Tuesday, 23 September, 2014

The need for internal digital evangelism

If you’re going to make your organisation sit up and take notice when it comes to new, digital ways of doing things, you need to get out there and sell them.

Pretend you’re a techie startup trying to sell your product to your organisation.

Get on every team meeting agenda that you can. Speak at every senior leadership team meeting. Come up with new and interesting angles and stories that will pique people’s interest, whilst still hammering home your core message.

Have chats with as many people as you can to find out what is going on in the organisation, make connections, build links, put people in touch with each other. Fins out what their pain points are and think how digital might help solve them.

Produce an email newsletter to send every week with interesting digital stuff in it that will enthuse and motivate people to give digital a go.

Find a way to use internal systems – maybe the intranet, or a social tool like Yammer, or even the staff magazine – to promote your digital agenda to people.

You might not have a specific product or service to sell, but you still want people to change the way they do things – and they will need convincing.

So try pretending that you are that little startup wanting to land a big contract – and get selling.

#The need for internal digital evangelism

Monday, 22 September, 2014

Using Trello to help run a workshop

trello

I’m a bit ambivalent about Trello as a project management tool – I know others love it, but me, I prefer something that looks a bit more spreadsheety.

If you’ve not heard of Trello – here’s a video that explains it.

Anyway, I did manage to make use of Trello in a pleasing way during a session at Channel Shift Camp, which I facilitated, which was called ‘transformation ticklist’.

The aim was to produce a checklist of things that really ought to happen when redesigning a product or service. With only 45 minutes we weren’t going to all the whole thing done, but we could at least make a start.

My original plan was to use a traditional post-it note and flip chat approach, but being lazy, I didn’t fancy doing the write up afterwards. What else could I use to get the same effect?

I settled on Trello. I created a new project board, cleared it of all lists bar one, and displayed it on a big screen in the room so everyone could see it.

The first thing we did to start building the transformation ticklist was to have people shout out ideas for things that need doing in a transformation project, in no particular order. All these were recorded in a list as individual cards in a list called ‘activities’ in Trello.

Then we identified the stages we’d need to go through that each of the activities could be put into, and these were created as new lists on the board.

The final activity was spent taking activities from our first list and distributing them around the various stages.

You can see the public version of the ticklist. Also email me if you’d like access to it for editing and so on.

What went well

Using Trello for this workshop went pretty well. People liked the idea, possibly because it was a bit new, and it certainly saved time on writing up, messing about with post-its and so on.

What went not so well

The system isn’t as hackable as pen and paper. We wanted activities to take place across the life of our ticklist, rather than being part of a linear process and this was difficult to make clear. Also, the writing on the screen was too small at times for people to be able to read comfortably.

I’ll definitely be trying this again in future, and would love to hear if others give it a go!

 

#Using Trello to help run a workshop

Sunday, 21 September, 2014

The soul of a new iPhone

So I got my new iPhone 6 on Friday – don’t judge me, I was due an upgrade anyway – and have been using it all weekend.

Here are some early thoughts.

1. The size – it’s a bit too big. I didn’t go for the ludicrously sized plus model, but even so. This thing is a lot bigger than the iPhone 5 I upgraded from and it’s just – just – slightly too big.

I have to stretch my thumb to reach the top layer of icons and it isn’t comfy. I know I can double tap the home button to bring them down, but at the moment this isn’t coming naturally to me.

Also it’s too big to fit comfortably in the breast pocket of a shirt, every time i move, it threatens to fall out. Annoying.

Another factor with the size is that there is no way I can put one of those oversize cases that double as an extra battery on this thing, so will need to find a new way of carrying emergency charge around with me.

2. The camera – is excellent, but I cannot believe they have released it with the lens poking out of the back of the phone like it does.

There’s a lot of nonsense written about post-Jobs Apple, but this is one of those things that would never have been released while Steve was in charge. It’s ugly and means you absolutely have to put a case on this thing if you don’t want to knacker it.

3. The storage – I went a bit mad and ordered the top storage option of 128gb. When I found out everyone else was getting the 64gb model I felt a bit daft, but not now.

It holds pretty much my whole iTunes library, as well as every app I would ever want, plus a load of podcasts, and a few downloaded episodes of Peppa Pig for those moments – and I still have 30 odd gigs free. Love it!

4. Some apps aren’t working – am finding I am having a lot of trouble with quite a few apps. Is this an iPhone 6 thing or an iOS 8 thing? I don’t know.

I restored the phone from an iCloud backup of my previous one, and a fair few apps either didn’t download properly at all or crashed when I tried to open them. Deleting them and reinstalling fixed most but not all.

The Chrome browser, for instance, refuses to work for me. Hopefully they will update it soon.

5. Touch ID is something I love, and I’m surprised by that. This is where you can unlock your phone by just holding your thumb over the home button to identify yourself.

My previous iPhone didn’t have it and I was always a bit sniffy. But it seems to work really well, really quickly, and I’ve got used to it right away.

What next?

Those are just my initial thoughts and I am sure I will be able to add more about how I end up using this phone differently to my previous one.

It would be great to hear how others are getting on with theirs in the comments!

#The soul of a new iPhone

Friday, 19 September, 2014

Lacking leadership

Recently on my visits to councils and to conferences, and in the conversations I have with people across the public sector, leadership in digital has been identified as an issue.

I think the problem is that within many organisations, there’s nobody with sufficient clout taking the digital agenda forward: identifying the vision and setting out how people can get there.

Part of this is because digital doesn’t easily fit into any of the slots of the traditional organisation chart. It’s definitely not IT, nor (just) communications, and probably not (just) customer services.

Perhaps the closest fit would be within the organisational development bit of HR.

To kick start an organisation’s journey to become truly digital, having an inspirational leader in place is, I think, vital.

I’ll be talking about this in more detail this coming Monday, in a free webinar. Sign up here.

#Lacking leadership

Wednesday, 17 September, 2014

Communicating customer access

I’m at Channel Shift Camp in Birmingham today, organised by my good friend Nick Hill.

It’s an opportunity for people involved in customer services in the public sector to talk about ways of delivering services using new channels, such as online.

The point for organisations is that online channels tend to be a lot cheaper than phone or face to face; for the customer, hopefully the experience is quicker and more convenient.

The first session I attended was a very interesting one about how to communicate the benefits of using new channels for contacting councils and so on to users of services.

The problem was soon identified of the quality of the new service being sold. Often the user experience of online public services is pretty bad – to the point where most people would rather phone up or turn up to an office than try and figure out how to use them.

After all, think about the big, successful online services, like Google’s search engine, or Facebook, or Amazon. When have you seen an advert, or a poster, trying to convince you to use them? Probably never, and yet we do in our millions, because it’s better.

It was mentioned that it might be possible to ‘nudge’ people into using online channels by doing things like hiding the organisation’s phone number and address on the website, so people have to use the web service.

That is not nudging! It’s bullying.

Users ought to be able to access a service in whatever way they prefer to. The job of the organisation delivering that service is to design it so that their preferred channel is also the one their customers would choose.

So to start with there is a need, I think, for communications folk to challenge those asking them to promote a service to ensure that it is actually an improvement on the traditional alternatives. If it isn’t, then trying to persuade people to downgrade their user experience is not really a goer.

In other words, the service ought to sell itself. To do that, it needs to be designed with the user at the centre, meeting their needs and solving their problems first, and not those of the organisation.

#Communicating customer access

Monday, 15 September, 2014

Change is hard

It isn’t said enough, I don’t think, that change – particularly in big organisations – is hard. Really hard!

If it wasn’t, it would be happening all the time.

At events there are regularly discussions that go on along the lines of ‘my boss just doesn’t get it’ – tales of woe where someone wants to do something new but is stopped by management or bureaucracy or a combination of the two.

What makes a someone a real force for change is the ability to get knocked back, dust themselves down, and have another go.

Again, and again, and again.

It won’t happen the first time, or the second time. It might not even happen at all in one organisation – you might need to move on to get the chance.

But nothing worthwhile is ever easy and if you’re committed to making a difference, you’ll recover from setbacks, never get too disheartened and keep coming up with new ideas, new strategies and new ways of persuading.

It’s easy to have a go and give up. The ones who make the difference are those who stick at it.

#Change is hard

Sunday, 14 September, 2014

How to show utter contempt for your users

I was never a regular user of Whatsapp, the mobile messaging app recently purchased by Facebook for gazillions of dollors, but now I’m never touching the thing again.

Why?

Well, after a recent update, every single time I open the app, I am greeted with this:

Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge

It’s an annoying pop up thing telling me to turn on notifications for Whatsapp.

Only, I don’t want to. I’ve never had them on, and I don’t want them on now.

I cannot, however, turn off this nagging screen. It appears every time. It would appear the only way to get rid of it would be to switch on those damn notifications.

Well, that’s not happening. I won’t be bullied by software, for goodness’ sake!

So those few people i converse with on Whatsapp I will start to chat to on something else, and Whatsapp is gone from my phone.

If you’re looking for a replacement, Glassboard is a great bet. Not that well known and not overly polished, but a nice indie solution.

The lesson here is to let your customers use your system the way they want to, not the way you want them to – else they might just go elsewhere.

Update: the app store on my phone tells me there is a new version of WhatsApp is ready to download. And guess what?

wa2

At least they are listening.

#How to show utter contempt for your users

Friday, 12 September, 2014

Use what you already have

When planning a new project or activity, it’s easy to decide to get something new.

For instance, you might see it as the perfect opportunity to buy a cool web service to help you deliver this piece of work.

Or maybe you know that you could do a great job customising WordPress to do exactly what you want.

Hold on for a minute, though. What have you already got available to you that you could use to make this happen?

It might not be the perfect fit you would like in a perfect world, but it might be good enough. It might also come with a few advantages:

  • you can start work right away
  • no problems with access or other IT issues
  • your users will be more likely to be familiar with the way it works
  • there will be internal knowledge of the system to help you get stuff done

I’ve an example to share in a future post, where I resisted the temptation to do something new, and instead used what was already there and already familiar, in my work at the Department of Health.

#Use what you already have

Thursday, 11 September, 2014

Loving lurkers

I couldn’t agree more with Mozilla’s Laura Hilliger:

We can’t force people to participate, and if we really care about educating people, we shouldn’t try. We should build and design for the people who are participating, and we should be careful to ensure that the lurkers feel welcome. We should create safe spaces of learning and mentorship where even those who don’t complete the call to action still start to develop trust in us, in our products. The fact is you are always a lurker before you participate, so we should be careful not to push people away by implying that they don’t count if they aren’t like us. If we work to love our lurkers, maybe some of them will find their reason to participate.

#Loving lurkers

Wednesday, 10 September, 2014

Embrace constraints

Sometimes it’s better to embrace constraints. Why not even invent some?

Constraints don’t need to make things harder – they can make things easier.

Why take a year to deliver something if you can get it out of the door in months?

Constraints focus the mind, especially on what is important and what isn’t.

Say you’re handed a project at work. It feels like something ought to be delivered within six months. How about seeing what can be achieved in six weeks?

It might end up being a bit rough and ready, but there’s lots of pros to outweigh that con:

  • The positive feeling of having delivered something
  • The ability to get feedback from users on what you’ve done
  • Reducing the level of risk in the project

So rather than playing safe and asking for more time, more money, and more people, why not embrace some constraints and see what can be done quickly, cheaply and with a small group?

#Embrace constraints

Tuesday, 9 September, 2014

Why some centralising of local gov digital is needed

An ongoing debate this. Ben Proctor has had his say recently, and it feels fairly sensible.

There are two issues at stake here – one is whether some kind of ‘GDS’ for local government is needed; second is whether we need a website for every council.

These two things are not necessarily bound to one another.

My view is that some centralising is vital for the sector, for two main reasons.

First, financial. It’s nuts that there are hundreds of broadly similar, publicly funded organisations out there paying again and again for broadly the same thing. There has to be savings to be made here with a bit of rationalisation.

Second, and most important for me, quality. The standard of digital services in local government is variable to say the least. Lots of people are doing brilliant work. Lots more people, it would appear, are being prevented from doing even competent work by some circumstance or other.

I think the first thing local government needs to do is to admit that there is a problem. The majority of services delivered within the sector do not provide an adequate level of quality user experience.

In other words, the current system isn’t working.

The problem, as many have pointed out, is that making this happen would be hard. Who has the mandate to get this done? How to get around political issues, particularly local pride, and so on? Big national IT projects? Arrrgggggh!

… and so on.

However, none of the arguments are strong enough to make this not worth trying. If we can save the sector millions of pounds a year, then putting a few noses out of joint will probably be worth it.

Key to success for me will be:

  • Ownership by local government. Lots of models have been discussed. I would look strongly at putting a mutual together, owned by the sector, where councils pool money by investing in the mutual. This should provide a mandate as well as scale to get things done
  • Focusing on achieving realistic things. Follow the GDS model of building prototypes and getting stuff out quickly. Don’t build the single local government domain as the first job.
  • Quality above all else. Everything that comes out of the mutual should be of the highest quality, firstly because it should be the minimum standard anyway but also to demonstrate to the sector what can be achieved
  • Share everything openly. Even those who choose not to be a part of the mutual should still be able to make use of its products and services.

I’m sure there are lots of holes in these – admittedly very sketchy – ideas. However, so much could be achieved so quickly if even just a handful of forward thinking local authorities got together and made this happen.

#Why some centralising of local gov digital is needed

In praise of the clipboard manager

A clipboard manager is an insanely useful bit of productivity kit. It’s one of those things that you may not know even exists, but once you start using it, you can never go back.

A quick reminder: the clipboard is the bit of memory on your computer (or phone, tablet, fridge etc) where the content you have just copied or cut from the screen is store, so that you can paste it elsewhere.

One of the drawbacks of the clapboard is that it can only store one bit of content at a time – it overwrites itself every time you cut or copy something new.

However, with a clipboard manager, your history of cut and copied content is available to you whenever you want it – so you’re no longer limited to that one clipping!

Here’s an example of when this is handy. Say you’re copying lots of bits of text from one document to another. Normally, you’d copy a chunk, flip to the other document and paste it in; then back to the original, copy, flip, paste, and back again.

With a clipboard manager in place, you just copy all the different chunks in the original, then flip to the destination document and paste them all in.

It’s so easy! You’ll wonder how you ever coped without it.

I use Alfred on my Mac to manage my clipboard (it does a load of other neat stuff too). If you’re on Windows, Ditto seems like a good option.

#In praise of the clipboard manager

Monday, 8 September, 2014

Find a problem, and fix it

There are a lot of problems out there that need fixing. Some are big, and complicated. Others are quite small, and simple.

Why not try picking one of the small and simple ones, and fix it?

Back in 2007, I started a new job in local government. I was a risk manager! I hadn’t been one of those before.

I needed to write a risk management strategy. So, in the best traditions of local government, I hit Google to find someone else’s that I could, er, take inspiration from.

Only, I couldn’t find anything useful. All my results were cluttered with non public sector stuff. What a pain.

So, I decided to fix this small, simple problem. I set up a customised search engine in Google, effectively feeding it a whitelist of sites to restrict the search to. My list was of all the URLs of UK local authorities.

Now, when I searched, I only got results back from organisations like mine. Lovely!

I put the search box on a website, where it resides to this day as LGSearch. You can give it a go yourself, if you like.

I do not claim that, even in 2007, this was a technological breakthrough of any particular sort. It was however a quick and dirty solution to an annoying problem, and it worked.

No need to build a new search index. No need to seek funding. No requirements for a programme board or any such thing.

What problem could you fix today?

#Find a problem, and fix it

Friday, 5 September, 2014

Just what is digital, exactly?

I’ve seen a few comments bouncing about Twitter and other places debating the meaning of the word digital, and why it hasn’t caught on in some places at all.

I’ve also seen some people saying that ‘digital’ is an unhelpful term, given the broad range of things it seems to describe.

I’d agree that it isn’t perfect, however, it’s what we’ve got. May as well make the most of it.

My definition of digital is:

The delivery of information, interactions and services over the internet.

However, that’s not all. It is also:

The approaches, skills and behaviour that have been popularised by digital projects.

Hence agility, responsiveness, user focus, and so on are all ‘digital’ even though they don’t specifically require the internet.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but this definition works for me, and hopefully for those I work with.

#Just what is digital, exactly?

Letting things go, making things happen

The way to make things happen is to let them go.

I learned this from hard experience. For the last three or four years I spent my time trying to build a business. It didn’t go very well. It turns out I’m best working alone, within organisations, helping them to get things done.

My business was to have products. This meant – to me, at the time – spending hours, days, weeks and months secretly making things. Plans, websites, content. The aim was to have something nobody else did, so I could sell it over and over.

But nothing terribly worthwhile got planned, or made, or sold. I got depressed, and that’s about it.

Then, at the turn of this year, I woke up. I remembered what I was good at, and what I liked doing. And I remembered that making things is a lot easier when you do it in the open.

It’s so easy to default to wanting to make things perfect before you tell anyone about them. This generally means they will never be finished, and never be as good as they could be.

It’s also easy to revert to wanting ownership of something. Don’t do it. Let everyone have a piece if they want it. Get them involved.

This is what I’ve been doing with Think Digital. I do have ambitions for it – to create some kind of framework or model to help people with digital transformation. But I haven’t waited until it’s all in place before I get it out there. Instead, as soon as I had something worth publishing – a simple list of ten ideas – I did so.

As I develop these ideas, I’m publishing them, through talks in webinars. Giving it away to help me get feedback and refine my thinking.

It feels good – but it’s a challenge. Every day, pretty much, I have to remind myself not to keep things to my chest, not to try and build a product, just to come up with helpful ideas that others might find useful enough to want to put some time into themselves.

#Letting things go, making things happen

WordPress 4.0 is out

Oh, goody. A new version of WordPress is out!

WordPress 4.0 is here, and it’s packed with new features:

  • New media manager
  • Embedded media now visual within the editor
  • The editor now works more smoothly, expanding as necessary to fit your content and keeping the formatting tools visible at all times
  • The plugin directory is a lot prettier and makes it easier to find the plugin you want

Here’s a video explaining it all.

[wpvideo bUdzKMro w=400 h=224]

#WordPress 4.0 is out

Wednesday, 3 September, 2014

Get rid of friction

If you want to get people to use your service, get rid of the friction.

This really hit home with me the other week, at an event I attended as part of my work at the Department of Health, which was about the patient of the future.

It struck me that what will make the real transformative change in healthcare (for example) is when people’s access to services, data and indeed connections is entirely frictionless.

Downloading an app is friction. Signing up for an account is friction. Finding a wifi connection is friction.

This is where I think internet of things stuff comes in. When your coffee cup has an internet connection, when lamposts have an internet connection, when wifi is everywhere, friction disappears.

This isn’t so far away. You can already get a coffee cup that measures the calorific contents of what you are drinking. When everyone, everything and everywhere is networked, everything changes.

The friction is replaced, of course, by a bunch of other issues – mostly ethical ones. Another, technical one, is how we handle and what we do with all this data.

#Get rid of friction

Monday, 1 September, 2014

#VirtualGovCamp FAQ

I’ve started putting an FAQ together for #VirtualGovCamp. Here’s the first effort.

Any more questions? Ask in the comments…

What is VirtualGovCamp?

VirtualGovCamp is an event which will take place online for people with an interest in improving public services.

What makes it a GovCamp?

GovCamp is an unconference – which means an open space event with no set agenda and no keynotes, where delegates can talk to one another about the topics they are interested in, not those of an organising committee.

What makes it virtual?

VirtualGovCamp will take place online, on this website (or rather, at this domain). People will interact on “sessions” which will basically be pages with comments where a discussion can take place.

Does that mean webinars?

No. VirtualGovCamp will live or die by its asynchronicity – which means people can interact when they want to and won’t need to be online at a specific time.

People organising sessions can make a time limited webinar or webchat part of what they are doing, but afterwards they will have to provide a means for ongoing discussion – such as embedding a video of the webinar session and allowing comments on that.

So no face to face stuff at all?

Not organised by me, no. But… if you want to run a local VirtualGovCamp party where people get together to enjoy sessions and talk about them together, then go for it!

So what does a session look like?

This still needs properly working out, but I reckon something like this: the person who pitched the session gets to create a page of content about the topic. It might be a video of them talking about it, or maybe someone else talking about it. It could be some text and links, or a Slideshare or Prezi. Maybe even a Storify.

They then facilitate a conversation in the comments to that page about the topic, encouraging people to get involved, share their views and ask and answer questions.

My current thinking is that a session will last a week. That doesn’t mean the comments will necessarily be closed, just that the active facilitation will cease.

Who can attend VirtualGovCamp?

Anyone with an interest in improving public services. It doesn’t matter what sector you are in, you are welcome to take part.

How do I pitch a session?

We will have a dedicated site for pitching and voting on sessions, which will be running on FutureGov’s Simpl platform, which they have donated for free.

Session pitching will begin in January 2015.

Can I sponsor VirtualGovCamp?

Probably yes, in two ways. One is in kind, by donating some technology or something else useful, like FutureGov are with Simpl.

I will also be accepting cash sponsorships, which I want to use to pay some people to do some online community management and other bits of support which are probably beyond what I can ask people to do as a volunteer.

##VirtualGovCamp FAQ

Tuesday, 26 August, 2014