SilverStripe

Guest blogger Sandy Mamoli: This is part two of my three-part interview series about the adoption of Agile and Scrum at SilverStripe. Last week’s interviewee was SilverStripe’s CEO Sam Minnée, and today I will talk to Scrum Master and Project ... [More] Manager Aleksandra Brewer. Alex works with one of the Agile teams at SilverStripe and has likened working with me with a visit to the dentist. Alex, what was the most surprising thing that happened during the transition? Some of the surprising (although maybe obvious) things were that (1) it's possible for more than one person to work on the same user story, (2) work goes faster when people collaborate, (3) sprint planning that results in greater understanding of stories and tasks necessary to complete them really speeds up the work during the sprint - everyone knows what needs to be done and can pick up a simple task and complete it. What's different now? I love being able to see the day to day progress of the team - it's so visible on the board, plus the work seems to be going faster, with several people going through small tasks all the time. With the acceptance criteria being defined and discussed before the start of a sprint, and with the Product Owner being available to answer any additional questions and provide feedback throughout the sprint, there is virtually no possibility for any team member to go off on a tangent. What are you more confident about now? Talking to clients is easier now, as they are much more involved and ultimately responsible for making decisions about priorities. We (the team) make recommendations, share our knowledge and inform the client about pros, cons and consequences of the different options, but in the end it's up to them to make a final decision. All along the course of a project clients know exactly where we're at, what's being built, etc., which they love. The transparency of Scrum, although scary at the beginning, is really beneficial for both the team and clients.  What did you have to learn? What was the hardest to learn? The hardest thing to learn was to give up the control over what the individual team members were doing from day to day. How do you think you benefitted from working with a coach? Working with you has been a bit like going to the dentist - painful at times, but all along I knew it was good for me, and I'm in better shape now than I was before. It's been good to have you keep us on track, and point out things that now seem obvious, and yet were not at first. Would you recommend Scrum and Agile to others? Definitely. I couldn't imagine going back to the old ways, negotiating "resourcing" among Project Managers, developers being on several different projects at the same time, and not knowing when a project would end because of the uncertainty of developer availability.  [Less]

Guest blogger Sandy Mamoli is one of NZ's leading Agile advocates, a Certified Scrum Master and became New Zealand's first Certified Scrum Practitioner in October 2007.  One of her major Agile initiatives was working on Sony Ericsson’s global ... [More] enterprise website. She has also worked with organisations such as the BNZ (Bank of New Zealand), the ACC (Accident Compensation Company), NZ On Screen, the National Library of New Zealand and Snapper. Currently she is working as an independent Agile Coach helping organisations become passionate about Agile and Lean principles and methods, and to be as Agile as they possibly can and want to be. When SilverStripe approached me to help them take their Agile implementation to the next level, I was excited about the opportunity to work with this local Wellington business with employees from a wealth of different countries. SilverStripe wanted to improve the way in which they deliver client projects, increase employee happiness and, in general, just do the best possible job. To achieve this, we decided to move away from the existing Agile-like approach and introduce Scrum, with its focus on client-driven iterations, early feedback and continuous improvement. During the past six months I have been working with sales, management and delivery teams to help SilverStripe adopt Scrum right across the organisation, and to make it the core of everything they do. In this three-part series, I will interview the CEO, a Scrum Master and a Developer. We’ll talk about their experiences including the biggest surprises, differences, and how they found the changes working out for them. Today’s conversation is with SilverStripe’s CEO Sam Minnée. Sam, what was the main thing you wanted to achieve? Did you achieve it? Although SilverStripe has favoured an Agile approach over waterfall methods for some time, we wanted to introduce more structure around our development and project management processes. As we are now successfully running the bulk of our work with Scrum, I would say that we have achieved it. What is different now? Prior to the change, we had a different set of people for each project. Everyone would work with several different groups of people on several different projects. This made it easier to find resources for projects, but it was subtly killing the team's sense of ownership of a project's success. Despite it being painful (many people had to be moved onto new projects and be taken off old ones) we made the decision to re-shape our developers, designers, and PMs into four consistent delivery teams, that collectively work on all the projects assigned to them. Now developers and designers are much more invested in the big picture of the work they do - it's not all up to PM’s anymore. What are you more confident about now? Teams have a much more accurate picture of a realistic amount of work, and so I'm more confident about our capacity. Why did you choose to engage outside help and how do you think you benefited from working with a coach? In short, we wanted a fresh perspective. We could read books about Scrum or send staff on training courses, but this would have only gone so far. It was difficult for the SilverStripe team to see outside of the way we run projects, and it's easy to say "oh, that's a nice idea, but it would never work in practice", when challenged to make more dramatic changes. Sandy has helped introduce Scrum and other Agile techniques and principles to many different organisations and was able to provide assurance that we weren't going to go down an unrealistic path. The result was that we could confidently make more dramatic changes to the way we run our business. What did you have to learn? What was the hardest to learn? The biggest lesson was that a change in attitude is more important than the process. The process is designed to encourage the emergence of correct attitudes. One major shift for us was the notion of delivering production-quality software at the end of every Sprint. It is very easy to fall into the trap of leaving polish and testing for a "stabilisation phase" at the end of the project, or to enter into a massive piece of work that, like a jigsaw, is completely useless until the last piece is put in place. It didn't really seem like that big of a deal to us, but it subverts the whole process. At its core, Agile is about accepting that things aren't going to go to plan, and constantly being in a position to launch with what you have. Requiring a stabilisation phase or leaving mandatory features until the end mean that you introduce the risk that you are leaving a show-stopper dormant until then. Would you recommend Scrum and Agile to others? Yes, I would. I strongly believe that Agile techniques are much more likely to result in a successful project than traditional waterfall techniques. However, I would caution people not to assume that it will be a quick fix or a change limited to the development team. In particular, stakeholders need to find new ways to manage the risks associated with engaging in a software development project; you cannot expect that provided a detailed specification, a fixed timeframe and budget can be adhered to. It would be great if that worked, but projects approached in this way frequently fail. Instead, a team needs to keep focused on finding out the best way of meeting the project's high level business drivers within the project's constraints, as unexpected issues arise. That way you can ensure that business goals are met within the necessary timeframes and budgets. In part two, I will talk to Scrum Master Aleksandra Brewer who works with one of the Agile teams at SilverStripe. [Less]

2011 was an exciting year for us. As well as launching websites such as www.aa.co.nz, www.plunket.org.nz and www.yha.co.nz, we made a lot of progress on SilverStripe 3 and have now released the alpha 2 version for our developer community to test. ... [More] Our ongoing mission is to find better ways of using the web to help make our clients better. Our open source CMS is a big part of this, but we have also been investigating the way in which we work. To that end, we have been working with agile consultant Sandy Mamoli, and we are successfully using Scrum to deliver our web projects. 2012 promises to be even better. Although I can't give the game away too much, there are a couple of things that I am particularly looking forward to this year: We're launching SilverStripe 3, a massive step forward for our CMS and Framework We're expanding our Auckland offices Here's to another year of using the web to make our corner of the world a better place! Sam MinnéeCEO [Less]

While much of the world is about to celebrate time off with family and friends with snow falling outside, for us in New Zealand and Australia the festive season is the height of summer, the time for beach parties and barbecues in our back yards. We'd ... [More] like to thank all our customers, supporters, and our open source community for helping to make 2011 a wonderful year for us. Our office shuts down today and reopens fully on Monday 9 January. We look forward to working with you to do awesome stuff on the web in 2012, through great work and with the exciting release of SilverStripe 3.0. [Less]

When the Ministry of Science and Innovation (MSI) is looking for a web presence, it has to be something extraordinary. MSI is a new government agency driving science and innovation to increase New Zealand's economic, environmental and social ... [More] performance. It does this through its strategic leadership and by partnering with the science and innovation sector and through the networks it builds across government, research organisations, business and industry.In saying that, it seemed almost a natural step that MSI would use world wide celebrated, local, open source CMS SilverStripe to build their website. Our team at SilverStripe Ltd., the company behind the open source suite, built the site and found the collaboration with MSI to be a good match in terms of culture and philosophy. MSI has a goal to connect all players in the science and innovation ecosystem. It also provides research and development funding to grow export focused companies who can compete globally. Accordingly, the goal of the website was to explain in an easy to understand way what MSI is about, and how people can access funding. The NZ government is generally very open about what they spend tax payers money on and is proud of the results of its investments. Based on this philosophy, the MSI website was also created to provide information on who received what, how much funding was provided from MSI and to showcase the results through case studies.With this in mind, there was a lot of content to go into one website; 273 pages and sub pages, and thousands of pages with funding records. SilverStripe then faced the challenge of presenting all of this information in a user friendly and helpful way.                                 The solution is a clean and fresh design that is focused on clear communication and usability. Different sections for different audiences create a well sorted and easy to navigate content overview, and an advanced and customised search function makes it easy to search the funding database.Simple and easy to follow HTML5 info graphics illustrate the New Zealand science and innovation landscape and provide an engaging and fun way to learn new things. The info graphics are editable in the back-end and even work on an iPad. The promotional tiles that structure the content can be updated entirely on the fly, with photos and text linking to any page on the site. If the user wants to share the content, they can click on any of the provided Twitter or Facebook icons and share the content via their accounts.The project wasn’t all smooth sailing, as SilverStripe faced a few challenges along the way. Julian Meadow, Project Manager at SilverStripe explains the biggest challenge: “The info graphics needed to be created in HTML5 in order to support the iPad. But a lot of desktop users visit the site with IE7, which doesn’t support HTML5. It was a challenge to find a work around for this issue, but in the end we mastered it.”In terms of design, SilverStripe partnered with MSI design agency Ocean Design, who delivered the MSI basic brand rules and elements. Based on these guidelines, our Creative Director Felipe Skorski created the website framework and design.The new website msi.govt.nz is a beautiful and very informative website that demonstrates that government work is anything but boring. We are proud of the work we did. What do you think? Check it out and share your thoughts with us. We are looking forward to hearing from you. [Less]

Decades ago the first prime ministers and presidents transfixed nations with television, replacing incumbents who couldn't use the power of the new medium. It's now twenty one years since Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web, and so high time ... [More] to put telly to rest and let internet take over as the most influential medium for deciding who runs a country. Not because it's sexy, but for the uncontroversial reason that while TV commands people, the internet better fosters learning, debate, and discussion. The last New Zealand Election Study is one term behind (i.e. 2008) but shows statistics you'd expect; for example, 70% didn't have internet or didn't use it during the last general election campaign, and that pamphlets, newspapers, and radio broadcasts were primary influences on voters. The 2011 election study will be published in March next year, and will no doubt show internet as having a higher influence. But I'd wager most of that website traffic is no different to TV and pamphlets because it would have been dominated by two categories: News reported by Stuff, NZ Herald, TVNZ, 3 news websites Political party websites The main exception to this, in other words where the internet provided more than what old media can do, would be elections.org.nz and electionresults.govt.nz. These government sites are built to serve the mechanics of the elections: to help people enrol, know the address of a nearby voting booth, and later learn what the vote counts are. They provide a necessary service but don't help voters choose who to vote for or to take more interest in voting. There were several websites that did set out to do this, such as vote.co.nz, OnTheFence.co.nz, TheyWorkForYou.co.nz and electionresults.co.nz/iPredict to name a few. All were (and are) good ideas and websites but are arguably just experiments in how to use the web for elections because none of them attracted a major percentage of the voting population. There's also obvious gaps: A full calendar of public debates around the country and running some debates online. (Why not add video archives and transcripts, too?) A popular mechanism to submit written questions to parties and see their answers, all in public view. Simple forms of participation. The US presidential race in 2008 saw millions of people text message a key issue (e.g. Iraq, Jobs) to a Google project. This formed an interesting grass-roots political map visualisation, but the actual success is it got a whole lot of people taking the first step to engaging in political thought prior to election day. The trick is then to get some of them to learn and discuss further.  It will be fantastic milestone when all of these types of online resources are available, popular, co-indinated with each other, (and politically neutral) weeks ahead of elections. Blogs, Facebook and Twitter also have a role to play. Half the challenge is building a fantastic environment of tools, information and resources, and the other half of the challenge is to get people to care and use them. If we can crack this, television can be left to be the thing you watch with your family and friends while votes are counted. But of course, you'll check the web in the ads to get more detailed real-time counts and discussion concerning your local area. [Less]

In celebrating innovation in local government, the 2011 ALGIM conference shows that while innovating is a real struggle, it is hard work, the spirit of collaboration, and the technology of the web that are its ingredients. Every year, IT managers and ... [More] their technical staff representing New Zealand's 80 councils meet. ALGIM, who has run the event for 31 years, provides three full days of presentations, food, and plenty of time for talk. But most importantly, the event encourages and celebrates innovation through showcases and awards. Given the IT department of a council is typically seen as the slow moving cog in an organisation that is already slow to move with the times, some healthy encouragement to take calculated risks and innovate is crucial. Councils exist to democratically serve their communities and make them wonderful places to visit, live, and work. This costs money, which is in direct tension with rates increases and, is made harder by an economic and political climate pushing cost cutting. (Nelson City Council Chief Executive Keith Marshall expresses this tension clearly in his video presentation about leadership and the challenges coming soon to local government.) It's very refreshing therefore to see at ALGIM sessions how IT, and in particular the web, can actually be the example and inspiration for councils to transform. For example: Windor city, Canada, is the automobile sister city of Detroit, USA. Zero revenue growth for Windsor city council over ten years is a much harsher economic reality than any New Zealand counterpart faces, and yet, their Executive Director of IT Harry Turnbell explained very clearly how they managed to keep their IT systems modern, including moving their website from brochure towards being a virtual branch open 24 hours. InternetNZ Chief Executive Vikram Kumar explained (see video) how councils, the public, and social media can co-exist before, during, and after natural disasters affect cities. This is more than just a case of citizens having a desire to use Twitter and Facebook: social media tools cost effectively nothing, are substantially robust, create considerable goodwill, and deliver a valuable social service. These are all benefits to councils (which is also to say, their communities) so long as councils overcome challenges to do with loss of control over communication and having the resources and will to participate in realtime public conversations.  Dale Hartle, Porirua City Council website manager, won an ALGIM award for putting just as much thought into creating a useful new tool, called updates.co.nz as she did on ensuring other councils could pick it up and use it for their own regions. (Please do!) Making the web useful to citizens is overall an expensive endeavor for councils, but efforts towards collaboration that Porirua City Council have started are right to be applauded - as is using inexpensive web tools and taking advantage of open source: these approaches are currently considered innovative but should be considered normal. This is the only way councils will be able to deliver a better service under increasing financial pressure. [Less]

In order for websites to remain relevant and useful, we believe it's important to usability test them on a regular basis. We don't only recommend this to our clients, but we practice it too.It's been just over a year since we redesigned ... [More] silverstripe.com and the best way to check whether it's meeting the goals of our users (you guys!) is to usability test it. We're planning to do this over the next couple of months, initially via a short questionnaire and then with face-to-face interviews in Wellington.In late July we'll be asking interested users the reasons why they visit both silverstripe.com and silverstripe.org and for details of what they're looking for when they're there. In August we'll be inviting test users to come into the SilverStripe office in Wellington, where we'll run through a series of scenarios to test how they navigate through our sites, and we'll then explore areas that could be improved.After collating and reviewing all the results we're hoping to better understand exactly what our users want from our sites and how they should be structured to make them as user-friendly as possible.We're interested in talking with a range of users, including developers, designers and clients. If you're keen on participating then please contact Julian (J) Meadow, our resident usability testing expert, and he'll send you more details. Those that participate in both stages will be rewarded with an iTunes or book voucher.Of course, anytime you have feedback on our sites you are always more than welcome to let us know by filling in a feedback form, which can be accessed via the the footer on both sites. We really appreciate your comments, so keep them coming!We'll keep you posted on progress over the next couple of months. [Less]

Last week at ALGIM Web Symposium, our Senior Project Manager Julian (J) Meadow gave a presentation about usability testing on a budget to a roomful of those responsible for various local government websites. He discovered that most people in the ... [More] session had been part of usability testing before, with almost everyone present wanting to do testing on their own sites - but no one had ever run their own testing before. Here at SilverStripe Ltd, usability testing is one of the many services that we're proud to offer. Usability testing helps you understand how users interact with your site and whether their needs are being met. It helps to uncover any difficulties users are having, and provides valuable feedback on how to resolve these issues. Perhaps you've heard that usability testing is expensive, and you think you can't afford it. The truth is it's not expensive and you can't afford not to do usability testing. Of course, we understand that your budget might not stretch to bringing in an outside company to do the testing for you. Instead, we’re happy to give you J's slides for free so you can get started thinking about how to run your own sessions. Usability testing on a budget (by J Meadow) View more presentations from silverstripe Some extra points to think about: If you find a group of people that you use for testing once, you can reuse the same people again - involve them in card-sorting for IA, user focus groups, and any other testing you might need to do. While it might take you up to three days to do your first round of usability testing (including identifying and selecting participants), subsequent test sessions can be completed in less time. Do a little a lot - limit the focus of your testing to a specific area or page each time in order to get the most clear results, and the next time you can choose a different area to focus on. And of course, if you'd like further help from us, get in touch. We also want your site to be as useful as possible! [Less]

As part of the the Association of Local Government Information Management Web Symposium we attended earlier this week, the results of the ALGIM Council Website Evaluation and Audit were announced. This external review of all 80 Councils assesses ... [More] compliance against the Government Web Standards, information and service content. In the 2010, Tasman District Council were ranked 71st out of 85 councils* for their website. That's where we came in. SilverStripe Ltd worked with Tasman to redevelop their website completely. By moving the website onto SilverStripe CMS, we provided an open source solution, tailor-made to their specific needs. Feedback on the site has been fantastic. The document integration in particular has been seen as changing the way the council looks at information as a whole. We were also particularly thrilled to see that after all that work, Tasman District Council now places third in the 2011 rankings, a fantastic result that has seen them rocket from near the bottom of the heap to the top. Two of the features that we built for their site - Electronic Document Records Management System (EDRMS) integration and Google Maps integration - were nominated at the ALGIM 2011 Web Awards as best feature, with the maps integration, and the overall site placed third for the Supreme Website Award. We were also pleased to see our other local government clients Nelson City Council, Gisborne District Council and Central Hawkes Bay District Council also ranked in the top 20 of the website evaluations. We know that councils have a lot of important information and services to share with their community, and we love to help them to be more responsive. After all, we're not just a company, we're citizens too. * prior to the Auckland City Council restructure there were 85 councils - now there are 80. [Less]