Web team strategy day
Yesterday the extended Web team—that is the Web team, a couple of Web application software developers and someone from the IT Services systems team—met for four-and-a-half hours in the Hebdomadar’s Room with our boss the Director of Business Improvements to look at our strategy.
The day was focussed around a SWOT analysis looking at strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats with a view to developing a strategy for both the Web team and Web application developments.
Agenda
In case we ever want to do the same thing again and can’t remember how we structured the day…
9.30-9.45 SWOT analysis: Strengths , Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats
9.45-10.45 Analysis of SWOT identifying and prioritising areas of action
10.45-11.00 Coffee break
11.00 -13.00 Defining and agreeing principles and goals for web developments
13.00-13.45 Lunch
13.45-14.00 Wrap up
What actually happened
It was always an ambitious timetable and so what actually happened was the second item on the agenda “Analysis of SWOT identifying and prioritising areas of action” actually finished at 13:50 after a coffee break and a 20 minutes lunch.
What a SWOT!
It was a useful day, with some good discussion and some positive affirmation: our strengths we identified as being
- teamwork
- our breadth and depth of skills
- our approach to working (e.g. using Agile)
- our can-do attitude
Our weaknesses were more varied but revolved around the absence of a Web strategy, a lack of a standard, agreed way of doing things and gaps in our skills within the team.
The mobile Web and emerging standards such as HTML5 and CSS3 were highlighted as opportunities. And predictably, among both the opportunities and threats was the forthcoming departmental restructure.
We now have 19 action points to work through, the first being “finish writing the Web strategy document” and the last “be aware of Web trends via Twitter, blogs, books, conferences, etc.”