…which was one of the key goals of the project. This exposes one of the significant aspects of R2: it was neither editorially driven, nor technically driven, nor commercially driven. It was driven by a unity of needs right across the company, and it needed to be successful in all these areas. There are a … Continue reading
…which is one of the features central to the Eduction section. An example is this page of GCSE results. Education tables are a great example of how one specialist requirement can reap rewards for so many others. We decided the Education section couldn’t be launched until we had created the ability to display and manage … Continue reading
…which Mat Wall and I have written about extensively before, However, for this piece let me say this… When you have a huge number of people for whom you are building software (1500 staff, 20 million unique users, and an entire wired economy influencing which way you should go next) then simply following instructions is … Continue reading
…which are a fact of life — certainly if your life revolves around developing software. During R2 there was a 40% churn on requirements. That means by the end of the project 40% of the work we had done had not appeared in our initial plan — some things were dumped, new things were introduced, … Continue reading
…which means different things to different people. In our case it meant extracting requirements and turning them into something that could be implemented. Business analysis is often misunderstood when it’s used in an Agile context. Agile people often think it’s not necessary — after all, they say, the analysis is best performed by the developers … Continue reading
…which is one of the first tools we built as part of the project. And it’s a lot more complex that most people expect, especially if their main exposure to a content management system is through blogging. The main reason there’s so much to it is that there’s so much to the organisation it operates … Continue reading
In September 2008 guardian.co.uk officially finished the rebuilding of our website, which had started (depending how you count it) in October 2005. The project was known internally as R2. Over each of the next 26 working days I’ll be looking at one aspect of the project — one for each letter of the alphabet, for … Continue reading
This is the third and final installment of a series attempting to redeem words tarnished by management. Previously I looked at “strategic” and “leadership”. Today: governance. This is a word that doesn’t tend to get used much among software development teams, and when it does it tends to carry the claustrophobic feel of heavy bureaucracy: … Continue reading
This is the second in a short series of articles intended to restore the reputation of certain words — words that have been abused by managers and therefore have likely become meaningless to people who have to listen to them. Today: “leadership”. “Leadership” is surely a word that needs saving from the management jargon-fest. It … Continue reading
This is the first in a haphazard series which takes various management phrases and tries to ground them in reality. First, though, a bit about why I’m writing this. A poor choice of words can be damaging. There are numerous times I’ve received an e-mail introduction from a company, and after a couple of paragraphs … Continue reading
