Memeserver Ltd » Project Management

20 Signs

Paul Evans — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 10:57:15 +0000

I meant to post this ‘20 signs you don’t want a social media project’ post when it appeared before Christmas, but for some reason I didn’t. It’s a response to Jeffrey Zeldman’s ‘20 signs you don’t want that web design project‘ post – one that it a great deal more familliar. I can vouch for every item on Zeldman’s list (apart from the Russian Doll one).

Experience designing Russian doll-related websites an advantage

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The Market for Lemons

Paul Evans — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 10:27:28 +0000

… and why public sector procurement drives down quality

Economists have a term for the way that quality is driven out of markets where purchasers don’t have a way of measuring quality. It’s called ‘the market for lemons’

Take web-accessibility for instance: Every governmental body needs to have it. Very few know what it really means – but they put it in their procurement documents as a must-have.

IT project management in highly disrupted organisations is a nightmare at the best of times. Getting the core functionality negotiated and delivered with suppliers who have won the bid on price is hard enough as it is. Management of these projects is often done by people who wouldn’t have the expertise to make a judgment on whether a website is accessible or not.

The rational supplier will, therefore, always say that their sites are accessible and go in with a low-ish bid in order to win the business.

They will then deliver a site that isn’t accessible (because this would require investment in expertise and training – as well as hard-to-find designers who understand WCAG compliance). The customer won’t pull them up on it because they’re to busy scrapping with the supplier to even get the html editor to work in Firefox. And any company that has invested in the expertise needed will lay off the staff that know this stuff because they aren’t earning their keep.

Ask a Sharepoint advocating IT manager if it’s accessible – they will say yes. But it usually isn’t.

Until governmental bodies can procure services in a human way – building relationships with trusted individuals within their supplier chain – this decline in quality will continue unabated.

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Web accessibility – to standard that ensures that techies give you what you want.

Paul Evans — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 10:47:10 +0000

I’ve just written a post over on the Local Democracy blog about how web-accessibility can help you to get a job done properly if you are commissioning work from web-developers.

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Getting website procurement right

Paul Evans — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 10:44:20 +0000

It’s easy to get sidetracked by all of the whizzy interactivity of social media, but many organisations still need a good website that provides them with a powerful organisational communications tool. I’ve worked on well over 100 major website projects and I’ve seen all of the possibilities happen.

Projects that failed because the wrong CMS was chosen, because the project management wasn’t up to scratch, because the client didn’t have a clue what they really wanted, that the client thought that they could procure a supplier and go away for six weeks, returning to find a perfect website management system that had a telepathic intuition for what they wanted …. and so on.

I’ve seen some projects really succeed as well though. Here’s a useful set of white papers and video resources for anyone who is planning a new major website project in the near future.

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