Over the years, a typical organisation’s web site grows like a garden.
Some parts of the web site flourish, becoming lush with useful content and links. Other areas suffer from neglect, developing bare patches or sprouting thickets of weed-like content that is outdated, superseded or simply not appealing to visitors.
Eventually, minor niggles add up to a general unease about the quality of the organisation’s online image and services. Senior managers understand that something’s wrong but — because they are senior managers — they are not interested in what they consider to be operational details. They want someone to “just fix the web site”.
This puts you, the web manager, in a difficult position. The problem is large and messy: multiple subsites, multiple maintainers, vague guidance from the executives and no agreed criteria for judging whether you have fixed the problem. Suddenly there’s talk about a web redevelopment project, implementing a content management system, changing people’s job descriptions so they allocate more time to web work…
Sounds familiar?
It’s tempting to treat this situation as a single problem. After all, that’s how the execs see it: do the project, solve the problem.
In my experience, this is a temporary solution. When the redevelopment project is finished, the project team is split up and moves on to other work. The redeveloped web site handed back to the people who used to tend the garden, often without much in the way of toolkits, training or helpdesk support.
After a year or two, the weeds and bare patches start to appear, dissatisfaction resurfaces among the senior managers, and the same process begins again. You find yourself treading the same circular path around the web garden.
Instead of continuing to wear a path in the lawn, you and your organisation may benefit from approaching web management as a long-term process-improvement activity.
With this approach, your web site develops gradually over time. A high-level strategy guides you and provides a long-term vision for the site. Web development work is incremental and iterative — that is, you change one thing at a time, measure the effect, learn from the experience, and then plan the next change.
This Virtuous Spiral model was developed and refined over several years by web staff at the University of Melbourne, in particular Martine Booth, Claire Spencer and Margaret Ruwoldt (that’s me).
We applied this model to our own web management work, and taught the model to colleagues in other departments. We observed informally as business units and project teams worked on improving their web sites. Overall, the likelihood of success seemed to be higher when the model was used.
The model is similar to well-established approaches for business process management. It draws on project-management theory and the concept of the virtuous circle.
The Virtuous Spiral’s usefulness goes beyond the field of web development. It can also be applied to other areas of business activity. During 2008 I will write in more detail about two case studies, showing how the Virtuous Spiral can be used for staff training and internal communication programs.
Further reading
Wikipedia: virtuous circle and vicious circle
Wikipedia: project management
Wikipedia: human interaction management (business process management)
Jeffrey Veen (2000). The Art and Science of Web Design. New Riders Press, USA. ISBN 0789723700.
Jesse James Garrett (2003) “The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams“, essay published by Adaptive Path
Greg Storey (2005) “Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia (or Build a Web site for No Reason)“, article in A List Apart
Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler (2 ed, 2004) Web Redesign 2.0: workflow that works. New Riders Press, USA. ISBN 0735714339. Related templates and tools downloadable from the authors’ web site.
