This week marks the start of two major projects that will run until late March (and forced me to cancel my trip to New Zealand – sorry bro!).
- Both of our two major websites are failing to deliver results for either our business or customer needs. We finally got the nod to begin addressing the problems and this week we started the project with a kick-off workshop day. Myself, four colleagues and the external agency fffunction spent the day finding out the scope of the problems and the opportunities. We are employing the GDS project phases of discovery, aplha, beta to live. January and early February will be “Find out what your users need, what to measure and what your constraints are“. For much of the remainder of the week I met with staff from across the service to hear what their needs were and to hear how we could best find out how we could meet real users/customers. The list of ideas are captured in a public trello board. I need to fire up our labs blog in the coming weeks to write about the project in the open.
- I met with our marketing officer to discuss plans for 2014
- I had a productive Skype call with a researcher at UWE and hope that we can collaborate on researching the use of kiosks at our M Shed museum.
- I contributed to a City wide planning meeting about an HLF digital project. I co-wrote the HLF digital guidance so it was slightly strange to hear folks quoting words I’d written a few years ago.
- A potential volunteer got in touch to offer his web skills for February. I’m hoping he can experiment with RFID and Raspberry Pi as I just haven’t found the time.
- The most important strand of work until Mid march is our Arts Council bid for 2015-2018. I had 3 minutes to pitch my thoughts on our digital activity road map.
- I managed to attend the always enlightening Social Media South West #SoMeSW event
- Finally I had a really nice chat with the curator responsible for Nature Sciences about possible digital activity
- A bonus work day was attending the fantastic govukcamp 2014 on Saturday in London which i’ll blog about soon.