanding decisions. RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. It is a matrix chart that defines people's responsibilities across project deliverables. RAM stands for Responsibility Assignment Matrix and some people prefer to use this term. So far, so good.
Do you recognise any of these problems?
Royston Morgan: www.projectsmart.co.uk
If any of these fit your workload, perhaps you might consider doing a matrix chart. You need to list the roles of your extended team across the top and then put deliverables/work tasks down the side. In the spaces agree with your team who is Responsible, Accountable, to be Consulted, and to be Informed. You write R,A,C or I in the space, or in fact leave the space blank if the person doesn't have to figure in the task. This gives you a blueprint of who should call the tune as the people Accountable should have the final decision. And there should be only one person Accountable in the chart for a task. The person Responsible for the task actually carries out the work or harnesses a team effort to achieve the task to the satisfaction of the Accountable person. When the same person is Responsible and Accountable – as might happen in our form of iMedia projects – then you can decide whether to put both initials in the box or allow A to imply both because there is no one else signified as Responsible.
This type of chart will clarify whose role is responsible for which task, and who is accountable for the final decision. This helps codify authority by implication. Authority to make decisions or allocate budgets can play a big part in potential conflict in projects – don't we just know. Our book, Managing Interactive Media page 84, gives a case study of a RACI chart for an e-commerce project, in case you have a copy.
Do you recognise any of these problems?
- 'My boss always overrules my decisions whenever she wants'
- 'The approval process for even the simplest item takes so long today'
- 'It seems everyone is putting together a spreadsheet on the same data'
- 'Things are always slipping through the cracks'
- 'I have the responsibility, but not the authority to get the job done'
Royston Morgan: www.projectsmart.co.uk
If any of these fit your workload, perhaps you might consider doing a matrix chart. You need to list the roles of your extended team across the top and then put deliverables/work tasks down the side. In the spaces agree with your team who is Responsible, Accountable, to be Consulted, and to be Informed. You write R,A,C or I in the space, or in fact leave the space blank if the person doesn't have to figure in the task. This gives you a blueprint of who should call the tune as the people Accountable should have the final decision. And there should be only one person Accountable in the chart for a task. The person Responsible for the task actually carries out the work or harnesses a team effort to achieve the task to the satisfaction of the Accountable person. When the same person is Responsible and Accountable – as might happen in our form of iMedia projects – then you can decide whether to put both initials in the box or allow A to imply both because there is no one else signified as Responsible.
This type of chart will clarify whose role is responsible for which task, and who is accountable for the final decision. This helps codify authority by implication. Authority to make decisions or allocate budgets can play a big part in potential conflict in projects – don't we just know. Our book, Managing Interactive Media page 84, gives a case study of a RACI chart for an e-commerce project, in case you have a copy.
Thursday, 3 December 2009
Archiving reaches maturity
Remember when the word 'archive' for projects used to be a dirty word. Your managers wouldn't grant the time to you to archive as you got pushed into new urgent projects and your old ones hung around like the proverbial bad smell. Well, all's changing as digital online information becomes the norm. Given that, certain expectations about the stability of information and long-term access to it surface.
Digital archiving is now big business. If we look at massive infrastructure projects for archiving then our web projects look insignificant. But with success and focus come standards, so beware. We will be expected to conform to some digital archive standards sooner rather than later. Keep an eye out.
The government have recognised its responsibility for broken links in its online information in its Web Continuity Project. This recognises which version of a web page is being looked for and accesses that version rather than give the dreaded 'broken link' message.
Also, with online referencing becoming common – we use it all the time in these postings – there are concerns about changes to the referenced page, loss of contextualised meaning, misrepresentation and so on, over time. The 'ostephens' entry on the TELSTAR blog entitled, The When of the Web, gives a nice breakdown of some of these issues and some software solutions.
Finally, for a taste of some of the larger projects that are around at the moment and what's going on, take a quick look at the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) page. They have loads of money relating to higher education research and provision in the UK with some funding opportunities too.
Digital archiving is now big business. If we look at massive infrastructure projects for archiving then our web projects look insignificant. But with success and focus come standards, so beware. We will be expected to conform to some digital archive standards sooner rather than later. Keep an eye out.
The government have recognised its responsibility for broken links in its online information in its Web Continuity Project. This recognises which version of a web page is being looked for and accesses that version rather than give the dreaded 'broken link' message.
Also, with online referencing becoming common – we use it all the time in these postings – there are concerns about changes to the referenced page, loss of contextualised meaning, misrepresentation and so on, over time. The 'ostephens' entry on the TELSTAR blog entitled, The When of the Web, gives a nice breakdown of some of these issues and some software solutions.
Finally, for a taste of some of the larger projects that are around at the moment and what's going on, take a quick look at the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) page. They have loads of money relating to higher education research and provision in the UK with some funding opportunities too.
Friday, 27 November 2009
Innovation and the creative industries
You know our stance on how Interactive Media is not really considered a sector in its own right and doesn't get picked up by government departments for statistical purposes – or many other purposes really. It boils down to where we get positioned in terms of being IT related or creative, as those denominations dictate the money allocation. Well, there might be a slow shift in the right direction of recognising we're a hybrid in the latest report from NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts).
"Our understanding of innovation has changed: where once it was understood to be largely the result of scientific research and development, it is now seen more widely to include changes to services, ways of working and delivery, customer insight and many other forms."
Previously they have been preoccupied with film and games as representing our form of `the creative industries'. This latest report- Measuring sectoral capability in nine areas of the UK economy' 26.11.2009 - looks at innovation in a newly-defined way and uses a correspondingly different analysis tool – the IVC (Innovation Value Chain). They chose Software and IT Services as one of their nine sectors and analysed that with their new way of describing innovation, they call `hidden innovation'. Not sure that they consider Interactive Media in this division of Software and IT services, but it does include consultancy, data processing and database design. Getting there, maybe!
We won't be surprised by the results: but they have been.
The sector reported the highest product and services innovation during 2006-9 compared to other sectors. This is a key indicator for NESTA's IVC. The average levels of innovation capability were relatively high when compared to other sectors in the report. They were surprised by the intensive team-working involved in the sector to access knowledge. Ah! Cross-functional teams strike again!
Take a look if this snippet tempts you at www.nesta.org.uk.
"Our understanding of innovation has changed: where once it was understood to be largely the result of scientific research and development, it is now seen more widely to include changes to services, ways of working and delivery, customer insight and many other forms."
Previously they have been preoccupied with film and games as representing our form of `the creative industries'. This latest report- Measuring sectoral capability in nine areas of the UK economy' 26.11.2009 - looks at innovation in a newly-defined way and uses a correspondingly different analysis tool – the IVC (Innovation Value Chain). They chose Software and IT Services as one of their nine sectors and analysed that with their new way of describing innovation, they call `hidden innovation'. Not sure that they consider Interactive Media in this division of Software and IT services, but it does include consultancy, data processing and database design. Getting there, maybe!
We won't be surprised by the results: but they have been.
The sector reported the highest product and services innovation during 2006-9 compared to other sectors. This is a key indicator for NESTA's IVC. The average levels of innovation capability were relatively high when compared to other sectors in the report. They were surprised by the intensive team-working involved in the sector to access knowledge. Ah! Cross-functional teams strike again!
Take a look if this snippet tempts you at www.nesta.org.uk.
Saturday, 21 November 2009
Free the data!
We have grown use to the idea that information is freely available on the internet and there are two news items this week that demolish or reinforce that presumption.
Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation have shown concern for some time that newspapers should charge for access to their stories. Added to this is a stance that news aggregators should also pay to reproduce the headlines from stories on other (such as News Corp's) web sites.
Tom Forenski of the Silicon Valley Watcher has an interesting analysis of how this might play out and why the 'simple' technical tactic of blocking aggregators with a robots exclusion file has been ignored in favour of attacking through the media.
I thought the thorny issue of whether taking headlines for links back to the orginal story infringed copyright had been settled years ago; it's certainly a common approach and is actively encouraged by RSS news feeds.
Murdoch Snr seems to be accusing organisations like, especially, the BBC, of getting news from the newspapers.
He is quoted in the Telegraph as saying "...most of their stuff is stolen from the newspapers now, and we’ll be suing them for copyright."
Oddly enough I see some resonance here, and not just with ITV's Michael Grade once saying that web sites that took broadcasters' content were 'parasites'. Broadcasters do scan the papers for stories and newspapers will regularly promote 'exclusive' stories into electronic media to build up interest in tomorrow's edition. TV coverage of the storm over Gordon Brown's sympathy letter was usually accompanied by extracts from an interview with the aggrieved mother which were brightly branded with the Sun logo. So the Murdochs (père et fils) must have a deeper concern, albeit one that I personally see brightly tagged 'self-interest' whenever the BBC is mentioned.
I doubt if many people think that traditional static-media-based notions of copyright can survive eternally in a connected world. I have shared the view of many that, as a classic example, Ordnance Survey's mapping data should be freely available. This includes the ability to map things to your location, usually by postcode. This isn't as simple as it might at first appear because OS get data from the Royal Mail to which they then map grid references. These dual rights are one reason it has been convoluted and expensive to access such data.
The OpenSpace project has opened OS data up a lot but this still has limitations to control the number of times you access their system, which has restricted large-scale use. Now commercial operations are starting using the system, which uses an application program interface (API) to access the OS data. To top this, the UK Government has announced that OS mapping will be freely available online from 2010 although I have not as yet seen the fine print.
The scheme's advisors are Sir Tim Berners-Lee (who of course always comes with his own tag of inventor of the world wide web) and Professor Nigel Shadbolt. Professor Shadbolt has reinforced the use of this data for what he calls hyper-locality; finding out what relates to your own street or postcode. He is also quoted on the BBC Web Site as believing that "... OS maps are more comprehensive in their coverage than other open source competitors which are already freely available online". This presumably doesn't refer to Google Maps (although rights issues do seem to limit how you can interact with them for hyper-locality) but is certainly true of the open map sites that rely on users inputting information. Cartography and GIS are a lot more complicated than most of us think.
It'll be interesting to see how this pans out.
Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation have shown concern for some time that newspapers should charge for access to their stories. Added to this is a stance that news aggregators should also pay to reproduce the headlines from stories on other (such as News Corp's) web sites.
Tom Forenski of the Silicon Valley Watcher has an interesting analysis of how this might play out and why the 'simple' technical tactic of blocking aggregators with a robots exclusion file has been ignored in favour of attacking through the media.
I thought the thorny issue of whether taking headlines for links back to the orginal story infringed copyright had been settled years ago; it's certainly a common approach and is actively encouraged by RSS news feeds.
Murdoch Snr seems to be accusing organisations like, especially, the BBC, of getting news from the newspapers.
He is quoted in the Telegraph as saying "...most of their stuff is stolen from the newspapers now, and we’ll be suing them for copyright."
Oddly enough I see some resonance here, and not just with ITV's Michael Grade once saying that web sites that took broadcasters' content were 'parasites'. Broadcasters do scan the papers for stories and newspapers will regularly promote 'exclusive' stories into electronic media to build up interest in tomorrow's edition. TV coverage of the storm over Gordon Brown's sympathy letter was usually accompanied by extracts from an interview with the aggrieved mother which were brightly branded with the Sun logo. So the Murdochs (père et fils) must have a deeper concern, albeit one that I personally see brightly tagged 'self-interest' whenever the BBC is mentioned.
I doubt if many people think that traditional static-media-based notions of copyright can survive eternally in a connected world. I have shared the view of many that, as a classic example, Ordnance Survey's mapping data should be freely available. This includes the ability to map things to your location, usually by postcode. This isn't as simple as it might at first appear because OS get data from the Royal Mail to which they then map grid references. These dual rights are one reason it has been convoluted and expensive to access such data.
The OpenSpace project has opened OS data up a lot but this still has limitations to control the number of times you access their system, which has restricted large-scale use. Now commercial operations are starting using the system, which uses an application program interface (API) to access the OS data. To top this, the UK Government has announced that OS mapping will be freely available online from 2010 although I have not as yet seen the fine print.
The scheme's advisors are Sir Tim Berners-Lee (who of course always comes with his own tag of inventor of the world wide web) and Professor Nigel Shadbolt. Professor Shadbolt has reinforced the use of this data for what he calls hyper-locality; finding out what relates to your own street or postcode. He is also quoted on the BBC Web Site as believing that "... OS maps are more comprehensive in their coverage than other open source competitors which are already freely available online". This presumably doesn't refer to Google Maps (although rights issues do seem to limit how you can interact with them for hyper-locality) but is certainly true of the open map sites that rely on users inputting information. Cartography and GIS are a lot more complicated than most of us think.
It'll be interesting to see how this pans out.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
