Healthy Web Projects

Transcription

1 The Helpful Guide to Healthy Web Projects How to deliver successfully with agile and open source Good for you, good for your projects

2 How often do you hear of web projects that are late, over-budget, and don t meet user needs or expectations? The problem is with the way web projects are procured, specified and managed. We believe there s a better way: Using open source tools, agile project management, and a collaborative approach to procurement and client/agency relationships. We work hard to earn our reputation for delivering successful projects. This booklet distills some of our experience into a short, easy to read guide. This is our helpful guide to healthy web projects...

3 Tip 1: Eat Less Historically, web projects were like Mr Creosote in the Monty Python sketch jamming themselves full of requirements un?l they exploded. A healthy web project eats smaller amounts more oden. Instead of procuring a huge project, break it down into smaller phases, and within each of those divide all of the work up into 2- week sprints. Then, during the project, you should only ever be ea?ng the current two weeks worth of work. And it s worth learning to say no when people want to put extra func?onality on the plate or if that s difficult, at least schedule it for a later phase. Reducing the amount you try to eat at any one?me will be a big first step towards healthy projects.

4 Tip 2: Eat The Right Things You used to just have a simple choice with large web projects: 1. Ready Meals (Proprietary Software) What s great about this is that you can just pick what you want off the shelf, heat it up quickly and it s ready to go. There s normally a big company s logo on the box to give you some reassurance (but it may not have been made by them). Also, the price is clearly marked on the packet, so you can set your budget. On the downside, you don t really know the quality of ingredients or hygiene with which it was made. You also can t change anything about it. The vendor can offer custom extensions, but that s essen?ally offering to garnish your ready meal with a bag of prepared salad. 2. Employ a team of personal chefs (Bespoke software) What s great about this is that you can have anything made for you at all, whenever you want it. The downside is that they re difficult to recruit (especially as it s not your own area of exper?se), and you end up with essen?al knowledge that can walk out of the door. If they leave, their replacements won t know how your favourite recipes were prepared. Most of all, this is very expensive, and you re s?ll paying a very high rate even if you some?mes just want something simple. But there is now a middle way: Go to a restaurant (Open Source agencies) A great way to get the quality and flexibility of a team of personal chefs, but without having the overhead of employing them full?me, is to go to a restaurant. The restaurant has a full?me professional team of chefs, who are true experts. They serve other people as well as you, and that spreads the costs. The very top chefs open source their recipes you can just browse amazon to see cook- books by Gordon Ramsay and more, showing exactly how to make even their signature dishes. That way you could if you wanted ask another chef to make these dishes, or you could even have a go yourself if you really wanted to! It s the best value way of geyng really good food.

5 Tip 3: Choose Quality If you re buying a ready meal, you can get the 1.99 version from a big chain of value supermarkets, or you can get the 5.99 version from a higher quality chain. Do you think it s the same thing inside? The recent horse- meat scandal shows it isn t. The same is true for web projects. Of course, you want to buy the best value but value is the balance between quality and price that is best for you and your project, not just the cheapest price. So if one supplier is a lot cheaper than others, look at why. Do they have the right calibre of staff? Do they invest in the con?nuous development of their team, so that they are at the forefront of their profession? Do they have good quality management processes? Do they have professional project managers, and take project management very seriously? Are they truly involved in the community of the open source project in ques?on? And so on. Evaluate your poten?al suppliers very carefully you want to be sure your web project doesn t contain horse- meat!

6 Tip 4: Skip Dessert & Snacks It s important to go through your project in the right order, just like a 3- course meal. All the important nutri?on is in the starter and main course. If you have room ader that then, sure, you can have a tasty dessert. But if you find you can only eat two courses it s much beder for you to have eaten the healthy nutri?ous part, however temp?ng the sugary fady dessert may have looked. For that reason, it s also important not to snack on chocolate bars and other sweet treats between meals it may mean you don t have enough room for the important things at dinner?me. Projects are just the same. All the requirements should be listed from top to bodom in order of priority so that no two items can be the same priority. Then your team should only work down them in that order. That way, if you hit a technical problem that causes delays, you can just skip the nice to have items at the end in order to finish on?me while s?ll delivering the really important stuff. Also, it s important to be able to focus on the main project without was?ng?me on distrac?ng side- tasks.

7 Tip 5: Get Your Vitamins Just as with our meals, it s important to get a good balance of essen?al vitamins in order to have a healthy web project: Vitamin A is for Agile a proven framework for managing complex projects. Much of what is described in this booklet is a simple overview of the Agile principles. Most people that say they do Agile actually only implement a small subset of the principles, or twist it to fit their current broken ways of working. It s important to adopt the framework properly to get the full rewards. Vitamin C is for Code it s important that this is open source and you have access to it. This means you, or others, can check what s in it, which is good for quality and security. It also helps prevent vendor lock- in. During procurement make sure you re sekking open source vendors and solu?ons, and ensure your contracts support this. Vitamin D is for Discovery web projects are complex. Use a discovery phase to examine the requirements, surface issues, and inves?gate these issues. This ensures you develop the best plan for what to deliver, and helps manage the risk of that delivery. In some case it can even be worth building quick and dirty prototypes.

8 Next Steps We ll soon be publishing a white paper with an in- depth review of the best prac?ce applica?on of Agile, Lean, Quality and Risk Management in delivering healthy successful projects. If you re serious about a beder way of running projects, it s a must- read. Contact us below to get a copy. We deliver training and coaching in delivering healthy projects with Agile and Open Source. Contact us to find out more about how we can help you and your team to adopt these best prac?ces. If you work in the public sector, we are a G- Cloud supplier, so you can search for us, and buy from us, there. You can also review the GDS service design manual, which is excellent, at: hdps:// manual This is version 1.1 of this document. It s a living document and will con?nually evolve and expand. Please keep checking back for new versions at hdp:// healthy Contact Us You can contact us to discuss your needs, and how we could help you: Steve Parks, UK Managing Director: steve.parks@wunderroot.com Steve Hunton, UK Opera?ons and Projects Manager: steve.hunton@wunderroot.com

9 About WunderRoot We re 140 business consultants, developers and designers working in nine European countries, including the UK. We help well- known brands and forward- thinking governments solve their business problems and work beder and we use the web to do it. We consult, design, develop, host, support, train and coach, using Drupal open- source sodware and Agile project management. We re Drupal specialists WunderRoot is Europe s largest Drupal- only professional services firm and we have some of the best Drupal developers on our team. We believe in Drupal its open- source technology and open community keep it innova?ve, flexible, reliable, user focused and lower cost. We re very ac?ve in Drupal s collabora?ve environment, which means we can bring our clients the newest ideas and the best solu?ons. We re Agile specialists We use Agile methodology, specifically the Scrum framework, on all of our projects. It focuses our efforts on what our clients and their customers need. We deliver in short itera?ons through Agile, moving with change and crea?ng value we can demonstrate. We work flexibly, openly and transparently. Clients can see all of our documenta?on, adend all of our project mee?ngs, access all of our code. At any?me, they know what we re working on and how we re progressing. We re friendly experts If it s part of your business, it s part of our answer so we want you to tell us about it. Our clients get the most from our technical knowledge and project experience because we re open, honest, approachable people.