M’colleagues
Usability Guy commented on an internal discussion list:
We… spend much money on technology, hardware, processes, buildings etc. but how much time and money do we spend on the people who use them?
That has been a long-standing question at this university. It was one of the drivers behind a bunch of senior executives allocating the resources to establish the University Web Centre in 2001. Our initial budget was three salaries plus A$65,000 operational costs — not huge, but a significant investment for a university that previously relied largely on the good will of enthusiastic individuals to run its web sites.
In its six-year lifespan, the Web Centre developed and delivered a comprehensive training program for more than 350 staff — people who did any kind of web work, plus their supervisors/managers. The training program consisted of self-contained, related modules:
- Web Management Principles (for supervisors/managers of web staff)
- Web Development Framework
- Usability: user research and usability testing techniques
- Content Mapping for Web Redevelopment
- Information Architecture for University Web Sites
- Writing for the Web
- Introduction to Accessibility
- Introduction to Dreamweaver
- Web Templates for Maintainers (how to use the university’s web design templates)
- Web Templates for Developers (how to customise or adapt the university’s design templates for special subsites, or for web applications)
- Creating Accessible Sites with Dreamweaver and the University Web Templates
- Quality Assurance for University Web Sites
We organised and hosted monthly brownbag lunch seminars (2002 to 2006), where university staff could present their own work — projects, ideas or recent learnings from research or conferences. Occasionally we invited an external guest to give a presentation: the head of ABC Digital Media (talking about podcasting) and the chief researcher in CSIRO’s spinoff company Funnelback (talking about the future of search engine technology) were particularly popular.
Every fortnight we hosted informal ‘web cuppa’ gatherings: an opportunity for web staff to sneak out of the office for an hour and share a coffee with like-minded peers.
An email discussion list, called Web Forum, provided an online supplement to the brownbags and cuppas. Through these communication channels, a university-wide ‘community of practice’ gradually emerged.
Many web staff have expressed appreciation for the Web Forum activities, because they enable people (who are often isolated in small departments and misunderstood by their local colleagues) to meet their peers, swap ideas and help solve common problems.
Even the people who did not participate in Web Forum activities appreciated the opportunity — I’ve often been told by a web worker that she felt better just knowing those resources and opportunities were available, even if she didn’t use them regularly.
Complementing the training and networking activities, Web Centre staff provided a free consultation and advisory service for University departments. Web staff from anywhere in the university were also able to borrow web-related books and reports from the Web Centre — practical, useful stuff that’s not available from the university library.
In addition, the Web Centre provided opportunities for web staff to attend events that brought together people from several different universities. We hosted a full-day meeting of the Victorian Tertiary Web Managers’ Forum and a Web Accessibility Network for Australian Universities (WANAU) forum. In 2002-03 we also sponsored quite a few people to attend the annual OzEWAI accessibility conference.
What was the result of all this activity? Most importantly, the overall quality of the University’s public web sites has improved greatly. We know this from the results of independent usability studies and from our own web users’ feedback.
I’m not simply blowing horns on behalf of the manyseveral fab folks who’ve worked in the Web Centre since 2001. (But “Yay, team!” anyway :-) The improvement happened because the university has developed a reasonably large cohort of well-informed, skilled, passionate and experienced web workers who understand that “web” is more than “IT” or “design”.
For six years, the university invested time, energy and money in providing its hundreds of web staff with wide range of high-quality, free opportunities for professional development. Both the university and the individuals have benefited from this, as have the tens of thousands of people who visit our web sites each day. The investment would not have happened unless there was demonstrable need for it — and one way we demonstrated that need was by running surveys to find out who ‘does web’ and how they do it.
Now that the Web Centre no longer exists, professional development and support for web staff will have to come from elsewhere. Surveys like the current one will help the new service-providers to understand what the university — and its people — need in order to continue producing awesomely useful, accessible and stylish web sites.
Tags: community of practice, analytics and metrics, survey, training, planning, knowledge management
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