Sketchnotes IWMW16 Gareth Edwards

Tagged: Iwmw16 Iwmw Live | Posted: Tue, Jun 21, 2016 approx. 1 min read

Skin Deep: Using Cosmetic Improvement to Drive Real Change

The team from the University of Greenwich started with the seemingly arbitrary date they were set for a new website. Instead of turning the exercise into a dreaded ‘resin’ they took the admirable step of doing things better and taking the change as an opportunity. In a trend that I’ll talk more about later they engaged some external consultants to help identify tasks for the triage of the mess, and more important in many ways use their external power to validate the teams ideas throughout the organisation. What really cam through from the talk was the thoroughness with which they stepped back and assessed what was likely to be achievable with clear ideas about how they wanted to do things. The timescale for a ton of work was extremely tight, but rather than wading in straight away I got the impression that endeavour was well considered before starting.

It sounded like once the thinking and planning was done the tasks really benefitted from the up front time. Not for the first time I heard Kanban and Trello mentioned in the same breath.