He posted this wonderfully expressive illustration on his blog to mark the occasion.

Finally Done! Drawing by Mark Kennedy, 2010

That’s exactly how it feels to finish a big or challenging project  :-)

PS: If you like comics, illustration or graphic art, keep an eye on Mark’s blog — he often posts articles about the craft of drawing stories.

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• Nope, sorry, nothing springs to mind.

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.

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Similarly, the Dilbert strip for 21 December 2008 has a particular resonance for me — and perhaps for others who work in large organisations? I recently worked with a colleague on compiling a history of the last decade in IT/library management at our organisation: the IT part of the publication looked very much like the list of milestones in this cartoon.

A report in the Guardian reminds us that effective project management isn’t as easy as it looks. A UK Department of Transport computer integration project was supposed to save over £50 million. It ended up costing more than £80 million and delivering less than £40 million in operational savings. As well, the new system failed to meet most of its performance targets. Ouch.

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Earlybird registrations are open now, and close next Tuesday 9 September.

Earlybird registrations are A$660, or A$550 if you quote the discount code MR0243. Register online at the conference web site.

The conference will be held in Sydney, on the weekend of 20-21 September.

Who should attend?

• Designers of navigation, organisation, labelling and search systems that help people find and manage information more successfully,
• Librarians, webmasters, and content owners responsible for creating taxonomies and information architectures,
• Application developers who design web and software solutions and select the technologies and staff to support them,
• Project and business managers needing to understand the benefits and challenges of information architectures in electronic information spaces.

[cross-posted at SneedleflipsockTheBlog]

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Plus it’s a great excuse to spend a few spring days in Sydney :-)

Online registrations open this week. Earlybird registrations are A$660, or A$550 if you quote MR0243 as your discount code. Even when the earlybird period closes, you can still use the discount code to get A$110 off the registration fee.

This largesse is your reward for me blethering for half an hour in front of a roomful of conference attendees. I’ll be talking about the Information Futures Commission, and what we learned from using standard IA techniques in a strategy development project — old tricks, new dog :-)

(Yes, you can still use the discount code even if you don’t want to come to my session.)

[cross-posted at SneedleFlipsockTheBlog]

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The Commission delivered three key documents to the University community:

1. Final Report of the Steering Committee, describing the consultation process, summarising what we learned, and analysing the major areas of contention
2. Melbourne’s Scholarly Information Future: a ten-year strategy (”Zis iss ze big vun,” as Otto von Chriek might say)
3. Implementation plan, including a budget proposal and a governance proposal

The Final Report was noted by the Academic Board and University Council. This now becomes part of the University’s official records, providing information about why particular decisions have been made.

The Scholarly Information Future strategy was endorsed by both Academic Board and Council. This makes the strategy an official part of the University’s planning and reporting framework. The strategy describes what we want to do, and by when.

The implementation plan was presented at the annual Planning and Budget Conference where money is allocated for the forthcoming calendar year. (So yes, there is a six-month lag between approval of budget and the appearance of actual money on the (virtual) table. Previous experience has shown that much can happen in those six months — universities are very political organisations.) The implementation plan describes how we will make the strategy’s aspirations into realities; the governance model specifies who will be responsible for achieving the desired outcomes.

Decisions are made outside the committee room

Getting a new strategy, governance model and funding proposal approved is not simply a matter of writing the documents and sending them to the relevant committee secretaries. The real decisions of committees and boards are made outside the boardroom.

With the Information Futures Commission, we had the perfect project sponsor — a CEO who is adept at engagement with both ideas and people, who has a reputation for getting things done and who carries great personal credibility within the organisation.

We also had a project leader who combines expertise in her professional fields with a strong emphasis on finding the best possible outcome for everybody involved in a given situation.

Within the project team, we rehearsed many different ways of telling our story. These rehearsals influenced how we wrote the final documents, how we talked at meetings and forums, the selection of examples and anecdotes for presentations. We drew pictures on our whiteboard, we stuck flurries of Post-Its to the walls, and we talked across the partitions at least every half-hour (or whenever inspiration happened to strike). This verbal and visual creativity also provided a fair bit of laughter for the project team, and free entertainment for members of other project teams who worked in nearby cubicle pods.

Eventually some concepts and language became canonical — we reached a rough consensus about how we wanted to express our ideas to others — and this informed our discussions with the Steering Committee.

Throughout the life of the Commission, our sponsor and our leader each spent quite a bit of time and energy on meeting with individuals and groups, explaining the strategy and answering questions about what it means for the University. This intensified in the last two months, as the deadline for decisions drew nearer.

We also called on members of the Steering Committee, and other senior stakeholders, to add their voices to the general conversation — to talk with their colleagues and peers about adopting the strategy, to find money for its implementation.

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This September I will be presenting a short (30 minute) session at Oz-IA, a case study based on the Information Futures Commission.

Session title: “Developing a business-led information strategy”

In it, we’ll run briskly through a strategy development process that:

1. takes an holistic approach covering several information ‘domains’
2. is founded on business needs and priorities (enterprise architecture)
3. is informed by external trends, developments (business intelligence)
4. and balances organisational needs with individuals’ requirements and perspectives (user research)

Because the Oz-IA audience is mainly people who work on web sites and applications, I’ll focus on how we used several standard user-experience research methods in the strategy development process.

If you have any questions you’d like me to address in this session, leave a comment below or send me an email.

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In our diamond-shaped process diagram, we are accelerating towards the pointy bit.

Next time I use this shape to represent a project process, I try to show that the rate of activity increases as you move into the final third of the process.

Actually, it’s not the volume of work or activity that’s increasing. It’s the team’s perception that has changed: as final deadlines loom, we become more conscious that there is limited time to achieve all of our goals.

From the outset we knew those deadlines existed; we even knew the dates on which they will fall. Knowing is different from feeling.

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A related question has come up several times in the last couple of months. When we ask a senior stakeholder for an opinion about what issues the Commission should tackle, the response is often,”Well, what are other universities doing?”

Scope of the Commission

The Information Futures Commission is developing a 10-year strategy for how the University of Melbourne deals with four kinds of scholarly information:

1. Published information and collections used by our scholars to inform their learning, teaching and research, for example library collections, archives, museum and gallery collections.
2. Materials created for learning and teaching purposes, eg course notes, presentation slides, customised ‘packs’ of selected readings for a particular subject, audio and video versions of lectures, and a range of digital objects that can be stored in a learning management system and reused in different ways and at different times
3. Information created in the course of research activities, eg numerical data collected from scientific instrumentation and laboratory work; information collected from surveys, interviews and other social studies; records of meetings and conversations between collaboration partners; models, plans or images created in the course of design, architectural or ethnographic research.
4. Research outputs such as papers, chapters, monographs, articles, letters, presentations, posters, demonstrations and speeches, processed research data, visualisations of large datasets, models, web sites and multimedia objects. Information produced for the purposes of community engagement can be considered a subset of this category.

As well as the information itself, we are looking at the technologies that we use to find, create, store, deliver, manipulate and distribute that information. And when we say ‘technologies’ we mean everything from library shelving systems to wireless Keepad clickers in classrooms.

What about those Joneses?

Some universities have rethunk their libraries recently — UC Berkeley and the University of Texas are good examples of this.

Many US and European universities are reviewing their IT functions and moving towards a shared-services model. This often involves adopting an ITIL framework for the delivery of IT services.

Support for e-research — large-scale computing, data storage and management etc — is not yet commonly tackled as part of a larger “library plus IT plus…” agenda. (Though I think Monash is leading the Australian way in how to provide information management services and support to researchers.)

As far as we are aware, no other anglophone university is looking at all four (or five) areas in an holistic manner.

Similarly, we haven’t found another library that is explicitly taking the larger organisation’s strategic/business goals as its starting point for a review. The library reviews that we’ve heard about tend to start with the observation that “library users’ practices are changing, so the library needs to change too.”

Asking the right question

Is the Information Futures Commission doing the right thing?
In the consultation phase of the project we have posed questions that are relevant to Melbourne University at this point in its history. Many of those questions won’t be relevant for other universities, because they arise from Melbourne’s particular strategic goals and ambitions.

Are we insanely ambitious? (Perhaps just insane?)

Will others follow our lead? (Do we care?)

Are we breaking fruitful new ground?

It seems there are no ‘right’ answers, no robust precedent to follow, no ‘best practice’ guidelines that we can use as a checklist for this project.

Instead we have designed a broad consultation process that seeks input from many sources and stakeholders. We will rigorously test the assumptions we make and, wherever possible, base our decisions on good evidence.

Ask me in 10 years whether we got it right :-)

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As the boss, Linda, noted last week, “The first stage of the consultation process has been focused on opening up the issues, exposing the complexity of the environment and the opportunities and challenges before us. In this way we hope to elicit a wide range of views and opinions and ensure that we have explored all the significant issues.”

We started by publishing a Consultation Paper that defined the questions we needed to address.

During March and April we have sought ideas and input from the University community and from external stakeholders. We have held forums with guest speakers, attended meetings, consulted widely, run an online survey, given presentations and invited written submissions.

This exploratory phase will conclude with a series of workshops in late April.

We have reached the widest part of the diamond shape in the diagram — it represents the half-way point for the process. Now we are entering a stage where we begin to refine our ideas based on what we have learned and the feedback received.

In early May we will hold a series of focus groups and other meetings to review all the input received and start drafting the 10-year strategy.

A draft document will be released for comment by the University community in early June.

Once finalised, the strategy will be submitted to an approval process that includes the Commission’s Steering Committee, Academic Board and University Council. An implementation plan will be submitted to the Planning and Budget Committee’s mid-year conference.

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