Simplify where possible

Why do some people (mainly in marketing) attempt to 'simplify' common terms on the web? They treat all users like imbeciles. In attempting to simplify things they actually complicate them instead.

A recent example was a system that allowed users to 'tag' content. The marketing Muppet's said we shouldn't be using the word tag because of:

• 'what the hell's a tag?'
• 'users won't understand what tag means'
• 'are we talking about dog tags or price tags?'

so, guess what? they renamed all references to tags in the UI to 'labels'. Fair enough if they'd used keywords instead of tags but labels? They seem to think tags is a technical thing? Most of the web use tags or keywords so why confuse users?

oh, and if you use Blogger.com it looks like the same Muppet's have been involved with this system as they call tags 'Labels'.

New Swine Flu Vaccine Discovered

If you’d like to avoid Swine Flu then read this.

There are over 80 people in our office made up of approx. 30% contract staff. The permanent members of staff are dropping like flies with Flu like symptoms but it’s not affected any of the contractors. For some reason being a contractor makes you immune to Swine Flu. It’s really odd that isn’t it!?

This Swine Flu pandemic could be stopped overnight by making all staff contractors.

Make them work weekends

Today, I presented to the project board the fact that we couldn’t deliver all the functionality using the available resources by the deadline. We went through the usual “just get more developers on the job” which I responded “we’ve got 50 man days of effort so lets get 100 developers on the job right now and you’ll have it by this afternoon, right?”. To my surprise they all twigged and realised that more developers wasn’t an option. Fixed resources, fixed deadline (we explored moving it but no way), so the only remaining option is to de-scope the functionality. We embarked on the task of reducing the scope of this phase and deferring features to later phases. The first 20 minutes were very pragmatic. Then a voice from the back of the room piped up…

A new starter from another team was invited along to get an insight into how things are run. This guy’s job title is “Programme Manager”. Obviously very important ;)

…here’s a transcript of the remaining conversation PM is the new Programme Manager:

PM: “what about weekends?”
Me: “what?”
PM: “are they working weekends?”
Me: “no”
PM: “this is ridiculous. We’re sat here torturing ourselves over what features to drop when our developers have lot’s more capacity”
Chair: “what a great idea!”
Senior User: “why’ve you just wasted 20 mins of our time when we could have simply got them to do more work?”
Me: “Well, I could ask them but I’m pretty sure they won’t want to work weekends?”
PM: “ask?!, ask?!,….you don’t ask them you tell them! They’re bloody contractors at the end of the day. If they won’t work when we tell them then terminate them and get contractors in who will. You’ve all got to stop letting these developers dictate to you.”
Chair: “Nice one PM, look’s like we’ll be asking you to join our project board so you can rattle some cages.”

One size fits f**k all

I’m currently working on a web development project in the public sector. It’s mostly resourced with contractors (this is not a pop at contractors – that’s a blog post for another time). The project is to develop a public facing website which has some pretty tricky bits of integration with internal systems and databases, which doesn’t lend itself well to outsourcing. The site has to follow brand guidelines so no need for graphic design work.

Ideally, this type of project should be delivered end to end by a team consisting of:

• 1 x Project Manager


• 1 x Business Analyst / QA (producing simple wireframes – no 200 page spec!)


• 2 x Developers


• 1 x user group from a representative cross section of users – no more than 20 users


• Several Meetings to establish vision and project objectives and a few update meetings along the way


• Estimated Schedule = 3 months (max, including several iterations of release/review with users)

Following the project methodology mandated by this public sector body (PRINCE2 & MSP), the following is what they truly believe they need (this is real, right now, in the public sector!):

• 1 x Programme Director


• 1 x Programme Manager


• 3 x Project Managers


• 2 x Project Assurance


• 6 x People from the OGC Gateway Review Team (Central Government)


• 4 x Business Analysts (producing reams of documentation that no one ever reads)


• 1 x Development Manager


• 4 x Developers


• 2 x QA


• 3 x internal steering groups


• 1 x product review board


• 1 x web standards committee


• 2 x working groups


• 4 x user groups (by segmentation)


• 100 + workshops to engage with stakeholders (all of the above)


• All decisions made by committee.


• Actual Schedule = 18 months and still not gone live :(

In the private sector this would never happen. Why? Because in the private sector you ultimately get measured by profit. No profit, no job. In the public sector there is no profit – you only spend money so what’s your motivation? In the public sector it’s all about covering your ass. The more governance you can put in place, the more your ass is covered. Due to the low wages paid by the public sector it tends to attract employees of a lower grade. To combat against this the public sector puts ‘rigorous’ processes in place to cover their ass’s. They just keep throwing bodies at the problem. In the private sector, throwing more bodies at the problem makes it economically unviable.

So, if it’s much cheaper and quicker to deliver this project in the private sector then why not outsource it? Introducing public sector procurement. Here’s a typical team to outsource the same project – it follows roughly the same structure as above due to it still being a project but adds 6 months minimum to the schedule due to procurement process activities:

• 1 x Programme Director


• 1 x Programme Manager


• 3 x Project Managers


• 2 x Project Assurance


• 2 x Procurement officers


• 1 x Lawyer


• 6 x People from the OGC Gateway Review Team


• 4 x Business Analysts (producing reams of documentation that no one ever reads)


• 3 x internal steering groups


• 1 x product review board


• 1 x web standards committee


• 2 x working groups


• 4 x user groups by segmentation


• 100 + workshops to engage with stakeholders (all of the above)


• All decisions made by committee.


• Outsourced team = (1 x project manager, 1 x business analyst, 2 x developers)


• Actual Schedule = 24 months+

Public Sector - stop pissing my hard earned tax payers money down the drain!

Guide to succeeding in Marketing

No joke, I used to work with this person:


Dress code:

• Tight black shirt (top 3 buttons undone of course) with over sized lapels.
• Skin tight black trousers, or are they Lycra?
• Flip-flops...no not the kind you used to wear as a kid, but 'designer' ones. The bit that goes between your big toe and next toe is rhino hind with a very large fake diamond-like solitaire in the middle.

Hair style:

If he didn't have jet black hair (probably out of a bottle) he'd look like shaggy off scooby-doo. In his long black hair was random splashes of hair gel. I think they call it the scrunched look. Looks more like he drove to the office with his car window open.


Daily lunch:
Deli style designer Sandwich with a bottle of specially formulated detox water.


Accommodation:
Small 'pad' in the City. Obviously you can't refer to it as a flat or high rise.


Favourite tipple:
Quaffing champagne, what else? Common drinks like real ale and lager clog your pours.


Common phrases to prove you're in marketing:

• "On-brand"
• "On-message"
• "We don't want to dilute the message"
• "Who's the brand guardian for this?"
• "Let's engage with our agency"
• "The six p's of marketing" - even marketing people can't decide on how many p's there are and they keep making up more of them to make themselves sound smart!
• "It's a marketing thing, you wouldn't understand it"
• "Are you working above or below the line?"
• "I'm working on a new campaign...", NEVER refer to work as a project, it's always a campaign.
• Yes, you guessed it, "we need to think outside the box on this"

...what a wanker.

parasite=EstateAgent;

The parasite we appointed put our property details on Rightmove.co.uk. When we viewed them along with the photos we quickly realised what a bag of shite they were. The key features consisted of two things - parking and garage. What the fuck is key about those two features?

Following a quick phone call to the parasite we were informed it was a technical restriction with the parasite management software they use, but if you read the small print below the key features they are of a high standard (bollx). To add insult to injury, I'd emailed this parasite some proper pictures taken with my digital SLR a couple of days earlier and he went on to complain to me about how the pictures I'd sent him clogged their entire email system and stopped all the staff from working. What the fuck are they using, a 9600 baud modem connected to Compuserve for fucks sake? Things must be bad if they can't afford 10 quid a month for broadband.

In the end, a friend of a friend made us an offer and saved us an enormous parasite fee. Fuck you parasite!

Why do we use parasites when we have the Internet available? These parasites do nothing apart from encourage Gazumping in order to earn themselves more commission.

The UK online property market is dominated by a single player - http://www.rightmove.co.uk/. If anyone is looking for a property, their first port of call is Rightmove. So, why not just put your property directly on Rightmove and avoid the middleman? Because, Rightmove only allows parasites to upload properties. If they allowed vendors to advertise their own properties they would 'alienate' their existing parasites who pay them money.

Come on Rightmove, don't be a parasite. Open the flood gates. Charge vendors £99 a pop to upload up to 15 photos. Your revenue will go through the roof (excuse the pun).

Outsourcing to India

The Peugeot 206 advert screened in the UK a couple of years ago had a number of similarities to my experiences of outsourcing software development projects to India. This is not a pop at developers in India as I'm sure there are many other countries in the world with shit developers. In fact, I've come across lots of shit developers in the UK, but I tend to fire them very quickly - subject to UK employment laws...but that's a rant for a later date.


The spec we sent them had a lot of work put into it. A lot more than we would normally put into a spec for our on-shore development team. What we got back seemed fairly respectable. It looked right, it functioned right (at first), the marketing bods and board executives were over the moon with it and wanted to go live with it. So what's the problem?

• The solution was open to SQL injection at the login prompt
• Big performance issues with more than 2 users hitting the system
• When it did crash it displayed dirty unhandled exceptions
• User passwords stored in plain text in the DB
  
• Once you got into the detail, the entire object model was wrong. Entity relationships were completely wrong under the bonnet and been bodged at the application level to make it work
• Changing anything on the querystring caused unhandled exceptions
• Letting the session timeout and trying to continue with the session threw unhandled exceptions.
• When users register they are unable to login using the password they specified.
• DB - No indexes, no primary keys, no foreign keys, lots of redundant tables.
  

Basically, this application is fucked. All of these issues were specifically defined in some shape or form in the specification.

Later that day, after I'd raised all of these issues as to why we couldn't possibly put this live, the company directors dragged the UK based account manager into the board room to explain himself. Here's a summary of what he said:

"typical."
"I've heard it many times before from techies. Perfection and nothing less"
"Surely you're not going to let the tail wag the dog"
"don't delay launching as it's just coming off your bottom line"
"here's the final invoice"

We spent the next 12 months getting them to fix bugs reported by the general public. The website has now been pulled and no longer online.