One Step Forward

We never managed to really complete important parts of the design sprint we started a month ago. The project time and budget wasn’t ever going to allow for custom development of a bespoke solution, so we were reduced to a process of reflecting over existing off the shelf solutions. We’d “sneaked” in the customer testing phase as part of training everyone to use the selected system. We’ve also failed to “prototype” in the pure design sprint fashion by using a real software package (MediaWiki) and having got that set up and working. I think the design sprint concept assumes that there’s budget and time, following the sprint, to properly deliver the solution to the end users. A critical part of the overall question for us was whether we could get any reasonable solution working on the NHS laptops and networks, and the result from yesterday appears to be yes.

I ran an hour long training session and had the trainees try things out for themselves (as we might do in a usability test) before reviewing how things should be done (if they got stuck). I learned a lot, including:

That last element might seem trivial. One might be tempted to say, well Wikipedia’s visual editor worked fine on NHS laptops/network, so of course the same visual editor on our own server will work fine, but if working with computers has taught me anything it’s that you really musn’t assume that things work as you expect. Particularly since we moved to MediaWiki after a selection of other high profile enterprise and open source wikis completely failed to load critical icons on the NHS laptops/network, which rendered them completely unusable.

So I’ve got a series of additional training events to run next week, and in the meantime we’ve got a soft launch scheduled for tomorrow. To support that we need to get a good subset of the following sorted:

Other things we will need to do before next week include

I could easily spend the whole rest of the week completely focused on this, but I’ve also got to re-record AV102 videos to reflect the changes to the Google Hangout API, and ensure we’ve made all the final accessibility changes on the MOOC which goes live next week. There’s also reviewing all the pull requests for the different AgileVentures projects, and the process of following up with Premiums. I have finally started creating individual private Premium channels to try and distribute the load of supporting the increasing numbers of Premium members. We can do it, yes we can!

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