Planning to get IT right

I spent the day at Boilerhouse's offices in Birmingham (Vicky's PR company, with her partner, Joe) in a workshop to consider the design brief for our new website. It should be able to do pretty well anything we want it to do, but that depends, of course, on us agreeing an effective design. Vicky, Adrian and I were joined by David, Diane and Pam, from the Socitm Office, Terry, from Socitm Consulting, and fellow directors David and Steve. We worked our way through a number of questions intended to help us identify some key requirements, and spent a while critiquing other leading websites, and those of some of our peers. Vicky and Steve recorded our agreed design requirements.

Our new CRM is the top development priority, so it's ready for the new membership year, starting 1st January. The CMS should be operational before the end of my Presidential year. The most resource intensive activities will be the migration of content and preparation of web-forms. I'm hoping, however, that we can get some quick wins by implementing in phases to deliver benefits like shared calendars.