All posts tagged project management

Mar

Look at my graph, my graph is amazing

Categories: News

Tags: big toe, HighCharts, KISS, project management, Project manager, XML

Competition, competition, competition.

I think I have been naughty. I have completed the creation of the Big.TOE spec ready for formal sign-off… and I did it before looking in detail at the competition. Hmm, naughty indeed.

“But, but, but, I was really busy and everything was…” SHUT UP! Leave the excuses and move on. As it turns out we’re safe, and this is due to Big.TOEs collaborative element. Big.TOE had been guided by colleagues into a niche that not only exists, but suits our ethics here at Connected.

Phew, thanks guys!

So I spent a day looking at the competition in detail, and then sighed with relief. They are all so complicated. Even the free stuff. You’ve got to spend hours of annoying time-waste to get the answer to the simple question “How well are banners doing?”. And when you get the answer you’re surrounded by an infinite number of ways to see it. Very very naff and annoying.

Another ‘sigh-of-relief-inducer’ is that they nearly all use third-party cookies which a visitor can opt out of. Woah. What a way to undermine your reporting. Cue shameless Big.TOE plug:

Big.TOE is server side reporting, so no third-party cookies.
Big.TOE follows the principle of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) and will be bloody easy to use!!

So bring on the competition!

—-

This week we also delved a layer deeper into the inner workings of Big.TOE and gulped again.

Actually it doesn’t look too bad. We have a list of features for the first release and a technical plan (first draft) of how it will be achieved. There is some stuff to learn (like xml and excel) but it should piece together fine. The eye opener is how much bigger things look when you go deeper, it really is like descending from 30,000 ft.

—-

Well, now I have just gone and changed everything.

We – almost all of the company techs – were unanimously decided to base Big.TOE on XML. XML was to be the glue to stitch the different parts together. But now I have found something called Highcharts, which is just luuurvely. Its a 100% JavaScript graph building suite… and its luuurvely.

Highcharts is very attractive for many reasons; here are the main ones:

An example HighCharts Graph

The graphs are just ace. The graphs are really really really ace!
Its on the front end, offering tasty interaction between the graphs and the clients
Very flexible with the data sent to them.
Its JavaScript, giving opportunity to develop it, or tweak it.
The graphs are just ace.

It can work with xml, but it doesn’t off the shelf. Now I want to use this, cos I like it. So I just have to persuade everyone else to agree to its loveliness. We can keep xml – if we still want it – for later upgrades. Trust me

Mar

Avoid re-inventing the wheel

Categories: News

Tags: basecamp, common sense, design, google, project management, Website

Comments: No

If you are thinking of re-designing your web-site then here are a couple of useful tips that could save you a load of development cost, reduce the hassle and speed up delivery. Just because you’re re-creating or re-building your site that is no reason to build the whole thing from scratch. Most of your visitors will care little for the new funky imagery you have planned, nor notice the cute new design cues. People visit web site to get stuff done and to imbibe enough of the culture and feel to reach a comfort factor. That’s it.

1. Managing the build and delivery process might be new to you but is a well worn path for many others. Using a simple and low-cost collaborative project management tool such as Basecamp with some standard templates will make sure you have covered all your bases and ease the whole deployment process. I’m quite surprised when I see clients kicking-off new web projects with a blank Microsoft Project page; that is just about the most expensive and complicated way to run a web project.

2. Unless you are a tightly controlled international brand then consider buying a standard design template for a few hundred quid and then paying a good designer to evolve it to fit your needs. This can save tens of thousands of pounds in design costs and, typically, also has the benefit that the designs are usually turned into web-ready code.

3. Don’t design and build your own search. Add Google’s rather good site search engine to your site, it costs less than £200 for 50,000 searches. The results tend to be rather good and you have the additional benefit of some halo branding as Google allow the use of their logo. If you are being pikey, or just different then use Microsoft’s Bing Box which is free for the moment.

4. Use an off-the-shelf e-commerce system. Unless your entire business model is built around a different approach to e-commerce then use one of the myriads of solutions that just work. Costs start from free and go up to £1m+ so you’ll need to choose carefully and do aim for an application that has a combination of ease of use for visitors and ease of maintenance.

5. Finally, remember to test your new design against the old one – I assume you are looking for an improvement in performance so set a target, say a 10% increase in sales/enquiries/registrations and be harshly critical of the new design if it doesn’t match up.

If you want any pointers and ideas about how to speed up development, improve performance and reduce costs then drop us a line.

Feb

I’ve Started So I’ll Finish… I Promise

Categories: News

Tags: big toe, project management, Project manager, scope, spec

Comments: No

So week 1 of my first project and the pressure is on. Proper on. As in ‘ring spasm-ingly on’. But thats cool, I can handle that.

Gulp.

How the hell can you ‘Project Manage’ a vague idea into a product? How do you start?… Well here is the thought process we (I got some help from the guys in the office cos I was blundering round like a blind dog) went through to turn the vagueness into something more solid, albeit still an idea:

We (Connected) decided we wanted something. We have been calling it BIG.Toe for a long time and everyone has a sense of what it is. A window into VITES, a face to VITES.
We looked at who we could sell it to – in fact – who we needed to sell it to.
We came to the conclusion of marketers.
We looked at who marketers were – ‘busy, non-tech etc…’
We looked at what general features marketers want (note we haven’t got a product yet).
We married what Big.TOE could provide to what marketers want (idea of product)
We populated a list of features that agreed on this marriage (a product)
We then broadly spec’d the product, which for us was mapping an interface, (note the spec was very broad indeed.)

Phew! Thanks guys we have an idea for a product!

—-

I had a milestone to present a scope accompanied by a spec to the boss which was coming up so that was the next stage. So I took the broad spec we drew up in the thinking-meeting the day before and completely annihilated it. I owned it. I questioned every aspect of it, attempting to keep the goals of Big.TOE in mind and I did a bloody good job. I managed to reduce a multi-page spec with drill down navigation down to three (yes 3) pages, with only 4 form fields, all in the aim of applying KISS. Our clients don’t want Big.TOE to be a complicated thing to use.

As it turned out I had missed a couple of elements… but that is fine. I talked about Big.TOE to my colleagues and these holes were quickly filled in. Essentially the spec had been through a transformation and had become more refined… It was good fun that. Whapap!

—-

Received some advice. “Be careful with time estimations“. You’re better off saying I don’t know, give me a day (or half a day) to make an estimate then blurting one out. People will hold you to an estimate; not to the minute, but if you’re 500% off – see linked article below – then you can end up in a world of pain.

Software development: dealing with awful estimates (programmers.stackexchange.com)

Feb

Getting my hands dirty

Categories: News

Tags: big toe, business intelligence, project management, reporting, trial & error economics, visitor tracking, VITES™ Platform

Comments: No

I have been at Connected for over 16 months. Throughout this time I have heard the term Big.TOE mentioned several times and never understood it. When I first got here I didn’t understand anything, and when I would request explanations on this interestingly named… thing, I would be told it means “Business Intelligence Group Theory of Everything” and nothing else.

As time went by and as I learnt more, and learnt quickly, I received more in-depth answers on Big.TOE but they were still vague; it was never defined to me in the simple terms of ‘Big.TOE is this’. But over time I built a picture of what Big.TOE is or – more to the point – what it is going to be.

Big.TOE is going to be the best use of the data from VITES. Specifically it’ll be a reporting tool.

So, recently, Big.TOE was kicked off by inviting most of the guys for a meeting to discuss the ideas and goals of Big.TOE and to push it into production, I raised my hand to be the ‘project sponsor’, and I was selected. As this is my first project it was suggested that I write a diary… so here we are. The diary will follow in weekly installments.

Dec

Project management…collaboration stylee

Categories: News

Tags: basecamp, collaboration, project management, the cloud, transparency

Comments: No

We rolled out Basecamp company-wide in January 2008 and now manage around 70 live projects in a wonderfully collaborative manner. It dramatically changed how the organisation worked internally and many of the clients subsequently took up using the application themselves for other projects. Changing from an ugly and ill-formed email-based system into a simple, fast and cloud-enabled application has reduced costs, increased control and brought a whole host of really important improvements to how we work... Read more

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All posts tagged project management

Look at my graph, my graph is amazing

Competition, competition, competition.

Avoid re-inventing the wheel

I’ve Started So I’ll Finish… I Promise

Related articles

Getting my hands dirty

Project management…collaboration stylee