Wednesday 5: Rasmus Frey and Martin Elneff, "Creating better solutions through incremental change"

You're not Microsoft - don't make things more complicated than they are
Also, it's not a USP, so you don't have to say "Agile" just to get the gig.

Rasmus Frey - consultant

NGO - Kvinfo? - research institutions on women gender women's rights
"We like women, so it seemed like a good fit for us"

Major "clusterfuck" of multiple websites, multiple developers, no documentation.
Library - traditional paper lib, 18,000 titles
Online magazine called "FORUM"
Mentor network
Searchable repository
Expert database
Women Dialogue
Kvinde woMen history

Question they aked us:
Stay or migrate?
"Yes" - do both.

Don't always listen specifically to what the client is asking for -
they don't know exactly what they're asking for.
Get problems rather than solutions.
"Want a better search" - well, you have bad findability. Let's work on that
First budget for twelve months.
Can we be agile on a strategic level?
We think so. We called it "incremental change"
Split into little tasks

Every designer's dream is radical change - iconoclastic! Extreme makeover
Instead designwise we had to incrementally change.
[Reckons designers were happy with this, but I'm not sure if they
wouldn't prefer ripping it up...!]

Developers liked this, as they could poke around in there and make
small improvements, and find out how things work

N hours - "getting to know you"
It's research but it was more about getting aligned with the vision
Send us their business plan
We sent them our business plan

Subsite design coherence
Colourcoded logos
Consistent header across all subsites

Advised them on the CMF
As we're a web agency ourselves we got in lots of other people to get
experience of all different platforms.
As it was open-source, people were interested in the migration without
necessarily putting up money.
In the end, not hard to choose - Drupal was the perfect choice
But we still had multiple platforms - existing platform
They had a free hosting platform, but now they have to pay.

Almost finished this now
Ground rules for the future:
Read your client's business plan
Try to avoid hand-grenades: large, potentially dangerous changes
[minimum deployable feature]
TALK. Have to talk.
Retainer for fixing stuff up? Never get around to it.
Monthly workshop where we click through the site and talk about how
they're doing