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Graham Oakes

Principal , Graham Oakes Ltd

Biography

Graham Oakes

Graham is the principal of Graham Oakes Ltd, a consultancy set up in 2003 to help organisations untangle complex technology, relationships, processes, and governance. He has worked with organisations such as Sony, Amnesty International, Oxfam, Cisco, MessageLabs and the Open Source Academy as to develop content management and customer service strategies – and hence to build systems which will support those strategies. His experience covers a range of proprietary and open source technologies.

Prior to forming Graham Oakes Ltd, Graham has held titles including Director of Technology at Sapient and Head of Project Management at Psygnosis. He has over 20 years of systems engineering experience.

Graham Oakes Ltd

Graham Oakes Ltd helps you work out how to use technology to achieve your business goals. The company provides strategic independent consulting and mentoring to help you manage the ambiguity and uncertainty that surround any major business initiative.

Tutorial

Defining Requirements

Tutorial Day, Tuesday November 2nd, 9.00-12.00

A scenario-based approach works well when selecting a new web platform: people identify 3-5 discriminating scenarios and ask vendors to demonstrate how their systems can deliver these scenarios.  However, when we start to implement that CMS or that enterprise portal, we often need to define a fuller set of requirements.  This is particularly true when the system must integrate with other systems – e-Commerce, CRM, Portals, etc.  We may do this via just-in-time stories (e.g. for agile development) or as a more detailed upfront requirements spec (e.g. if we have to go through a public sector procurement process).  Either way, defining a clean set of requirements is hard work, and inadequately defined and managed requirements is one of the main reasons for problems with the subsequent project.

This tutorial will look at an approach to defining such requirements, covering:

  • Why we need requirements
  • Approaches to defining requirements – just-in-time (agile) versus upfront (traditional / waterfall)
  • A way to structure requirements for content and information systems (covering areas such as objectives, stakeholders, content types, content lifecycles, business events)
  • Challenges for gathering / defining / negotiating requirements

It will be based on examples of actual requirements developed for a number of organisations across Europe.

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Presentation

Working with IT - Romance, Marriage or Divorce?

Track: Web project management
Conference Day #1, Wednesday November 3rd, 16.00-17.00

We often need to bring together a wide range of skills in order to build and operate successful websites: design, editorial, technical, project management, etc.  In most organisations, these skills are scattered across a number of departments – IT, Communications, Marketing, and so on – each with different drivers, objectives, mindsets and processes.  This can lead to a lot of conflict.  In particular, the divide between IT and other groups is often very large.

This session will look at some of the drivers that apply to people in IT.  It will also look at the psychology of some typical roles in IT, and how this complements the psychology of some of the other roles involved with web development.  We’ll also have some open discussion on how to deal with the conflicts that these differences in perspective can cause.

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cmf2006

cmf2007

Philadelphia 09