Gareth is the former web architect within the University of St Andrews web team and digital communications team. A graduate of St Andrews (BD Hons, 1993), Gareth joined the web team in 2006 and worked mainly on information architecture and front-end development (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript). He then spent most of his time doing DSDM agile project management and business analysis, was the warden at Agnes Blackadder Hall from 2016 to 2018 and then moved into full time agile and scrum master work.
When creating a plan—whether it be a big project release plan or a smaller two-weeks’ timebox plan—you essentially need to know three things: Tasks —What are the requirements? What do you need to do? Size — How big are…
One of the biggest challenges we faced when we started down the Agile path was how to accommodate working on multiple projects concurrently. This is a little insight into how we are currently managing ourselves across…
Hands up if you love meetings. Anyone? No? Here are a couple of ‘inspirational’ quotations for you: Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything — John Kenneth Graham The least productive people are…
Over the last year, as we’ve been formally trying to work in a more agile way, one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced as a project manager is resource management. In other words, How do we know how much time each…
We've been running retrospectives at the end of each sprint for the last few months. This is how we do them and why they've been useful for improving how we work.
Updates on the web team activities can now be found on the digital communications team blog. If you would like to continue to follow our adventures then please change your RSS subscription or browser bookmark to point…
What do you do when something goes wrong; when something goes wrong in an obvious and public way? Should you tell your users that you’re dealing with it, even if at that point you have no idea what’s causing the…
With the increase in mobile devices accessing the University website, I’ve spent a couple of hours this week working on a St Andrews themed responsive WordPress theme for our central WordPress multi site installation,…
As we begin to transition towards a mobile-friendly design and workflow, I’m thankful that for the last five or six years we’ve been designing primarily in the browser, rather than in graphic editing applications such…
When the web team took on management of the University’s WordPress multi site installation we actually inherited two instances: live and test. Working with two almost identical installations I discovered a sense of…