The Developement Up-Cycle
I don’t quite know how to describe this one; it’s about Workflow more than anything else and it’s a constant challenge. Let me start by saying the biggest threat facing customers at the moment is some form of cybercrime.
Not a day goes by that some service or other fails, goes down or is a victim of cybercrime. We’ve heard of the Marks & Spencer’s fiasco earlier in the year, costing M&S some £330million to sort out, now Coop has ‘fessed up that data on every single customer they have has been stolen. Closer to home, we know of at least one company that has had its entire corporate-wide computer network hacked and scrambled, forcing them to rebuild their entire IT infrastructure and losing years of data. Another firm was in the press, having gone insolvent and losing 700 jobs. Crime is a problem and it’s growing… Update your passwords now.
Behind the scenes
I won’t exaggerate, we don’t get involved with all this IT stuff. In the world of Web Design and Development, we’re relatively safe; we either rely on 3rd party platforms to build our websites or we upload our coding from our network to an entirely separate network, and most of our ‘data’ is stored with 3rd parties. We’re at the mercy of a number of systems, so I can’t say we’re all that secure, but we’re sufficiently spread out that should the worst happen, most of our websites would survive and nothing would be lost. We are also fully backed up.
But what is going on behind the scenes, that is the question, as we rely on computers and electrical devices more and more, how does it all work. Ultimately, it’s all software code that works on hardware.
Let’s make no mistake the correct way to do everything is to spec out a job fully, compartmentalise everything, employ the right resources to get the task done and then have a system in place that checks everything before it is uploaded to the Internet and then also afterwards to ensure it all works.
If you’re a bank or PLC firm or perhaps the NHS, this will be mandatory and basic stuff. Work is divided up between teams of computer developers, who work on projects together in teams, constantly cross-checking and bouncing ideas around, then managers will check work, writing reports and going back to teams with their findings, before passing it up the line again to senior managers. This process will continue up the line until ultimately a single person gives the Go-Ahead and the project will be shipped off to different teams for implementation before being sent back up the line of the manager for final checking and testing.
You can see the process. It’s a nightmare and in previous posts, I have gone into more detail, suggesting the whole of tech is more or less down to Bill Gates, as ultimately is the top-level approver of pretty much everything. If Bill Gates hadn’t approved of the way Windows works, then Browsers wouldn’t work they way they do and the Internet would be a very different place than it is today.
It’s a bit like the analogy that our Space Travel is down to the Romans; if they had not built Chariots 6ft wide, then Roads would be a different width, thus bridges and tunnels were created based on the width of the road. This concept carries onto the width are vehicles are based on the bridges and tunnels they have ot cross or pass through. So the Space Shuttle dimensions were ultimately based on what a lorry could carry and where it could carry it – so being based on the width of a charity. Thus, our Space Travel potential is entirely dependent on the Romans to kick-start it all. I think you get my drift.
Why is Marketing Different
So there is something different in the Marketing Industry. Sure, for old-fashioned marketing, there were plenty of Teams, Managers and Approval Processes. But in the world of websites, this is far less common or obvious. The first big hurdle is Time. Marketing has to move fast – there is no time to bounce things around between departments. An Instagram shot is here and now.
What this means is that decisions are made at a ground level. Our level, if you like. When a client asks us to build a website from scratch, it is normal that they have no corporate image. What colours shall I use – says I? Any is the reply, and when I pick the blues or yellows, about 30 seconds of thought goes into the Pantone selection.
All too often, a client will prefer to use stock photography and that’s fine for something conceptual, but if you’re trying to promote your plumbing skills, surely you cannot use someone else’s photos. But I few Plumbers websites will do that.
Marketing is obsessed with making products or services look good, yet simple does not put the time or resources into backing this up. It’s truly like sending in the troops with below-par weapons; it should end in disaster and quite often does. Add Alt Tags to your photos, we say, but often it’s just too time-consuming for the client to bother.
So what Happens
I am going somewhere with this – please bear with me. So on the one hand, we have a tech industry that depends on a hierarchical system of managers constantly ‘approving’ of one thing or another. On the other hand, we have a system where any old thing will do and we can always change it later.
It’s clearly a cost-benefit thing. The first method of full-on project management is both the safer and more expensive route, whereas the fly-by-wire let’s get it done is cheaper and quicker. We get that.
Our experience is that most of the work we do is now more of the Fly-by-Wire approach, and that’s the point of this post. We want our clients to understand that we’re not a company that subscribes to the Development UpCycle; in fact, the reverse, due to our own laziness, we’re very much more in the 2nd camp.
But I want to reassure you, while there are risks to this methodology, everything we do can be recified and that is the ultimate key to it. If we were hacked or scammed, we’d be up and running again within 24 hours. Our websites would be unaffected, our emails unaffected, we don’t have much data on our computers, and because we use a plethora of 3rd party services, most would be untouched in a serious situation and reasonably backed up if the worst were the worst.
This does give us our biggest competitive edge as it were. A bit like a seriously small outfit being so small they can save you 20% because they aren’t VAT registered, we’re a little like that. If we have to incorporate every project into a team of developers with managers to oversee things, our workforce would quadruple and our prices would correspondingly quadruple as well.
I hope I have explained a little of what it would be like if a disaster happened, what we can do to mitigate, how we manage to keep costs down and why we don’t actually do what a lot of IT companies do by formalising their workflows and processes. Instead, we’re just a good quality, highly knowledgeable team working on your ideas.
Thank you for reading.