(Please read my post, “What Goes Into A Good Web Design Contract“, so that you don’t end up as the butt of a joke too.)

Pigs were seen flying over the UK this morning as the Local Government Association released a list of 200 terms which should be banned from use. These include many of the Orwellian statements of jargon, nonsense, and bullshit-speak which have characterised so much of life in recent years.

You can view the full list here.

I scrolled down to scan for my most hated business bullshit terms – “partnerships” and “partnership working” – and was thrilled to see them on the list.  Far from their lofty ideals, in public sector practice, those terms really mean the forced dumbing-down and dilution of even the simplest tasks.  No one is permitted to work professionally, thoroughly, or efficiently, tasks must never be completed, and problems must never be solved.  Under no circumstances are you permitted to just get on with the job you were hired to do.  Doing that, of course, would not be “partnership working”, and would be an offensive incursion on the rights of your “partners” and “stakeholders”.   And fixing the problem you were hired to fix, after all, would put your “partners” out of work, so anything you do must merely dance around and hopefully expand the problem, not end it.  Oh, and don’t ever make the fatal mistake of pointing out that all five of your mandatorily assigned “strategic partners” are all funded from the same government branch as yours and most of their work overlaps and duplicates to absurd extremes.  Asking questions, after all, is the ultimate affront to your “partnership” and is condemned by any means necessary.  Ask the same question twice and your work is reassigned to new “key stakeholders” who are more willing to be “inclusive of partners” with your brief, though you are given a month’s pay as a parting gift.  “Partnership working” is the smarmy tool which has permitted the public sector to grow to 60% of employment in many areas of the UK, and “partnership working” is why we are deeper in social and economic decay than ever before despite all those “partnerships”.  As this piece put it brilliantly:

For those with 50 quid to spare, there’s still time to book a place at a conference in January on Improving Child Protection.  One speaker will be Sharon Shoesmith, who somehow finds time between days out at Ascot to be the head of children’s services at Haringey council. The subject of Mrs Shoesmith’s talk is: “Breaking Down Silos: Inspiring Ownership And Sharing Responsibility For Measuring Impacts And Outcomes Across Partnerships.”  No, I don’t know what a silo is either. But I’d be more than happy to whack Mrs Shoesmith with it.  (Full piece here.)

Last night at a networking event, I bumped into a graphic designer called Sandra Neilson of Forty Design.  Sandra designed the logos and colour schemes for two of my clients, and I integrated her work into their sites.  Here is one result of our combined work, and here is the other.  Two projects delivered on time, on budget, with great results for both clients, with both of us retaining our independence as self-employed freelancers.  We do not seek to encroach on each others’ territory and we do not burden our work with “quality assessments”, “IIP benchmarking processes”, or “strategic vision away days” (all of which my quango bosses were obsessed with); Sandra and I simply get on with what we do best and love.  That is real partnership working in action – a tool of progress and respect, not punishment and suppression.  And not a silo in sight!

A 16-year-old girl from Essex was fired after she described her office job as “boring” on her Facebook page. Kimberley Swann, 16, of Clacton, had been working at Ivell Marketing & Logistics, in Clacton, for three weeks before being fired on Monday.”I think they’ve stooped quite low,” she said. The firm’s Steve Ivell said of the decision: “Her display of disrespect and dissatisfaction undermined the relationship and made it untenable.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/essex/7914415.stm

Steve Ivell has proven once again that bored employees = bad managers.  Good managers give their staff enough to do.  It doesn’t matter if the employee is a 16 year old Essex gal, a 55 year old executive, or a temp being made to stare out the window for six hours a day so the management can spend the temp budget allocation (as happened to me).  Everyone has the right to be given enough work to fulfil and challenge them.

I’d hire this girl right away.  Clearly she wants to do more and she doesn’t hesitate to speak up when something isn’t right.  Good on you, Kimberley.

If only British managers put as much effort into managing as they do into witchhunting.

During my sophomore year at university I had the opportunity to attend a guest lecture by a world renown diplomat who had quite literally written the book on much of what I was studying.  I jumped at the chance to go; it’s not often that world leaders make time in their schedules for 19 year old students.  The lecture was being held in a tiny room which barely held 60 people, so I got there early, found a good seat, and sat attentively.

Eventually the lecture began, and the diplomat had a rapt audience.  But fifteen minutes into the lecture, the university president – a pompous, arrogant, self-promoting multi-millionaire – finally decided to show up.  He announced his arrival by hacking a smoker’s cough, pushed his ample girth to the front of the room in a way that ensured that his backside hit the faces of several students, and plopped into a seat in the front row.  The diplomat nodded to acknowledge his presence and continued.  But then, five minutes later, we heard something different from our honoured president.  Snoring.

It was mortifying, so much so that immediately after the lecture, one of my classmates wrote a letter to the campus newspaper expressing her shock and embarrassment that the public face of the unversity would behave in such a crude and boorish manner.  After the letter was printed, the subsequent newspaper carried a personal attack on my classmate for writing the letter.  It took just seconds of research on the university’s UNIX directory to see that the woman who had written the retaliatory letter was in fact one of the university president’s personal pupils, a group of masters’ degree students who received free tuition in postsecondary management in exchange for accepting full time employment as his personal cabal of flunkies.  This thirtysomething woman’s take on the situation was: how dare some ignorant, stupid little girl insult our esteemed University Leader, who arrived late because he was working hard, and fell asleep in public because he is diabetic but he skipped his lunch so that he could work so hard for you!

I learned a lot about leadership from that incident, but not from the diplomat.  Years later, my executive coach would help me to understand the difference between “authentic confidence”, where authorities lead because they are respected, and “inauthentic confidence”, where authorities have to force and fake respect because there is no way in hell they could merit it on their own.

Sadly, there’s lots of it happening these days, both in business (see Gary Marshall’s column in this month’s issue of .net magazine) and in politics.  I don’t know whether to feel pity or contempt for anyone who would fake their identity to support a manager who wouldn’t know leadership if it hit him (or her) in the face.  Real leadership inspires support, not syncophancy.  As some have said, it’s a Jacquiavellian world now.

Last weekend I caught up with a friend for coffee and gossip. We met when we worked together at a public sector community development agency, one which no longer exists. We are both very good at what we do for a living – marketing and web design in my case, data compilation and statistical analysis in hers. You wouldn’t know it, though, based on our time at that agency.

You see, we were never allowed to do our jobs. Any work we managed to produce was subjected to raised eyebrows, overly creative manipulation, and personal criticism above and beyond due diligence – not because we had done anything wrong, but because that was what the public sector culture of work required. We were frustrated casualties of the culture of consultancy excess, where consultants are called in for every little thing, regardless of whether or not they are needed. Our goal was to do the jobs we were paid to do; the consultants’ job was to “adjust” that work in order to perpetuate the problems as long as possible to justify the agency’s existence.

A brief and very typical example: I was doing project management on the agency’s web site revamp. I had to take a day off so that my husband and I could meet with a solicitor about a property we were bidding on. In that day I was off, the managing director of the company and the ever-present consultant convened a focus group to discuss the web site. They spent three hours discussing my project. The results were never conveyed to me and the fact that the meeting was held at all was never conveyed to me. I only found out by putting two and two together after being publicly bullied by the MD during a team meeting over random statistics and ideas, when I honestly had no idea what he was talking about. I did think it was odd it was that in the eight hours I was away, this MD – who was already insufferably smarmy – had begun quoting the sort of web “expertise” that comes out of in-flight magazines. As a web professional, I don’t know what was more disgusting: the fact that demographics critical to my project had been collated in secret and then withheld from me, or the fact that these two individuals could be so petty as to wait for the one day I took off to hold a secret meeting, skulking about like bitchy teenage girls. When I set forth my objections in writing, the consultant co-conspirator replied with two deadpan sentences denying that he even saw this as a problem. As a result of my objection, I was called into a disciplinary hearing.

Another example among many was discovering that the project was not necessary at all. I had been parachuted into the project assuming the agency and the consultant had peformed basic due diligence, which included analysing the existing site’s visitor statistics to determine which audiences the new site needed to target. Not only did the concept of visitor statistics leave them looking like Father Dougal McGuire, but I when I peeked under the bonnet of the existing homemade web site, I found an even bigger mess. They had a silly coloured graphical hits counter on their home page – the height of daft amateurism – which counted every pageview, internal, external, or repeat visit, as an individual hit. The web site was set as the home page on every employee’s computer, so that every time they pulled up their browser, another hit was registered. Smoke and mirrors. The counter did not track any visitor statistics, so I installed a real analytics counter and tracked results for a month. The findings? The site averaged eight external visits per week, six of which were from its funders. That left just two people per week choosing to interact with the agency through its web site rather than in-person visits or the phone. The MD and the consultant had put this project out to tender to the sexiest web firms in town, with a promise of five figures worth of public funds, having no clue how web analytics even worked. If the consultant had a clue, he would have known to divide the cost of the new web site by the average number of visitors. At the existing rate of hits, the cost per click of the new web site was nearly £1,800. I had no qualms about stating this to the world’s most clueless Board, and was rather proud of the ensuing disciplinary hearing (yes, another one).

Pity my friend the statistical analyst. Imagine constantly being ordered to rearrange black and white figures to support the story the management and consultants are determined to tell, rather than the story which is actually happening.

The mug, of course, was me, for assuming that a web site project was about delivering a web site. To the consultant and MD, the web site project was about spending money. The more money the agency spent, the more cash would be doled out to them in the next budget allocation, and the more PR mileage the public sector regeneration industry would get to spin out of cash spending. When you hear boasts of “We’ve invested £100 million in regenerating the local economy,” remember that 85m of that was overheads which includes astonishing amounts of consultancy fees. In the end, the problem was no closer to being solved, the neighbourhood was no closer to being regenerated, and the staff were no closer to feeling valued. But the managers got to spend some time play-acting at having actually done something for a living, and they leave the industry with swollen chests and a lucrative future as…consultants to the regeneration industry.

My experience with bad web consultants has set an easy definition for how not to run the web consultancy side of my business. I am not interested in telling people what they want to hear, witchhunting staff who are too good at what they do, or keeping a problem going until the next budget cycle. I try to be one of the good guys, and the only way to accomplish that is to come in – like I did at the agency – as the bad guy. I understand that web problems have very little to do with technology and a lot to do with personalities, structures, and relationships. I ask a lot of probing and occasionally uncomfortable questions about why things have gotten to the point where a consultant needs to be called in. Having been on the other side of the fence, I recognise the facial and verbal cues from staff members who are dying to speak their minds, but don’t see the point. I also recognise the verbal and body language hints from managers which tell me that they are bluffing their way through the conversation because they have bluffed their way through their responsibilities to their staff and their mission.

If it is clear to me that discomfort and evasion will be everyday occurrences on the project, I state my very Sagittarian opinion and ask them to find another web consultant. It’s not a stance which has me rolling around in public money. But it’s one that lets me go to sleep with a clear conscience. And when I do get a consultancy client who puts their business in front of petty games, it is the start of a beautiful friendship.

I have just posted one set of my guiding rules for web consultancy, Building a business case for your web site,  over at the Scottish Business Blog.  The piece has appeared on this blog before, but I have tidied it up and updated it for 2008 to reflect the rise of social media.

What I have written is still something I feel very strongly about and which every business owner should take on board.  Believe me – you do not want to be on the receiving end of the alternative.

If you are in Scotland we would love to see you on Scottish Business Forums, the companion site to the Scottish Business Blog.

I love this excerpt from Lois Frankel’s monthly coaching newsletter:

Recently, an affinity group from a large electronics firm called and asked me to make a presentation – but they had no budget. My recommendation to them was to get a budget so that their members didn’t feel like second class citizens.

Girlfriend practices what she preaches! In her life-transforming book, “Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office”, she talks about how too many women in business apologise for wanting to spend money on their own professional development. They choose to regard themselves as charity cases and objects of sympathy, where male colleagues would find development money in the budget and spent it to the penny.

Hence a group of otherwise intelligent corporate women think they can guilt-trip a bestselling author into speaking to them, free of charge, about how to grow thicker skins. Clearly they’ve missed the point entirely, and none of them have actually read her book!  In business and in life, no one will respect you if you don’t respect yourself. And that means quitting the charity case act and regarding yourself as the professional that you are.

In the consultancy side of my web design business, I always advise customers that when they say they have a problem with their existing web site, 75% of the time the problem actually has nothing to do with the web site. This week a new client proved that mantra in a way that still has me shaking my head.

This lovely lady approached me after the most recent Women into Business networking event to seek help with her web site. The company which she had hired to create and run it had done a runner. They were not answering or returning calls, emails, or written letters, and their own web site had gone down. Her “contact us” form had stopped working the day they took their own web site offline, and she was losing frightening amounts of business as a result. She had never dealt with her web site directly – everything had always gone through the designer – and now, with her mail form no longer working and the site in urgent need of updating, she could neither get in to her own web site nor find the people who could. The host was not allowing her to access her own account, as it had a design company employee’s name on it, and they needed to track him down to get his permission first…which was what this poor lady had been trying to do for months…

Doo doo DOO! Idea15 to the rescue!

First, to get control of her site back, I had to track down the company that created it. A little web research told a very interesting story. The company had been based in Edinburgh, and its one named employee was an all around “sales girl”. You know the type. They breed by the dozen. I found her current whereabouts through a social networking page, which told me that she knew everything about partying and nothing about IT. Getting in touch with her would be a complete waste. The other 35+ employees, now where were they?

China.

Although they were fully registered with Companies House, they had not filed their books in over two years, and I sourced their records to locate their most recent registered address so that I could try to contact them. It was a student flat in Edinburgh rented in a Chinese man’s name. There is nothing wrong with working from home – I do it myself, of course – however, I am a sole trader, and I am very up front about what I can and cannot accomplish. This company had been selling themselves as being capable of doing everything from designing your web site to installing your telephones and network to building databases. All this from a rental student flat? Where were they storing the inventory of E3 cables, the bin room?

Normally, due diligence would have caused me to try to negotiate with him to improve the deal the client had already paid for. Normally, though, the company representative is not a front for third world labour. I may not be Chinese, but I know Sun Tzu, and Sun Tzu says that a fly-by-night gangmaster is not a worthy adversary for battle.

As for the quality of the web site his company had produced, it was shocking. Table layout, graphical navigation, no ALT/TITLE tags, a rainbow coloured stats counter on each page, no META tags, no basic SEO – it was late 1990s amateur design.

Fortunately, the client was the domain owner. The domain is the power, not the site on the host. Incredibly (or perhaps not), the designer had not worked to a written contract, only verbal assurances, which meant that the client didn’t owe them a second more of her time.

I found a new host for her, moved the site over, wrestled the domain out of the registrar where the fly-by-night had stored it and onto a new registrar, and took it live last night. It still looks like it was made in China for a bowl of rice, but it’s out of that company’s hands, and next week the client and I will sit down and discuss how to redo this web site in a way that will win her business, not sympathy.

This company was advertising web sites, outsourced to China, from £99. You can be sure that the sales girl and the man on the ground in Edinburgh took at least a 2/3rds cut from each £99. So, someone in China got paid less than £35 to make a Scottish client’s web site. Everyone loves to get on their moral high horse about the true cost of a £5 pair of jeans made in China, but when it comes to IT, people are strangely silent. Paying someone on the other side of the world just £35 to create a web site is not outsourcing. It’s exploitation. Keeping a stable of people in an eastern country to work below fair market rates does not make you an entrepreneur. It makes you a pimp.

My client’s business turned into a battle ground for the unhealthy collision between a naive startup and an exploitative parasite out to milk the system. She was unsure and afraid of all things web, and believed the first thing a smooth-talking sales girl told her. As a result, instead of growing her business and signing new customers, she’s been writing pointless letters to a dormant address. And instead of helping her expand her web presence, I spent five billable hours just trying to get a hold of it.

Lesson learned for her. I look forward to working with her to improve her web presence and to correct the bad impression of my chosen profession which the experience has unfortunately given her.

One of my web design and consultancy clients was quoted in yesterday’s Scotsman in a story about Alpha Males, those arrogant, chest-beating workplace cowboys. You know the type: the ones who treat the business as their own private boys’ club and don’t think twice about ruining the lives of anyone who gets in the way of their fun.

Both Julia and I had encountered our share of them, and we both have those experiences to thank for inspiring us to create our own businesses built on integrity and dedication, not bluster and abuse.

Read what Julia has to say here and give her a buzz if you are looking to develop your managerial or leadership skills. She is an amazing lady!

The Scotsman carries a piece about the legal issues involved when a company changes hands and its web site becomes one of the transferred assets.  This piece was written by a lawyer for a managerial audience, so it’s not a light read.

http://news.scotsman.com/scotland/When-websites-are-forgotten.3692223.jp

One could say that the Scotsman’s web site was forgotten in its recent horrendous revamp, but let’s not go there.