Last week, the team went to see Gavin McLachlan talk about his aims for the University, and it was great to see we’re on the same page on some key issues.

New Chief Information Officer

Gavin McLachlan started as the new Chief Information Officer last month, replacing Jeff Haywood, and last week he was out and about giving talks around the University. The Website Programme team went to see him on the 9 March at DHT.

Gavin McLachlan

Commercial background

Other than his immediately previous role at UCL, Gavin’s CV seems mainly commercial. He told us that he eventually felt a need to achieve more than profit-chasing. This background could be a good thing for the University. Like any sector, I’m sure, Higher Education can be very inward facing, and it’s often a breath of fresh air to have someone coming in with more diverse experience – to shake things up a bit or give us a pat on the back, it remains to be seen!

He certainly seems interested in getting to know people, and talked of perhaps reviving plans that had been ‘sitting in people’s desk drawers for years’ but hadn’t been though feasible before, for whatever reason.

Gavin McLachlan’s profile on the Principal’s Office website

Rejecting development requests

What most struck a chord for me was when he talked of rejecting HR‘s request for a new system. At first this surprised me – I think most people who’ve used the HR systems, as a recruiter or an applicant, would agree they need to be reviewed. But this wasn’t an out-of-hand rejection – he just wants HR to go away and work out what they really need, not start off with ‘we need new tech’. He shared the viewpoint that, too often, systems are designed by developers and then given back to those who want to use them.

This cheered my heart, because that’s exactly what we aim to do at the Website Programme. It’s would be all too easy to make systems that meet the requirements of central services and leave editors across the University out in the cold with a CMS they don’t understand, resulting in frustrated members of staff, despite their best efforts, producing websites that are out-of-date, confusing and inaccessible – in short, not user-friendly.

Agreeing objectives

When we make a new website at UWP, the very first thing we do is to bring in the key stakeholders of the unit – regardless of whether they’re going to be involved in editing the site. These are the people who are the experts in the activities of their unit, and what they need users to get from the site. At minimum this is a short meeting with key stakeholders; with larger, more complex sites this process is correspondingly longer and more complex.

We produce an objectives document clearly laying out the purpose of the site, intended as a living, breathing tool for continual appraisal. Only then do we apply our own expertise – what we know about user behaviour, accessibility issues, University style, and our intimate knowledge of the CMS, and help to edit and structure the site. Once we get as far as adding content to the CMS, it’s a quick and easy job, because everyone’s on the same page.

Our site building process – Website Programme website

EdWeb – a many-layered thing

What’s been so interesting about the EdWeb project is that it’s a story within a story. Although on the face of it, the aim is to create great public-facing websites, to me what the project’s really been about is to create a CMS> using the same approach we use to create websites. With a friendly, efficient CMS, those great websites are much easier for editors (often cramming in web editing as part of an overloaded schedule) to build and maintain.

What for a small website is a short objectives document, for EdWeb was months of consultation and hundreds of user stories gathered before a stroke of development work ever took place. How else could we know what to develop?

CMS User Experience – EdWeb wiki [EASE login required]

It’s fantastic to see our new Chief Information Officer behind this approach, and I look forward to seeing his plans unfold over the coming months.