• Initial request

  This real estate agency needed to diffuse more information, manage its content creation in 3 languages and confort positioning in Google with a link to external system for product database.

• Solution retained

  • New graphic design,
  • WordPress multilingual CMS solution,
  • Daily custom content import system from their product management software with OpenImmo API,
  • Tracking and smooth transitioning of SEO @ Google,
  • Mobile friendly.

• Technology

  • WordPress / WPML solution,
  • Open Immo API mapping and imports from their product management platform,
  • New LAMP VPS server.

• Evolution

  After 6 month, some evolutions are under way.

• Initial request

  LaGourmetBox came to me at the initial phase of the project to have advice on how to launch their activity online.

• Mission

  My intervention covered 3 areas:

  • Technical consulting: From initial phases to launch and follow-up, consultancy in all technical aspects of the architecture.
  • Architecture and UX: Technical and UX choices and definition
  • Project management: Management of production ressources and technical implementation.

• Technology

  • LAMP servers (CentOs),
  • Magento eCommerce CMS,
  • Partners APIs,
  • Paiement systems,

• Methodology

  • Business oriented IT,
  • KISS principles,
  • Iterative development,

 

• Initial request

  TwoNav had launch a new eCommerce website on a new platform. They had speed issues with this new system and has a hard time organising their architecture around this new project.

• Mission

  The mission was composed of 3 phases:

  • Analysis and interview: In order to understand what the business really was about and what the business needs were, interviews where performed with all implicated parties. Analysis of the current state of the systems and legacy was done in order to propose the most effective solution.
  • Architecture design: We designed the optimal architecture taking into account all existing systems and current developments…
  • Planning: …and proposed short term / middle term / long term planning for implementation.

• Technology

  • LAMP servers,
  • Magento eCommerce CMS,
  • Symfony2 framework,
  • Internal and external APIs,
  • Geoportal products,

• Methodology

  • Scalable System Architecture,
  • Business oriented IT,
  • KISS principles,

 

This has spawned the concept of Rapid and Agile development in NPD (New Product Development). You run sprints of 2 weeks with little definition, then sit down, then take it from there, sprint after sprint. The approach is great when you can afford the process and when you have the proper company culture for visual navigation in development. Usually to develop a new product. But this is often not the case.

On the other hand, your team can easily integrate the concepts on which these techniques are based. They help set foundations for negotiation with the business side when creating new features or applications.

1/ Talk them out of it

They came up with an uber long list of top notch features they absolutely need. What they are really saying is they want an usable application.

You want to keep it simple so it can be perfect and practical.

Focus on usability and simplicity. Show examples and find simplicity in benchmarks they might showcase. All successful apps concentrate on usability and simplicity to deliver the first release (or beta), then build on top of a real solid base. Share this view and agree on the principles.

Your tools for negotiation are cost and time. Business is very aware of what cost and time mean. Go fast and simple.

2/ Pareto principle

20% of the effort cover 80% of the needs. 80% of the effort will be needed to cover the remaining 20%. You know about it, everyone knows about it.

Start from there. What are the basics your application absolutely needs to deliver for the business to run? This a joint reflexion you need to have with salespeople in your organisation, for every side of the application ask how specific features contribute to the company’s strategy or key metrics. Sit down, make a list and create three groups:

• Absolute necessity (red)
• Great help (orange)
• Nice to have (green)

Now focus on the red part. Break it down if needed and iterate.

Doing this, jointly with the business people you will quickly identify where the first efforts should be placed. Agree on delivering first what really matters for the organisation to do business and start from there.

3/ What can you take out of your application?

I believe the credit for this phrase is to be given to someone from Twitter. I could not find the source, but the concept is fairly simple: In IT, we like to complicate things based on the assumption that this will offer more flexibility in the future. Is that always the case?

Rather than spending time complicating things that will create more headache in the future, why not simplify things? Is this pile of joint tables with standardized objects really a request from the users or rather what they really want is a simple text field? Sometimes IT cannot answer this question. When we should take the time to understand and simplify, we take more time to create a beautify standardized system of complex elements that will take forever to implement, and that no one will really know how to use.

Take the time to make the dumbest feature… really usable. That’s how they came out with Twitter. 140 character field. Period.

4/ Advocacy within your team

Developers love beautifully complicated systems. Although these might sometimes be needed, they are often not what is expected. Excess complexity can seriously damage your development time and deliverability. The KISS (Keep It Stupid Simple or rather Keep It Smart & Simple) principle has to be adopted by everyone in your team. Fast, clean, simple… perfect.

5/ Deliver

Delivering is part of the process. Business understand available and ready. When it’s here and it’s simple and usable, they will understand quickly how this is way much useful than the 6-month development feature they though they wanted.

In the end building apps is much more of a joint effort than what’s expected from both parties. IT likes to keep the recipe secret to make everyone believe it’s magic, business wants everything today. Successful teams talk, exchange, understand each other and keep it real.

You liked this? You did not? Tell me about it below.

Of course, all systems have history and an easy answer is to blame it on predecessors, their misunderstanding or outdated/bad development. But this only reinforces a negative vision of company IT and distracts from taking the lead in changing collaborator mindset.  So, a few basic rules:

1/ Accept

The first step is to accept and say “thank you for telling me this”. Take the bullet. This might not be the first thing that comes to mind but it does have an immediate positive impact:

• You are strong. Business people like Darwin’s phrase “Survival for the fittest”. To be respected you have to play hard and take the bullet when needed.
• You are open. People will feel they can come and talk to you. In the future they will know they can raise issues earlier because you have shown openness to criticism. This reinforces your position. When other departments have problems, they should come and talk with you as early as possible.
• The discussion has started. This is a necessary step towards resolution. And you already are in the process.

With acceptance cleared out of the way, there are no more bullets to shoot so your partnership can get down to work.

2/ Exchange

Bad IT is most of the time due to misunderstanding. You need to figure out the business and most of all understand what it is sales really want. This is a whole other issue we will not develop here. It’s a subject of its own.

• Discuss it. Understand the needs. Go into details. Take the time.
• They came with complains, you are listening to them. Once again communication reinforces your position. Openness. IT experts often lack communication skills. Real communication with others, people exchanging views. Where can we go from here?  What could be an ideal solution for you?  What are your needs? How is the current system not delivering properly? What do you expect from an excellent IT? How can we help increase your business, make it easier, faster?

Once you exchanged and everyone expressed what’s in their heart, you can define new business rules together (in stone of course).

3/ Define

Change request management 101. Definition. We are not talking about NPD (New Product Development) or Agile Development or Extreme Programming. This is fixing, you need clear, written operating procedures to formulate clear requests to IT.

Again this is also a whole story of its own, fight for definition. Facilitate it, pay someone to do it, do it if needed.

Then make sure the procedure is understood and validated by the business side. They need to agree on all parts. This includes timeframe and cost.

Do not do anything until this is clear.

4/ Deliver

This is your job. Deliver the improvement. Make the changes. Make it work within timeframe and cost.

5/ Communicate

This is when you really start to act on the company’s culture. Business had a problem. You solved it.

You are now part of the performance, you deliver stuff you all agreed was needed and business can now deliver, thanks to IT.

Talk about it. Manager meeting. Internal IT Blog. Personally go at their desk to ask about the change. Is it good? Does it work? is it helping?

Thank everyone for their precise input that helped you make the system work. Ask them for more whenever they feel more can be done.

You are now an effective partner the business people can count on to deliver.

You liked this? You did not? Tell me about it below.

• Initial request

  The customer wanted to evaluate the IT department and code was based on 10 years of piling bits of application and was slowing time to market of new products. Website was aging.

• Mission

  A one year mission to close the team in Barcelona, contract with an outsourcing company in Romania, start refactoring the complete platform while insuring business as usual.

• Technology

  • LAMP servers,
  • Symfony framework,
  • Responsive fronts, custom on frontend, bootstrap on backend,
  • AngularJS,
  • New API integrations,

• Methodology

  • SCRUMBAN,
  • SCRUM,
  • Outsourcing of all IT,

 

• Initial request

  The customer wanted  to show complete and up to date information for partners, customers and investors in one place. We had to connect the website to the City’s financial market information on the company’s share data.

• Solution retained

  A custom CMS solution was chosen, allowing presentation of external data, company information and company updates and announcements.

• Technology

  • Custom Php/MySQL CMS solution,
  • UI based on Mootools,
  • Connexion with financial web services.

 

• Technology

  • Custom PHP/MySQL CMS based personalization,
  • UI based on Bootstrap,
  • Integration of social APIs,
  • Emailings with Mailchimp integration.

 

• Initial request

  The initial request was to create an interactive presentation of geographical data in Flash format to inform mayors. We immediately ruled out flash and introduced a Google Maps API based approach, which instantly divided the cost of the project by more than half.
  It also allowed more data to be integrated more rapidly and the user experience to be much easier and wider across platforms.

• Solution retained

  The project turned out to be rather a geographical portal than an animation of geographical data.
  Creation of content was discussed and a CMS based approach for creation and positioning of markers and info was build.
  After 4 years, new data is coming from government organisms who now are partners and sponsors of the project.

• Technology

  • Geographical API based. At firstGoogle Maps and then French Geographical API.
  • PHP/MySQL custom CMS.
  • Mootools UI Framework.
  • Custom Photoshop scripts to treat all photos and initial Google Maps Layers.
  • Fluid full screen design with side panel.

• Evolution

  The decision to switch from Google Maps to IGN geoportal API is based on the precision and relevance of data provided by the IGN. As a french government agency, they provide data that is more relevant to mayors, like public real estate register.

• Initial request

  The customer wanted to open a blog, simple, strait-forward, that he could handle.

• Solution retained

  We decided to create a blog using the most famous (and simple) open-source platform for blogging: WordPress.

• Technology

  • WordPress, hosted,
  • Social APIs and diffusion in Twitter and Facebook connected pages,
  • Gigantic tag cloud of french politics.

• Audience

  Audience rises at a steady pace since the launch and benefited from the French elections in 2012.
  The blog attracts more and more interest and open comments are keeping a relatively high degree of interest even though the subject is politics and therefore very sensitive.