Pat’s Point of View

I’ve enjoyed watching Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares for several years now, it’s a great show and we all love to laugh (and cringe) at the predicaments the owners of these restaurants get themselves into before Gordon resurrects them. But it’s also a great example of a good consultant at work.

Our favourite football-star-turned-TV-chef exhibits several key traits, he is:

• confident – the meek might inherit the earth but they’re rubbish at getting the job done
• experienced – having done it all before he knows what he’s talking about and everyone knows it
• well rounded – it’s not just about the cooking, to run a successful restaurant you need to know about every aspect of the business
• eager to teach – he’s not a pompous prat who refuses to share his knowledge and experience, he gives it willingly

Gordon’s methodology on the TV show is simple but effective. One of the most useful parts of his approach is he breaks it down, demonstrating simple ‘tricks of the trade’ that can be the difference between staying afloat or going under. For example, I love the way he often shows how you can serve simple but elegant meals for mere pence, but sell it for a few quid.

By breaking the dire straits situation down to individual problems, the answers become quite simple. Like a lot of things, these answers are typically quite obvious, when viewed individually. The phrase “it’s not rocket surgery” seems to fit, but you need to work at the right resolution; the whole enchilada is too much to swallow in one go.

However, this is easier said than done. If you know what you’re doing you can salvage almost any situation. Gordon has a lot of experience, so he looks for patterns in each establishment he visits, patterns that reflect things he has dealt with in the past. With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight he can apply a solution. If you’re tackling something for the first time, it can be difficult to see the answer, even for a superstar chef.

Of course, the outsider’s perspective is a big advantage. The people in these failing restaurants are often blinded by their own myopia and apathy, even though they are talented, hard working people with the best intentions. They can’t see what’s happening right in front of their eyes, and in many cases they just don’t care anymore.

The parallels with being a consultant—particularly in the kind of work I do—are clear. And I think Gordon has the right approach to whipping his clients into shape. The swearing would certainly make my clients sit up and take notice :)

This analogy also highlights the importance of observing; spotting the points of pain and the root causes behind the troubles a restaurant is experiencing. This is equally important when working with my clients, for example examining the current situation with their website, intranet or information management practices. Then identifying the actions that would have the greatest impact in the shortest possible timeframe. Because we’re not talking about refinement in these situations, we’re talking about code red emergency, about to fall to pieces. That’s the scene we most often find ourselves in as consultants.

It’s a case of the 80/20 rule; forget trying to tackle everything, just tackle the key 20% of issues to keep your head above water (or the doors open in the case of a restaurant). Then once you’re up and running again you can smooth out the wrinkles and go for that Michelin Star!

Another key part of Gordon’s success is the fact that he aims to get people skilled-up and self-confident. He points them in the right direction then he f***s off (as Gordon would say). He doesn’t step in and do the work for them, otherwise when he leaves they would be back at square one. This is the only sustainable way; being a mentor as opposed to a contract expert.

So what? Well I am a big believer in uncovering useful things in places you’d least expect it. Yep, this is just a TV show, but I think we can all learn a thing or two from Gordon. In a way, this post is the spiritual successor to my earlier post about the Super Nanny. I wonder how many ‘celebrity consultants’ could be role models for the humble IT consultant.

Of course I’ve put myself right in it, I’m going to have to practice what I preach now. Have to get myself one of those funky chef’s shirts.

(Thanks to James for sparking off this idea.)

After an embarrassingly long time, I have finally finished a case study of an intranet redesign project I did for Canon more than a year ago.

This project highlighted that intranets do not need to be structured in the ‘traditional’ way (ie like public websites).

Instead of a single home page and a rigid view of the site, a fresh approach was taken, and the information architecture for [this intranet] makes use of personalisation to efficiently meet the needs of Canon staff.

Lastly, it is worth noting that the information architecture techniques devised for websites apply equally to intranets, sometimes more so. This is a key lesson for experienced information architecture practitioners.

Continuing my ‘exclusive tips’ for those who read my blog, what you won’t read much about in the article is the intranet alignment workshop we ran.

In any organisation, there are many stakeholders who are involved in the design or management of the intranet. The first challenge confronting many intranet projects therefore becomes to create a common vision for the intranet, to align the many stakeholders, and to define the role that each stakeholder will play.

Ask anyone who has worked in a large organisation on a website or intranet project, and they will tell you that getting management buy-in can be very difficult. Political battles over ownership of the site, and thus over its redesign, are commonplace. And without some early alignment and consensus, trying to get approval for design ideas later on can be heartbreaking.

Just a half-day workshop, held after some initial needs analysis has been performed, can work wonders. Key stakeholders get their chance to give their input, they can see progress is being made, and as a group can discuss those things that are often assumed (like what is the intranet for?).

Today I ran the first of my series of Information Architecture Fundamentals workshops. It was a good day, with a nice small group so we had lots of good discussion.

And it was a really great group of people too, with similar situations and levels of experience. Everybody worked in public sector, either health or education. And because these weren’t absolute beginners, I could dispense with some of the material in the course and discuss stuff that was a bit more advanced.

The feedback from attendees was really positive, with high praise for the lunch (oh and they thought I was pretty good too). The most frequent comments were that the group discussion was great, giving them a chance to hear other people’s perspective. The scope and level of detail was also appreciated. This is good since I deliberately tried to keep the focus on ‘big picture’ and properly defining the problem space, rather than jumping into the details of specific techniques, which IA training tends to do.

Next step Canberra, and there are plenty of places so I might see you there.

Yesterday I made what seemed like my millionth trip to Canberra. Nothing really deserved it’s own post, so here are a few tidbits:

• There a hell of a lot of roundabouts (‘traffic circles’ if you prefer) in Canberra. They are the ultimate in user self-governance. How democratic of Walter, although I suspect the prolific use of roundabouts has more to do with lowering the cost of road infrastructure by not having any traffic lights.
• Whilst the situation with cabs in Canberra is stupendously bad (if you’ve ever tried getting a cab at Canberra airport you know what I mean) it’s worth pointing out that the taxi drivers are pretty good. They’re tidy, polite, topical, they speak English, and they know their way around. Unlike most Sydney taxi drivers who don’t tick any of these boxes (who hasn’t had to give their cabbie directions to a well-known destination?). Dare I say it, this is likely because Canberra’s cab drivers aren’t fresh off the boat.
• I met a lady named Gwenda. It’s like her parents couldn’t decide between Gwen and Glenda. It’s annoying but not as bad as the thing where people create a new name by spelling an existing name incorrectly (eg Jorja, Kortny). I think there are more than enough names in the world without resorting to this kind of ‘creativity’. Either way, I think it’s rather cruel of parents to give their children such stupid names.

See what people are blogging about: Canberra, Canberra cabs, roundabout, business travel, stupid baby name

Recently I’ve been faced with having to present design ideas to a client, as part of strategic recommendations, prior to a user-centred design process having begun.

The reason behind this is to create some enthusiasm and gain buy-in for improvements to a website, to meet their strategic business goals. Without showing them some ideas—including examples of the end product from other sites—the feeling is that we wouldn’t get the go ahead to start a proper design process. This isn’t uncommon in the real world of doing business with clients.

However, I am not particularly comfortable with this approach for several reasons. Firstly, from experience I know that clients often see these suggestions and fall in love with them, demanding they go into production. No matter what you come back and say later, you can’t renege these ‘golden’ ideas. We have included in our recommendations that user research be conducted, with the view that these ideas may potentially be disqualified based on what we learn about the needs of the target audience. But it might be too late by then.

Secondly, the ideas being suggested at this point are not in any way based on the needs of the target audience. They are based on the ideas which some consultants think would be good. And we’re talking about fairly complex functionality; discussion tools, comparators, information sifting. (Can we spell ‘featuritis’?) We just don’t know if that’s what this particular audience wants or will use.

Obviously we could be on to a winner with these features, after all we are supposed to design new innovative solutions. Usability testing will probably reveal if the suggested functionality is not going to work. I’d just be happier if we started with some understanding of the audience needs, rather than the client’s business objectives.

I am probably particularly sensitive to this issue. In a former life I worked in technical development and engineering, then later in the world of marketing and graphic design. These are two worlds notorious for creating websites they would use rather than something their audience would use. In order to move away from that mentality I have become a bit of a zealot and tend to get all shirty when someone doesn’t do things right.

That said, the argument for showing our hand, so to speak, is compelling. If we don’t get the design work we can’t do anything at all. Like I said this isn’t new, I’ve seen it many times before but in the past I’ve just bitched and whined and put up with it. I expected more this time round.

So I’m wondering, does anyone have any suggestions for solving this chicken-and-egg? How do you find a balance between giving the client an idea of what could be possible without short-circuiting the user-centred design process? This is surely an important issue for those of us working in this field.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about recruiting users (or I could don a lab coat and call them subjects) for usability testing.

I’ve spent the last year focused on intranets, which when it comes to this, are a breeze. You have a captive audience which can be defined quite well—in terms of job roles and information needs—through a bit of ethnographic research, they are usually close by and are usually quite happy to participate (if it comes to it you can always get their boss to make them do it…<evil laugh>).

Now, working on a website is a whole different ball game. There’s a lot of talk about usability testing—who to test, how many subjects, how to run the sessions—but not a lot on how to find a good source of representative subjects.

In the past, I’ve used two techniques when working on public projects: guerrilla style and external testing. By guerrilla (I just love that word) I mean low-cost, in-house testing where you make use of carefully selected colleagues/friends/family. At the other extreme we almost totally outsourced the recruitment and provision of test labs. Each is a valid technique, if applied appropriately, but both have obvious drawbacks.

Your client might already be in contact with key customers (such as in the case of B2B) and allow you access to their staff, but this is not that common for most projects, and more importantly, are these going to be representative users?

Probably the most popular method of recruitment is to use an external recruiter, normally a market research firm, who can get you subjects. Sometimes they even get you subjects you specify! But this is pretty bloody expensive.

A recent addition to the proverbial toolkit is Usability Exchange which makes it a bit easier by facilitating remote online sessions (specifically for accessibility). But remote testing of this nature has major drawbacks. It’s not surprising that it’s focus is on the more mechanical aspects of accessibility; so much of what you might learn from a one-on-one session is lost with this arrangement.

AGIMO have an interesting bit in their tookit on recruiting participants, although it doesn’t go into specifics. Some of their suggestions are interesting, and the list of pros and cons seems very sensible. Having never used some of these methods (such as cold calling or advertising in the newspaper) I’m not sure how practical they would would be, or how enthusiastic most clients would be to use them.

So it’s looking like the best approach is still to try a combination of methods that are suitable for the specific situation you find yourself in. No silver bullet here…or is there? Do you have a favoured technique for getting hold of usability testing subjects? C’mon let’s hear it.

(And this is just for your usual usability testing, what about cultural probes and other more ‘intrusive’ techniques? How do you find subjects for those?)

I’ve just published another article, this time it’s Feed your enterprise with RSS in which I discuss the benefits of using news feeds.

Conceptually, ‘news feeds’ are quite simple, allowing content to be delivered over the internet. Web users are very familiar with the idea of feeds, but what about their use within an organisation?

The life of a consultant is a much varied one. My work environment can be different from one day to the next; in an office one day, workshop the next; call centre here, corporate HQ there; noisy bunch, morgue-like quiet; heart of the city, God-knows-where.

Going from client to client, office to office, desk to desk, is like starting a new job every few weeks. You are in a different environment, you don’t know anyone and people look at you funny when you make ‘school boy errors’ (look how was I supposed to know you had to hold down all three buttons to get hot water to come out, I mean come on people!). On top of this you need to get the job done efficiently. Luckily the process of learning your way around and learning about an organisation is closely aligned with needs analysis work. You have to get to know people and learn how it all ticks.

You get to travel a bit too—I’ve been to most Australian capital cities recently, but no overseas yet. Today I just happen to be in an outer suburb of Brisbane. This is interesting as you get to see the differences between cities (and states). Maybe it’s because of the time I spent overseas or because my impressions of other places in Australia were shaped by childhood experiences (and I didn’t pay much attention), but in the last year I have noticed many things during my interstate travel. For example, the accent. I used to dismiss Brits who said they could hear differences in the Australian accents of people from, say, Sydney and Perth. But I now believe there is a difference. Most recently, I’ve noticed the Brisbane (or perhaps Queensland) accent and a while back, the Adelaide accent.

The other thing I have noticed is the number of Kiwis over here. Again, maybe I just didn’t notice before, but since coming back from the UK it seems the level of immigration from New Zealand has shot up. Not that this is a bad thing, but it’s noticeable.

Anyway, I’m off to earn some more frequent flyer points.

I was recently in the unfortunate position of having to work through the night to complete a project for the next morning. In this case, the work involved writing a fairly long report critiquing a client’s website.

The next day, looking back on what I had written, I formulated the ’3am writing’ axiom "at 3:00am sentences often sound really, really good—but they’re not".

I found several instances of 3am writing, but my favourite is:

The site is like a novel but what you want is a fortune cookie.

Scott Berkun, author of The Art of Project Management is running a one day masterclass on Leading successful web and software projects in early September, in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra.

I’m looking forward to this as I’ve really liked what Scott has had to say in the past, and I sure could use some tips on project management! :)

More information can be found on the Step Two Designs website.

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