Feeling a bit Cinderella-ish today, because my ’short session’ proposal for the OzIA 2009 conference has been accepted and I’m off to Sydney in early October.
Yippee!
The 30-minute session is called “Look what they’ve done to my song, Ma” and it’s about the different perspectives of project and operational teams.
Here’s the pitch:
It was a good project, well planned and managed, and you did your best to idiot-proof the redeveloped site and the technology that supports it. The wrap party was a blast and the project team has split up, moved on.
A year later you visit the redeveloped web site – only to find that the CMS rollout has stalled and your elegant IA and sleek interface design are being whittled away by dozens of tiny, clunky changes made by the client’s permanent staff.
Would the client be willing to engage you again, to set the staff back on the path of Usability Gorgeousness™? After all, you can’t be blamed for what went wrong after the last project – or can you?
Part confessional, part observational, this session looks at web redevelopment projects from both sides: the independent consultant brought in to “just fix it, OK?” and the in-house wage-slave who seems to want nothing to change, ever, at all. Is it possible for them to move from “loathe at first sight” to “happily ever after”?
And the take-aways (that is, what you can expect to learn from the session):
- Improved understanding of how organisational politics can affect a project’s outcomes (and possibly your reputation), no matter how well you plan ahead
- Tips for bridging the cultural divide between the project team and the company staff responsible for day-to-day web site management
I’m not saying I know everything about this topic, but I’ve worked on both sides of the project/operational divide — so you can at least expect to hear an anecdote or two that you’ll identify with.
Tags: conference, mentoring, organisational politics, oz-ia, #ozia09, project management
Post a Comment