GovMap
Coming soon…
GovMap wins AIIA i-award
I’m proud to announce that we have been awarded the Victorian State AIIA (Australian Information Industry Association) i-award in the ‘Data Insights Innovation of the Year’ category.
The joint win between DELWP and our development partner, Dialog for is for GovMap, a Victorian government website providing information about government owned land in the State.
Unfortunately (for me) I was at a Land Use Victoria off-site the evening of the award and so could not attend the ceremony, however the crew were there (and looking fabulous!) to represent and take home the gong.
Everyone on the team, both at DELWP and Dialog are thrilled and it’s great to see everyone getting recognised in this way.
Here is a (slightly cringey.. ok, very cringey especially yours-truly) promo we made for it.
Movember 2014
I’m writing this somewhat after the fact (given that I’m already fully working on the 2015  version of the site) however this does provide an opportunity to reflect on last year and what turned out to be a very successful project for IE.
2014 was the year we got the Agile process much more fully embedded into the way our cross-company team worked. Whilst we still had a number of areas to improve upon (planning remained a weak spot) at least we were much stricter with our process and timings. From my perspective this was by far the smoothest year to date, we delivered on time and on budget, although not all features that Movember had originally wanted. Here too the Agile process was able to identify potential production issues and we were able to transfer the team’s energies into the highest value work.
We were able to scale up the front-end team (with a particularly fine bunch of freelancers) at just right time to turn around the creative as it was getting approved – the basic groundwork having already been completed by our superstar Italian new recruit Franco Zaniol. It worked brilliantly, the team scaling up to 13 developers at one stage, but always productive. Velocity continued to improve until the end of the project. Validation that Agile can work on even the most challenging projects.
Overall Movember were very happy with the result, the site was much more ready to hand over to the Movember business than it has been in previous years, and this was greatly appreciated – giving Movember’s content around the world more time to hone the content…
In terms of the new features we did roll out, they included:
- Overhaul of Mo Space UI
- Rebuild of the Sencha Mobile Website (after the ‘difficult’ 2013 version)
- Introduction of Kiss Metrics across the site
- Redesign of Registration
- Implementation of Twitter Bootstrap framework (groundwork for moving the site Responsive in 2015)
- All new ‘Mogress’
- Introduced more regular site features to T2 and T3 countries
- New Front-end theme
- Suggested Donation amounts in the Donation form
- New Report Cards section
- Extension of the Events section functionality
- Introduction of back-end Jobs and a Queuing system (ie. to handle processing of email notifications etc.)
- …and many more smaller updates.
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- Homepage
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- Mogress
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- Mo Space
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- Donate
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- Mo Parties
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- Mo Photos
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- Report Cards
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- News
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- Search Results
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- Mo Space
Nike E-Commerce
Client:Â Nike Australia
Launch:Â August 2013
URL:Â www.nikestore.com.au
This project started in late 2012, shortly after I finished up on Movember 2012, and to be honest, it was not my normal kind of project; essentially a job to replicate an existing website, in this case the US Nike e-commerce store, and build it on a different platform, Magento e-commerce. There were a few changes and modifications Nike Australia wanted to make, but essentially that was it – this was an engineering and production challenge whereas my preference is always to work on new designs and solutions. That’s not to say this was not an interesting project, or that I wasn’t up for the challenge of making it happen.
We quickly realised that the US version of the website, dubbed the ‘Nike One’ design, was developed for Adobe’s CQ5 and would not be able to provide us workable front-end fragments from which to build our UI – this would need to be redeveloped from scratch, no small undertaking as this design is responsive to both desktop and tablet, with a separate site for mobile users – we knew early on that would be a big front-end job.
The site would also make full use of some interesting technology partners, Product search specialists, SLi, recommendations engine Baynote, user reviews Bazaarvoice and delivery experts Temando, and all hosted on AWS. Overall this mix of technologies combined well to make a website easily the equal of it’s big brother in the States.
In the end multiples staff changes at IE led to a difficult production, especially in terms of that complex front-end build and ultimately the project over-ran – even I had to handover the final delivery of the site so that I could switch back to Movember 2013, which by that time was heading into full production mode.
 However, the site is live now and, importantly, sales are up and the feedback has been universally positive.
Movember 2013
As I write this post we’re just two days off from November 1st and I’m struck again by the sheer energy that goes into making Movember happen – not just from the thousands of Mo Bros and Mosistas that take part, but the work we have been doing behind the scenes, for the last twelve months, to prepare for it.
It remains to be seen if this year’s campaign will top last years, but so far signs are good. In project and production terms, however it easily eclipses previous years.
This year has seen a long shopping list of new features and upgrades made to the website – it’s safe to say not a single section has not been tweaked and optimised further.  One of the bigger changes has been a targeted notification system that uses the member location and demographic information to produce tailor made email comms and a daily update email that rolls together several previous notifications into one highly personalised and engaging one.
Following some success last year we decided early this year to move the project into a much more recognisable Agile process, complete with planning wall, planning poker and iterations. We also upgraded to the latest, Cloud based version of Jira to supply the issue ticketing system for (as of today about 2.5k tickets :-0 ) For the most part it worked, and brought the Movember and IE teams closer together than ever before, working in a more collaborative fashion.
The results have been good, despite a mobile website overhaul which proved to much harder to deliver that it first appeared. This year’s site is bigger and faster than any previous and is set to deliver a great experience for people all over the globe.
 Time to grow that silly mo again…
Client:Â Movember
Launch:Â September 2013
URL:Â www.movember.com
Movember 2012
Movember has a great concept, branding and execution and is fast become the global poster boy for the way modern charities must work if they want to attract huge, engaged audiences.
Moving to Melbourne I was struck by how much the local fashion is reflected back in this Aussie icon, which seems to embody the quintessential Melbourne dandy like no other. I’m not even close to being hip enough to consider myself amongst these ranks, however when the opportunity to work on developing their website came along there was no way I could let it pass.
Movember.com is the global hub for all Movember activities, and it’s just one site operated from Melbourne in 26 countries. It’s the scale of this operation which is breathtaking and is best conveyed in numbers – the 2012 website, which I helped produce, had the following crazy stats:
[put in numbers, total donations, total registrations, total mo bros, mo sistas total concurrents, max donations in an hour..etc]
I project managed the site build and liaised with the client to help define requirements and solutions. I managed a team of 10, including software engineers, developers, test analyists and specialist consultants. It was fascinating to work on something that needs to operate on such a scale – learning about the engineering and tools that this requires was incredibly valuable and interesting.
Alongside a number of upgrades to the website and complete re-skin in 2012 we also developed a new mobile website (using the Sencha framework) and public API (used primarily by Movember’s native iOS and Android apps).
Managing a project of this size was not easy as there were multiple stakeholders at the charity and hundreds of development tasks to deliver. However we were still able to introduce some Agile practices into the production process, ones we would extend further with Movember 2013. The site and campaign in 2012 was widely regarded to be a success, with no down time during the campaign whilst seeing Movember’s biggest ever numbers to date.
I also grew a very silly mo.
Crime & Punishment movie
A huge congratulations out to my partner’s old friend Andrew O’Keefe and his partner Tuuli in achieving their crowd funding goal on Pozible.com. Along with Steve Jablonkski they are producing a new feature film adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. They’re doing it with the help of the film school of Melbourne University (where Andrew lectures) and, needless to say, the whole production is operating on the tightest of budgets and an army of volunteers.
I’ve been helping, albeit in a very small way, through setting up and hosting the website crimeandpunishment.com.au – although in the end we decided the best solution would be a simple wordpress theme, so my involvement has been minimal since then. For the last couple of months Andrew, Tuuli and Steve have done an amazing job on social media, especially Facebook, in drumming up support for the movie as the January 2nd Pozible deadline approached – these guys can really teach anyone I’ve worked with in media and marketing a thing or two, I’ve been massively impressed.
They are filming the movie this month in and around Melbourne – which on its own should be an interesting twist on the original – which is set in a cold, damp St. Petersburg. As I write this Melbourne is bracing itself for heatwave with temperatures set to hit 40+ degrees today and for the next few days, so if they were looking for a different backdrop then they have certainly got it.
I can’t wait to see how it turns out  and with any luck I’ll get a chance to be an extra in the movie.. just need to find some precious time to make it happen. If you’re interested in finding out about the movie, or even becoming an extra yourself, then check out the website or the Facebook page.
Movember.com – 2012 Campaign all set to mo..
We went live with the new Movember.com website last week, after a heroic few months development and UAT.
Since I started at IE I’ve been constantly amazed at just what a big site and operation Movember is. The campaign doubles in size each year with 2012 fully operational in about 20 countries and set to be massive back home in the UK – and despite a presidential election should break all records in the States too. Around the world hundreds of thousands are expected to take part, generating several million individual donations: simply massive.
And the whole operation hinges around the website, it manages the donations made by everyone taking part and cleverly aggregates this into leaderboard data and in so doing turns Movember into a month-long worldwide money raising game. Via the site you can track individuals, teams or even multi-country networks of members’ donations. Movember.com is also a fully-fledged social network. Every member has their ‘Mo Space’ that they can use to track their progress, blog and share with others – it’s an idea that has evolved over the years and fits perfectly with the fun irreverent nature of the event – if a thousand young men in your area growing moustaches wasn’t viral enough the website is more than happy to remind you just what a social phenomena this is. Read More
Mo Bro
And following favourit I find myself back for a stint in agency-land, working for a company called IE Agency.. (the ‘IE’ I’m reliably informed stands for ‘Internet Experience’) project managing development on Movember.com. For those of you that don’t know they’re people behind all those moustaches sported by hipsters throughout the month of November. I think we’ve all come across Movember at some stage – certainly living in London you couldn’t get away from it, I even toyed with taking part myself.. but never really had the cojones, so to speak. But it was quite a surprise to find out what a massive operation it is, especially on the web. The project I’m managing never really stops, just ramps ups hugely in the run up (ie. now!) to the launch of the campaign (2012 starts in September).
I have to say, so far, I’m enjoying it. It feels good to part of something clearly destined  to become (if not already) an Aussie icon, and the chaps at IE are a lovely bunch so hopefully I will be sticking around for a while longer.. and, of course, I’ll post up pictures of the ridiculous mo I’ll be growing later in the year.. no excuses this time..
Favourit.com goes Beta
I was sad to leave Agility Interactive a couple of months ago. At the time the company faced an uncertain future following their new parent company’s decision to strip it and sell it on. I had to leave – contracts were not being extended, but the few full-timers that remained faced a nail-biting few weeks while theirs, and the future of Favourit.com (the product we had all worked on) future was decided.
I don’t know the details but the company, now simply called Favourit.com, has new owners, direction, and at long last the password protection has been lifted and the site opened up to the public for the first time.
Favourit.com is a really interesting proposition and (in my opinion) has the potential to be a really big online success story.
It’s a marriage of social network with online sportsbook with an aim to own the ‘social betting’ space. So far, so bad, you might be thinking – this space is literally littered with the bodies of countless startups that have tried and failed this kind of thing before. But I think Favourit is different; where other social betting sites have invented gimicky tools to create bets with your friends, or offered bizarre multiplayer pool betting games constructed around chat rooms, favourit simply aims to take your normal sportbsook experience and make it social. Read More