As a consultant working mostly with government, I am used to things going, shall we say, not always exactly to plan. 

Everyone starts out with a strong wish to deliver something great – and then legacy technology, supplier disagreements, siloed thinking and other natural hazards get in the way, leading to the final result looking quite different from the blueprint. 

Of all the factors that can scupper a plan the biggest, in my opinion, is unclear goals and expectations at the outset leading to misunderstandings and disappointment.  I have seen it happen – after much hard work the consultants turn up and expect to get feted, only to hear the client declare that s/he wanted something completely different all along.

However, it’s a pretty big thing for a government department to stand up and actually shoulder the responsibility in the way that Defra has done in its work with Accenture.  In brief, the permanent secretary of Defra has made it clear that Accenture cannot be held responsible for the fact that the Rural Payments Agency could not adequately describe what they needed from the contractor. 

The standard remedy for this is to make certain that highly detailed technical and business requirements are gathered and documented in great detail.  There is nothing wrong with this approach, but it begs a few questions: how certain can the client be that they actually know what they want?   How easy is it to specify a service without having seen the output of it?  And, particularly for IT and digital products, how can you be certain that what was specified at the beginning of the process is not already out of date by the time everyone is happy with the specification?

My recent work takes a very different tack – don’t worry about getting the specification right first time, because you’re going to fail anyway. Instead, think more about how the get end-users to engage with the product or service in the first place. 

The best way of doing this is to slap something together that quickly brings the concept to life – the look and feel, the functionality and features, and the navigation.  Make certain you slap a big fat “Beta” up at the top and then launch it, sooner rather than later.  Make certain that you have good facilities in place to capture feedback, and that you have thought through what you want to ask your customers.  This can include polls, discussion boards or more sophisticated rating and ideation tools. Equally important is to get the right end-users to participate, but this is becoming increasingly more simple, as the social media sphere now allows for rapid identification of websites and individuals who can act as advocates and nodes for disseminating your message.

I feel strongly that in a world moving as fast as ours, this is the way to get things done.  No battle plan survives contact with the enemy, so why not be flexible from the beginning? This approach turns speed from a disadvantage (“the world is running away from what I am building”) to a benefit (“my product evolved in line with the environment and became much better as a consequence”).  It also means that the people who will actually use the product are participating through every stage of design and re-design.  If they had worked liked this, maybe Defra, Accenture and a whole bunch of farmers would all have been happier today?