Turnbull's digital transformation team discovers user testing Australia's Digital Transformation Office (DTO) has done something, again. After a couple of weeks in which its blog has gone largely silent and its Twitter feed has been reduced to retweets of other agencies news, a new post has appeared offering truly transformational advice: do stuff differently for different audiences. …
@Mark
Obvious? Only to those of us who work in IT. Or management. Or really anywhere in the real world.
To government and, specifically, those managing government IT projects, such advice is quite the revelation and those concepts and processes that the rest of us take for granted as basic, roll-a-six-to-start practices can be confusingly absent.
For example (and I've used this example before), we have a project to implement SAP for a State (well, Territory) government department in Australia.
"How we would do it if we had to do it again would be paying much more attention up-front before we went to market; looking at it in much more detail when the initial request came up for the system; what exactly it was going to do; understanding that at a greater depth; involving agencies right from the beginning then; and differentiating between what are the business needs from the nice-to-haves and understanding the costs and benefits of those at a much deeper level; a lot more involvement in the developing of the tender; and monitoring that process right from the get go."
And, from another person:
"I believe we should have, right from the beginning, engaged someone who actually knew SAP - from the beginning."
No, really?
Like I said: what is so obvious to the rest of us as to barely need saying is a world of wonder and innovation to those managing government projects.
Dan,
I know of what you say. I've been myself. It still just strikes me that governments (and many companies) never learn.
My example is eons ago (it seems like) I worked in engineering a defense firm. We won a contract to design and build a turret for an armored fighting vehicle. We built it per the spec and then during acceptance, some General said: "Ok, let's take it out of the vehicle and tear it down." The spec stated "no repair needed". The as-built had wiring bundles to be cut and welds to be broken to get it out of the vehicle which destroyed the turret. The spec.. written my civilian and military members of DoD who should have known better. I should be jaded but idiocy still surprises me.
Getting users to do their testing can be like getting kids to eat their vegetables. Putting it out there like this might just be a tactic to protect developers who don't have sufficient influence to make users do it properly or help put pressure on users to get it done when they are suppose to.
Shame that the whole modus operandi of Gov departments was exposed in the above amusing documentary. Don't be fooled when they tell you it is a comedy, for those of us who have worked in the PS, sadly it is all too close to the truth. The other problem for Gov departments is that too often vendors use government contracts as a way of extracting inordinate quantities of money from the government coffers, particularly when the specification period stretches into the preliminary build time and the manager involved is getting pressure from his manager to get the contract signed off and under way otherwise he will lose funding.
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