Deathly quiet

So we were meant to golive on Friday, and I was even ready, but then our technology partner is having difficulty getting all the various versions of the site talking to each other reliably. I feel like a teenager waiting for a call from a prospective date…

Meanwhile I have been compiling a list of things to do now that my boss is leaving. Lets start with some obvious stuff:

• Organisation wide accessibility position
• Technical standards (html versions, css for layout, that sort of thing)
• How about some business reporting using, gasp, stats packages!?

We are so far behind, but I reckon with 6 months hard work I can bring us up to speed… because I am THE PUBLIC SECTOR WEB GUY!

Countdown

You know the feeling… a thousand little technical niggles to sort out and someone INSISTS that such and such a paragraph must change or the APOCOLYPSE will happen NOW.

You know that it’s more important that the site be visible on IE5.5 without turning to custard, you know that one person a year looks at that page from your stats log, you know the deadline is fixed but this paragraph is REALLY important to this person so reluctantly agree.

Then they email you the paragraph and whats attached? The PDF with NINE annexes in word form, all to be magiced together into a lovely document. And the content of those annexes are diagrams cobbled together in Word that are horrific, truly magnificant illustrations of the ‘chart junk’ school of time wasting… it makes me weep…
I shouldn’t even be writing this, I shouldn’t even be doing content, it’s meant to be signed off, but there you go – who cares about IE5.5 anyway?

Well me, since 10% of our customers are still on it.

OU Site

Just aware that I should be putting up some links to actual good public sector sites… I have worked at a University and know how f’ing hard they are to get right.  The Open University do a stonkingly good job:

http://www.open.ac.uk/

Whipping boy

Ahh, my boss has gone into paranoia mode. When I told her that I was delaying the launch because of late content she told me that she was not going to be ‘the whipping boy’. The content is her resposibility.

Aside from the obvious insanity and rudeness of this remark and the completely inappropriate naure of this kind of thing at work, this is the second time she has laid it on me and I know from experience that it’s all about her; she really can’t handle criticism (any form of it) and so goes into passive-aggressive  mode. So it’s my problem that she is not delivering on time? I don’t think so. It is a lot of her and a lot of the people she is trying to wrangle content out of, but when she goes around with this kind of attitude on… well… it just turns into me from someone with a degree of sympathy to someone who couldn’t give a fat rat’s arse about her.

Managers take note: You are not allowed to get this personal. And if you do, does it come back to you? Oh yes, it does…

I just had a though – maybe she has some gender issues, why else would you use the term whipping boy as a female? Maybe that explains it all, anger at having to live in a womans body…

Calm regained

No, I’m not going to exaggerate the negativity – from yesterdays post you may think I am getting ready for a fight. But once again I will rise above the acrimony I have for my boss and, rather than fight my corner, I will merely stand firm: The website will go live when I say I am ready and finished what I need to do.

And if asked why I am going to be doing this I can point out that the content has been so late stabilising (and one month later than I expected) that I haven’t had time to finish my own tasks.

Simple. I still struggle to believe that I even have to think of preparing of meetings in this way. Is that naivety? In a way, yes. It’s taken me about two years to get used to my bosses management ’style’ – and about the same time for people to realise quite how bad she is for the organisation and her staff (much more on this later!). I can’t wait for her to go so I can get on with thinking about positive change and working with people rather than defending myself against them.

Anyway… a relatively simple day ahead assembling metadata. Though already I have discovered one gaff I have made: I can’t define a news item as a press release AND a piece of other news (like ‘research news’) which is, frankly, really stupid on my part and I will suffer for it!

Pre-launch misunderstandings

One of the problems with being a specialist inside a generalist department (‘Corporate Affairs Group’) is that no one quite understands you. Nothing unexpected there, but at times like this, with a relaunch a few days away, a little understanding would go a long way…

One problem ‘we’ have is that Comms here are very used to dealing with things that have staples in them – annual reports and the like – and still struggle to get the dynamic nature of a website. the whole idea of Metadata is foreign and thinking about content management completely alien.

All well and good but these are the misunderstandings that have really surprised me over the last 6 months:

• The very large web company doing the implementation can’t generate CSS based websites. Not a clue. No idea. They also have no designer, no IA and no usability practice. But they are a world leader in SMS and satellite communications. So why did we choose them? That’s a whole other story.
• The person doing content has consistently not applied any of my rather useful suggestions (lets start with the obvious, like ‘What pages need to be on the new website at live and what can wait). Consequently everything is late…
• Because everything is late it is now becoming me who is the bottleneck – applying metadata, upload and so on takes a while and with pages changing underneath me all the time I can’t do the extra things like ‘See Also’ links.
• Because of a, b and c above I am now the one saying that we need more time. What surprises me about this is how, though being a good all-round guy, I am now the one who is the baddie!

So I am going to step into the project board meeting having to defend myself by, unavoidably, pointing my finger at other people. That makes me feel like a real heel. A lot of this has to do with my toxic boss and the atmosphere of doom she has managed to create, she is forcing me into a corner from which there is no escape but forward and thus into the target zone…

And that’s what I really don’t understand – why does she feel the need to turn website development into a battlefield?

Who said the the public sector was boring!

First up…

So why start yet another bloody blog?

• I got sick of moaning about web life in the public sector; I got sick of the sound of one man crapping; I got sick of thinking that one day I might get that great other job; I got sick of myself thinking of this as a temporary job…
• I also am completely bored by how apathetic the UK web scene is. Actually I got bored with myself thinking how boring it is so thought it was time to put my head over the parapet…
• I am amazed at some of the things that go on, the contracts, the stances, the corporate double-speak. I need to share some of this stuff…
• I am asked from time to time how to do various things by people (non-experts) who have been tasked to ‘build a new website’ and have no idea where to start – I can help…
• I want to be able to say: Yes, we can do innovation!

I AM: The Public Sector Web Guy!