It was probably a mix of both. The team at that point was myself and two other peers. We had about 6 months to redesign a site that had grown over the years to around 10,000 pages of horridly outdated content. It was a mess to say the least. While doing the redesign, we had to maintain normal operations for that site, manage other projects - internal business apps and marketing projects, and handle the communications plan & training for the new site. The training involved 50-70 content contributors. So, one part was simply a resource issue. 3 guys couldn't handle all that and do the redesign all at the same time.
The second factor, and I really think this was a huge part of it, was we simply did not have the credibility built across the organization to change the culture this drastically. Obviously, our champion had faith and trusted us, but not all of the stakeholders did. The two consulting firms were so well pedigreed that credibility was no longer an issue, and a lot of the internal politics at play went away quickly. There was simply no arguing with these guys! :-) Also, my team made it part of the selection process that we be highly involved with the research - we went and did fieldwork with the research firm and were equally involved with the design firm as well. During this time we constantly communicated back to internal stakeholders and established ourselves as equals with the consultants that they already highly trusted. By the time the project was finished, our credibility had gone way up. It went up even further after the site was live for a few months and the customer feedback and conversion numbers, as well as employee feedback started coming in. It set us up perfectly to be the ambassadors of change that you mention, and we were there to stay and apply the same process to other projects. Jeff On Jan 9, 2008 1:14 AM, Pankaj Chawla <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 1/9/08, Jeff White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >They never seemed to really > > believe us, but as soon as we found a champion to support us and give > > us actual money to redesign their website, we brought in two outside > > consulting firms - one that specialized in research and another that > > specialized in design. > > Was the success because you finally found a champion who had the > budget and power to drive the organization towards UCD or was it the > external consultants? I would tend to believe that with such a > champion even you and your team internally would have made the > difference. Most such culture changing success stories have a seed in > a champion at the highest level. Once there is a champion it just is a > matter of time and finding a team either internally or externally who > can implement the vision. In you case it happened to be an external > team but I have seen so many cases where it happened with internal > teams also. The added advantage with internal teams is they are there > to stay and will become the change ambassadors for times to come. > > Thanks > Pankaj > ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
