Friday 27 January 2017

Why should charities use Jira and Confluence to get things done?

I recently spoke at an Open Charity meetup event in London about how charities can save thousands, reduce waste and create awesome digital products using tools made by a company called Atlassian. Here are some of the main takeaways from that presentation. Powerpoint slidedeck can be downloaded here

What are JIRA and Confluence?

Jira

Jira is used to track tasks and issues for your project and helps you deliver more work, faster. It is popular with software teams but is by no means limited to them. A team using Jira can easily track many types of work, from simple tasks to bugs and user stories common to agile teams. We use multiple management styles at Cancer Research UK, and Jira is well-suited to many situations. The main benefit of Jira over good old white board and post-its is its reporting capability: all the work your team has ever done is kept in Jira so you can set up powerful dashboards and reports which empower managers to better forecast future delivery.

A Cancer Research UK JIRA board

Confluence

Confluence is essentially a wiki for your organisation. it is a great tool for team collaboration and document management. Have you ever spent half an hour searching for that really important information buried somewhere in your email inbox? Confluence allows your teams to have 'one source of truth' for collaborative documents and meeting notes. Powerful macros allow you to dynamically display content to keep landing pages fresh. If integrated with Jira, you can dynamically link to lists of work items and dashboard widgets (See 'examples of good user stories' Jira widget below).

Examples of some user stories at Cancer Research UK. The columns are key, summary, team, created and updated.

Why should I care?

If you are a registered charity and you have the capability to install and configure these programs in-house, they are completely free for you. This would include many add-ons which normally cost thousands.
These tools allow teams to be on the same page with high visibility and transparency of their work (see project dashboard below). They are highly configurable such that they can scale from a tiny startup to a massive enterprise-grade company. Dynamic reporting tools and dashboards eliminate what might otherwise be manual effort. 
A JIRA dashboard

What about other tools?

At Cancer Research UK, we use a combination of tools for Digital delivery.  We want delivery teams to be free to choose the tool that is right for them. There are competing products but lately we've found Slack, Trello, JIRA and Confluence to be the most useful. But it is a crowded field. Competing in this space are Sharepoint, Yammer, Skype, Hipchat, VersionOneMS Office and Google Drive to name but a few. For a charity which needs to watch their budget, I recommend Trello, the Atlassian tools, Slack and Google Drive.  Pivotal Tracker is also worth a mention, as they have a significant free plan for non-profits.

Conclusion

Whether you’re a charity of 5 people or 500, the tools described here will help you deliver high quality work, quicker, across multiple projects varying in degree of complexity. See below for further reading and video tutorials. 

Open Charity Meetup

Open Charity is a public meetup based in London. For several years it was a rag tag group of charities and their partners meeting privately, but as of late 2016, their public events feature guest speakers, lightning talks and networking. Their focus is on bringing charities and partners together to collaborate and share open solutions to create value in the digital space. If you are interested in sponsoring, speaking or providing a venue, please get in touch via one of these channels. 

Monday 23 January 2017

Dude, where’s my content?

One of the nice things I’ve noticed recently is that more and more people are recognising content strategy as a ‘thing’.

But even though I can hold my head high, safe in the knowledge that people understand my job isn’t actually made up (yay!), and is as crucial to a project’s success as a designer or UXer (double yay!), I still find that people tend to ignore one of the most important aspects of content - good governance.

Dropping the G-bomb


Without a doubt, the number one reason that content strategies fail is a lack of governance. You can spend hours understanding exactly what your users want, and exactly what type of content they need. But if no one’s empowered to enforce standards and guidelines (or if you don’t have standards and guidelines in the first place) all that work is pointless.

Because how will you know if the content you create is meeting those user needs? How will you know if it’s providing value for your business? And how can you be sure you’re not going to get 50 stakeholders crawling out of the woodwork wanting to sign content off before it goes live?

The answer is you won’t. So your strategy will fail. Always.

So what do we do?

If you stop to think, it seems obvious. Just setting content live and forgetting about it is a bad idea. As is just letting anyone publish whatever the hell they want on the website.

But actually, most of the time the challenge isn’t getting your organisation to govern its digital content effectively, it’s getting any kind of governance in place at all.

If your organisation has strong governance for other aspects of its business, the idea of content governance might not be all that foreign. Especially if you have strong brand and style guidelines in place for your more traditional channels of communication.

But sometimes large organisations with clear governance in traditional areas are some of the worst offenders. So how can they take what they already know about governance and apply it to content? In my mind, most governance issues can be solved by keeping in mind three things: 

1.Making sure you’ve got the right people, doing the right things, at the right time


At Cancer Research UK our digital strategy is to devolve content creation throughout the business. There’s no one central team that owns every piece of content on our site.

So one of our biggest challenges is working with teams to identify the roles and responsibilities they need to manage their content effectively throughout its lifetime.

Meghan Casey’s excellent Content Strategy Toolkit identifies 6 phases all content goes through during its lifetime.



I’d probably also add ‘retire’ to that list (or KILL if you’re applying it to a bunch of old Flash animations).

The best way I’ve found to get visibility on this stuff is to run 2 quick workshops. In the first workshop, you get all of the senior stakeholders involved in the content creation to map out every step involved in each of those phases, with the people they think are responsible for them. And in the second one you get all the people who actually produce the content itself to do the same.

By the end, you should end up with a whiteboard filled with post-it notes that looks a little something like this, once you’ve collated everything and digitised it:



Most of the time you’ll find any bones of contention slot into 1 of 3 categories:

  • Gaps appear in each phase, where everyone assumes something happens, but it actually doesn’t
  • You’ve got multiple stakeholders who all think they’re content owners who should have the final sign-off on a piece of content
  • You’ve got 1 person doing 90% of the steps in each phase. Someone who not only owns the content but writes the content and is also responsible for its sign off

Once you’ve invested the time upfront to work out every step involved in each of these phases you can start asking the big questions; why is this necessary? Who is responsible for it? What’s the output?

The answers to these questions are key for building visibility on how content flows through your organisation. And working out where the gaps, problems and stress points are that you need to address.

2.Making sure you’re measuring the right stuff


If you’ve developed an effective content strategy upfront you should (I hope) have a clear idea of what your content needs to achieve, and the metrics that let you know whether it’s achieved it.

Where governance fits in, is to provide clear guidelines on when to review your content against these metrics. And when you should consider acting.

If things are going badly – consider changing your content

Sometimes we make changes to our content that we think will move our metrics one way, but actually end up having the opposite effect. This is fine, as long as we’re able to quickly shift the blame to someone else honest with the size of the problem, and its cause.

A small problem is a bump in the road. A bigger problem might send everyone running to panic stations. Whichever it is, being honest about the size of the problem helps you work out how to prioritise what you need to fix first. And if you find you’re having a lot of these smaller problems take a step back and look for any patterns – they could be the symptom of a bigger problem.

Similarly, spend some time interrogating the cause of the problem. Speak to your users, grab as many insights as you can and work out what they mean. Yeah, sometimes your content might just suck. But sometimes the UX might be doing a bad job of supporting your content. Or that new image the designer’s put together jars with your brand messaging.

And above all, share what you’ve learnt with your team, your stakeholders and the wider business. That’s the best way to stop the problem happening again in the future.

If things are going well – consider changing your content

So our content’s smashing its metrics, our users love it and our stakeholders treat us like rockstars. Time to just sit back and congratulate ourselves on a job well done right?

Well, maybe. But failing that, questions you might want to ask yourself are “how big is your success?” and “how do I make it happen again?”

If you’ve had a big success shout about it. Build a story around what you’ve achieved that you can sell to your stakeholders to get more resources to make your content even better.

And, just like when things go badly, speak to your users and get their feedback. Once you know why your content performed well it becomes a lot easier to replicate that success in the future.

If there’s a change in context – consider changing your content

Occasionally, hitting or missing our metrics isn’t so much of an issue. Because the metrics themselves don’t matter so much to us. Sometimes our company’s goals might change and sometimes the world around us might change.

Again, once you’ve figured out how this change is going to affect your content, work out how big the impact will be. Is it a permanent or temporary change? Will it affect your competitors too?

And not all change is bad. Yes, adapting to it could be a massive resource drain stopping you from doing what really matters. But it could also be a massive opportunity to attract a whole new audience and revenue stream.

Whichever it is, once you’ve understood the size of the change you can work out how much time and resource to dedicate to it.

3.Making sure you’re keeping it lean


One thing us digital folks sometimes struggle with is confusing governance with being a bottleneck, and treating it as an enemy of the agile process. And admittedly, our plan to retire workflow process does seem a bit waterfall-y at a first glance. But it doesn’t have to be.

Instead, when reviewing your workflow ask yourself “what’s the minimum thing I need to build to move from one phase to the next?”

You might have a massive site redesign to plan, but rather than tackle the whole site audit, why not run a rolling audit of each area of the site? Can you update the content for one small sub-section of the site at a time, rather than do everything all at once? And is that stakeholder who demanded a place at the table for every editorial meeting really vital to the content’s success?

Answering these questions helps shift the perception of governance from something that impedes the progress of your content to something that actively supports it. Because it forces you to focus your attention on what drives the most value with the minimum effort, in a way that’s scalable. And that sounds pretty agile to me.

Go forth and govern

At Cancer Research UK our digital strategy relies on us giving people the tools they need to manage the long term success of their content, which is where good governance really shines. Because if we can make our processes more efficient, it gives us confidence that the right people are doing the right things at the right time. That we do have the right measurements in place. And that we’re being as lean as possible.

This all means we can spend less time worrying about the day-to-day management of our content. And more time focusing on making that content as good as it can possibly be.

Chris Flood
Content Strategy Lead

Thursday 12 January 2017

Becoming digital masters to beat cancer sooner

At Cancer Research UK our goal is that by 2034, 3 in 4 people diagnosed with cancer will survive. That’s rightly ambitious and we need to keep moving forwards to make sure we get there. We need to become a more digital organisation to keep pace.

It sounds good in theory. We hear that we’re supposed to be ‘more digital’ all the time. Organisations can’t keep doing things the way they’ve always done them. Or they risk being ‘disrupted’. Left behind, eating the dust of an army of post-it wielding hipsters.

But for people who don’t work in digital every day we know this can all feel a bit abstract. That’s our priority as a Learning and Development function within the digital team. How do we help people understand what ‘being more digital’ is? And how do we support them to get there?

Digital mindset and skills
We describe ‘being digital’ as a combination of mindset and skills. Mindset-wise it’s about making sure you really understand your audience and prioritise their experience. It’s about testing and learning. Embracing failure, and continuously improving whatever it is that you're working on. And it’s about collaborating. Avoiding unnecessary hierarchy and bureaucracy in order to get work done quickly.

And the skills? Being able to write great web content that comes up top in a Google search. Being able to track and analyse the performance of web pages. Continuously improving pages to ensure a great experience for users. Understanding social and other digital marketing channels. And managing work in an 'agile' way and applying 'lean' principles to reduce waste and be as productive as possible.

Learning by doing
So how do we work with teams so that they can do all these things?
At the moment, the Learning and Development world is buzzing with ideas about modern workplace learning. Jane Hart and others are leading a shift away from the traditional training course, where ‘learning’ is separate from work.
Nowadays if I wanted to find out how to do something outside of work I’d Google or YouTube it to find out how. Or I’d ask someone who knows more than me. I wouldn’t book onto a training course in a month’s time.
We take this kind of approach to digital upskilling. We see work and learning as one and the same thing.
As a wider digital team, we no longer do the digital stuff for other teams. Through our ‘Hub and Spoke’ model, we (the digital hub) work in partnership with teams (in what we call spokes) to deliver a digital outcome. Like increase the team's digital presence or increase the engagement of people who visit their pages. And just as importantly, to help the team adopt a digital mindset and develop their digital skills.
We don’t send people on a one-size-fits-all training programme to make them better at digital things. Instead we support teams to learn as they work towards their spoke goal. 
At the start of a spoke, teams assess their current skills and set some learning objectives with a digital team member (a Proposition Manager) who acts as their learning guide throughout. We’ve created a digital skills self- assessment to help them do this. We can share this with you if you’re interested.
They then get started on the digital work they’ve come together to deliver. Working with the Proposition Manager to build their understanding of how to approach a piece of work in a digital way.
The team can ask questions as they go, and get guidance and advice from digital experts in our team. When relevant they can go to focused training sessions and have access to the helpful just-in-time resources.
So at the end of a spoke, a previously ‘non-digital’ business team can test new ideas from their audience’s point of view, maintain their web page and create great online experiences. And they can do all this independently, needing less and less support from the digital team.

For example: Our Annual Review team
A spoke was set up to make sure we have outstanding content on the Annual Review pages of our website.
Oli Welch, a Proposition Manager, guided the team through this journey. So that they could keep improving their pages in future, once the spoke ended.

Skills assessment
Firstly, Oli needed to establish the team’s starting point. In this case they were all quite new to digital but were really keen to learn. Ideal!

Learning to use some analytics and collaborative tools
Next the team needed to learn how supporters were using the Annual Review pages. Oli showed them how to use Google Analytics and Crazy Egg. Google Analytics let them track some key statistics about their users and Crazy Egg allowed them to see visually how people engage with their website. These tools gave them a much better idea of how people interacted with their pages.
The team practised with the tools until they were able to use them confidently on their own.
Oli also introduced the team to tools like Trello, a platform for managing workload in an agile way, to share their work. The team picked them up quickly and have continued to use them since.

A lightbulb moment
Oli introduced the team to the concept of User Experience (UX). They went along to our testing lab at City University, to observe real people engaging with their existing pages. They watched as members of the public skimmed through pages they’d expected them to read in detail and didn’t even open the pdfs they’d painstakingly put together! It really challenged their preconceptions about how people interacted with their content and the difference between what works in print and what works online.

Reflecting and Consolidating
All of the work so far allowed the team to put together a list of things that were wrong with the existing pages and things that were working well. They could begin creating new content.
But before ploughing on, Oli held a couple of washup sessions with the team. He reminded them of everything they’d learned. And gave them a handy document explaining who to ask in digital for help with different tasks.

Learning from experts
Next came workshops with our Content and SEO leads, Chris Flood and Nancy Scott. They gave some tips for creating a new user journey and ideas for writing great web content. The team now keep these in mind when they produce new content.

Pressing the right buttons
To put the new pages on the website, the team needed to know how to use our content management system (CMS), Drupal. Becca Sharplin-Hughes, one of our Digital Producers built a page as an example, showing them the steps she took to do it. Then the team were able, with Becca’s support, to create their own pages. With more practice, they’ve grown in confidence and can now edit their pages by themselves.

From zero to digital 
So through a mixture of learning by doing, speaking to experts, and training, the team grew to adopt a digital mindset and developed the skills to take control of their digital destiny.
We’re seeing some exciting progress working with teams across CRUK in this way. Helping them to deliver great digital experiences and supporting them to become more digital in the process.

Ed Willis
Digital Training and Comms Manager