So, 12 whole months since I joined NixonMcInnes, and whilst I could write a whole blog post about the amazing year it’s been, I won’t; a quick scan of our back catalogue provides a wealth of information on the topic of working here. Instead, I wanted to discuss my experience of our salary process, as it’s pretty special, and is a process that I approached in (hopefully) a fairly unique way.
Instead of going into huge depth about the process, which is constantly evolving, not perfect, and also ultimately uninteresting in detail, here is the 30 second outline: we are personally responsible for proposing salary changes on an annual basis, and once you’ve prepared a salary proposal with help from your direct manager, an elected group of four colleagues review and discuss your review before approving or suggesting an amendment. Ta-dah!
Like most other people, I’ve previously worked in workplaces where salary changes are often unexpected, and always undiscussed. Therefore, the openness of NixonMcInnes is pretty exhilarating, and that’s why I wanted to share this, my proposal.
As part of my future development, I want to make more of my creative side, and so the salary proposal seemed like a perfect time to do so. I’m pretty pleased with it as a picture, but obviously a picture requires more narrative than a word doc or powerpoint would, but for me that was the fun. In short, the little robot is me now, and the bigger robot is the world-conquering mega consultant I will become. Going from the top clockwise, you’ll see the actual figures in question, main achievements, a word-cloud of feedback from colleagues and clients, my plans for the future, and then a visual pause for discussion about whether the proposal is fair, equitable, affordable and attractive – the four main benchmarks against which we measure any salary request.
I’m pleased to say that the committee approved my proposal, but instead of a quick rubber-stamping exercise, we spent an hour discussing my role in relation to the other consultants, and their respective goals and rewards. Doing this with colleagues rather than one-to-one with a boss can be slightly awkward as it’s unusual to be so open about your strengths and weaknesses, but ultimately it results in a team who completely ‘get’ each other, and can find ways to compliment each others unique characteristics.
Lastly, when planning and writing this post, I asked the team whether I should blank out the actual amount on the proposal, which lead to an interesting debate. I posted the question:
Some responses suggested not to show the amount:
Others suggested a clever alternative:
And others were all for openess:
So, I decided to just put it up there. We are a transparent organization, we share other figures, so why not share this? I’d welcome any feedback you have on the idea of salaries being public, any thoughts on the process, and lastly any comments on my picture :)
Ross wrote this on 08.06.10 – 13 comments
It's filed in the Democracy, Development, NixonMcInnes box
While idly experimenting with the newfangled, real-time Twitter Streaming API yesterday, I decided to have a little bit of fun, to try and make life a little more interesting! In the interests of innovation and openness, I thought I would take some time out to share these experiments with you…
Read more…
Steve wrote this on 07.01.10 – 10 comments
It's filed in the Development, Funny, twitter box
For a few days before Christmas, deep within the NixonMcInnes Skunkworks, a band of elves were busy developing something special based upon some newly released Wordpress functionality. Behold, our new plugin, Sentimeter!
Read more…
Edward wrote this on 04.01.10 – 4 comments
It's filed in the Blogging, Development, Free things, Internet, NixonMcInnes, Social media, Web analytics, Web technology, measurement, wordpress box
As an agency with a long history of designing and building social sites and apps, we’re not new to agile. While in the early days we’d used the trusty (but pitfall ridden) waterfall approach, over the past couple of years we’ve been moving towards a more agile model – but mainly on our smaller projects.
So when a big and exciting design and build project landed, with a healthily ambitious deadline, we thought it was a great opportunity to put agile to a serious test.
Meeting the needs of changing requirements
The project is working with two key clients, a charity whose aim is to increase entrepreneurial behaviour in the UK and one of the country’s leading entertainment and communications companies.
We’re building a social platform that combines quick, easy video blogging and networking features, to equip disadvantaged young people with the skills, confidence and contacts to make it as entrepreneurs.
All in all this project means a lot – to the people funding it, the people who will be using it and, needless to say, to us! So as the first major project on which we fully commit to the agile process, we’re investing a lot of time, energy and confidence in this.
So if it’s a big project, why take this approach? More than anything, we’re confident it offers clear advantages over the waterfall model, especially on a large-scale build.
Traditionally the agency takes a brief, produces a full specification and goes away to build it. Months later they come back, while requirements have changed for the client, with something that might not still meet their needs. Using agile, regular reviews mean new requests can come in at any time and the end product can change accordingly.
Engaging outside expertise
We know the value of engaging outside expertise; we do it whenever we know an external resource can add massive value to our clients – so considering the scale of the project, we started by bringing in an outside Agile Consultant, Mark Stringer of Agile Lab.
Mark accompanied us to the kick-off meeting, in which we undertook the time-honoured ritual of stories and priorities – working from the core objectives of the site and the needs of the people who’ll be using it, we created a list of things they would want to achieve, which we prioritised before breaking them down into a series of features and functions.
We (the royal we, really it was Steve Winton, our technical lead) estimated how long these would take to build and broke them down further into two week ’sprints’ – bursts of work in which various people from different disciplines develop core aspects of the site.
Initially this is working well, building on the open source technologies we know and love – WordPress and the BuddyPress plugins – Steve is starting by delivering the core functionality of site while I’m designing how it will work and how it will be laid out.
Facing problem one
As with any large scale site with its own individual identity, branding is a big job and something that we’ll all need to get nailed before we can start on the page design and front-end coding.
In the meantime, we’ll work on the user experience design and back-end development, putting the fundamental inner-workings of the site in place.
Planning it out, this posed our first problem – how we can later start to tie in all the other disciplines.
The solution we’ve come up with involves a staggered approach to our sprints, coding back-end functionality while working on the user experience design for the same feature set, scheduling in page design of the same for the following sprint, and front-end coding for the one after.
It might sound confusing but on paper it’s looking like an answer to the problem of bringing agile to a large, multi-discipline project.
Problem one leads to problem two
This fluid approach solves many problems but lead us straight into to our second headscratcher…
What really happens when requirements change? As I said, in agile priorities change between sprints and new stories are introduced, which can leave us feeling a little nervous about exactly what’s going to come out at launch.
Our solution? Well, to be honest, it’s still early days and we’re still working on it. Currently we’re regularly reappraising the backlog of stories and ensuring we keep a holistic view of what we’re aiming to deliver, but beyond that it’s a work in progress. Perversely it’s one that makes us feel a bit more nervous than if we had a weighty document specifying exactly what the finished product would look like and do.
Have you used agile on a large-scale web build? Or had a site built for you where everything wasn’t set in stone before development began?
How did it make you feel? I’d be really interested to know.
Max St John wrote this on 14.10.09 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Development, Internet, NixonMcInnes, Social networks, User generated content box
An out-of-the-box WordPress installation provides traditional “previous – next” navigation for paging through lists of posts, as do the vast majority of the freely available WordPress themes. These little ‘previous’/’older’ and ‘next’/’newer’ links, that typically reside at the foot of a list of a WordPress posts page, are often the user’s only means of browsing archived content, and navigating your way through a very large set of such listings can quickly become cumbersome with this navigation method.
Pagination offers a more usable mechanism for navigating through a very large set of data, by providing direct access to content beyond the current page.
Smashing Magazine has provided some simple guidelines for creating usable pagination:
- Provide large clickable areas
- Don’t use underlines
- Identify the current page
- Space out page links
- Provide Previous and Next links
- Use First and Last links (where applicable)
- Put First and Last links on the outside
Although I’m admittedly far from a being an expert in this area, I humbly suggest an eighth guideline:
- Provide a subset of the full paged set centering around the current page
This eighth guideline is exemplified by the pagination pattern employed by Flickr on its photostream pages.
To illustrate, a pagination control that encompasses the above guidelines, providing links to the first, previous, next, and last pages and centering on the current page being viewed might resemble the following mockup:
There are a myriad of variations of pagination patterns along this theme available, and you could do worse than start looking in the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library for some inspiration.
Anyway, I digress…
Any intrepid WordPress theme developers out there may be interested to learn that we’ve developed a little plugin for WordPress, tentatively named ‘Proper Pagination’, that intends to ease the creation of pagination controls for WordPress listings pages.
Inspired by the WordPress Loop and WP_Query, this plugin attempts to stay out of the theme developer’s way, allowing her to create the markup needed by providing ‘template tags’ such as pp_has_pagination, pp_the_pagination, pp_the_first_page_permalink, pp_the_last_page_permalink and so on (pp_ is a prefix we use to effectively ‘namespace’ the global functions defined by this plugin).
A full list of the template tags, along with their respective descriptions, follows…
- pp_has_pagination — determines whether the current ‘view’ has any pagination to display, i.e. whether the content being browsed spans more than 1 page
- pp_the_pagination — initiates the pagination context, should be called at the beginning of each loop iteration
- pp_rewind_pagination — resets the pagination context, so that the pagination loop can be iterated over multiple times
- pp_is_current_page — for use in the pagination loop, returns a boolean indicating whether the current loop iteration is for the current page
- pp_has_previous_page — for use in the pagination loop, returns a boolean indicating whether there is a previous page, e.g. when at page 1, there is no previous page
- pp_has_next_page — for use in the pagination loop, returns a boolean indicating whether there is a next page, e.g. when at page N of N, there is no next page
- pp_the_page_permalink — for use in the pagination loop, echos the permalink for the current page
- pp_the_previous_page_permalink — for use in the pagination loop, echos the permalink for the previous page
- pp_the_next_page_permalink — for use in the pagination loop, echos the permalink for the next page
- pp_the_first_page_permalink — for use in the pagination loop, echos the permalink for the first page
- pp_the_last_page_permalink — for use in the pagination loop, echos the permalink for the last page
- pp_the_page_num — for use in the pagination loop, echos the page number of the current page being iterated over
Additionally, here’s an example of how you might arrange those splendid template tags to achieve the desired pagination effect:
<?php if (pp_has_pagination()) : ?>
<div class="pagination">
<!-- the previous page -->
<?php pp_the_pagination(); if (pp_has_previous_page()) : ?>
<a href="<?php pp_the_previous_page_permalink(); ?>" class="prev">newer stories</a>
<?php else : ?>
<span class="current prev">newer stories</span>
<?php endif; pp_rewind_pagination(); ?>
<!-- the page links -->
<?php while(pp_has_pagination()) : pp_the_pagination(); ?>
<?php if (pp_is_current_page()) : ?>
<span class="current"><?php pp_the_page_num(); ?></span>
<?php else : ?>
<a href="<?php pp_the_page_permalink(); ?>"><?php pp_the_page_num(); ?></a>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php endwhile; pp_rewind_pagination(); ?>
<!-- the next page -->
<?php pp_the_pagination(); if (pp_has_next_page()) : ?>
<a href="<?php pp_the_next_page_permalink(); ?>" class="next">older stories</a>
<?php else : ?>
<span class="current next">older stories</span>
<?php endif; pp_rewind_pagination(); ?>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>
The template tags on offer by this plugin provide the theme developer with an unlimited array of possibilities for marking up the pagination control in a semantic manner.
If you fancy taking the plugin for a little spin, feel free to grab it from our GitHub repositorythe official WordPress plugin repository, and do the usual with it (yep, upload to wp-content/plugins, unzip, and enable!).
As always, we welcome any feedback or comments in the section below…
Steve wrote this on 27.07.09 – 9 comments
It's filed in the Design, Development, User experience box
This weekend I was reppin’ NixonMcInnes at the first MusicHackDay held at the guardian offices (which were super plush!), it was an excellent, fun and tiring event. Held over Saturday and Sunday, about 150 music and computer geeks were given 24 hours to hack some cool stuff together using API’s and data from music related sites around the web. Sponsors included Last.fm, Gigulate, SoundCloud, 7Digital, BBC Music, Echo Nest, Songkick, Peoples Music Store and The Guardian. There was some amazing stuff built over the weekend ranging from cool little hardware hacks aided by the folks at tinker.it, an app that lets you share your iTunes library over the net (with syncing play so you can listen along with the owner) and tons more. All in all great fun.
The weekend started off with an introduction from the organizers and then brief introductions to each of the sponsors and their API’s. The group then broke up and some of the sponsors gave some more in depth talks about their companies and API’s, after that it was hacks-ahoy!
I spent my weekend working on a Flex/Actionscript 3 wrapper for the SouncCloud API, something that I had started about 6 months ago but never had the time to finish. Not being an Actionscript guru had hindered my progress somewhat and it was great to be able to quiz the any attendee’s who were better versed in AS3 than myself (a big thanks to John Martin of Gigulate for that). My code can be found up on Github, its a little rough around the edges but perfectly usable. I’m planning on tidying it up for use in a future app.
After a looong (caffeine fueled) night of hacking (surprising how many people were up until the wee-hours working on the particular hacks) we had breakfast, wrapped up our work then at 2pm the presentations began. There was a huge amount of projects, far more than I was expecting and we all waited eagerly to show off our own work. I cant remember all of the hack but two of my favorites were:
http://citysounds.fm/ – An app from some of the SoundCloud guys, it grabs the latest tracks off SoundCloud from cities around the world. simple but quite cool, its interesting to see how different cities vary in the styles of music that are being produced there.
MusicBore – Pulls in songs and metadata from last.fm, gets info about them from the BBC (like shows they’ve been played on) and then mashes them into a ‘radio’ program spewing the data into an IRC channel where it can then be read using a screen reader as a kind of DJ.
The coolest thing I discovered there was the Echo Nest service, you can upload a tune to it for analysis and it will give you back tons of data on it like tempo, key, volume points and changes in the track like chorus or fade outs etc. You can also process tunes, pitching them up or down or mixing them together etc. An amazing API put to some excellent use in some of the hacks, check it out over at http://developer.echonest.com/pages/overview
Something Rob Watson, one of the other attendees there had built a little while ago using Echo Nest is this piece of awesomeness: http://www.donkdj.com/ – remix your favorite track in to a scouse/bouncy house donk master peice! Give it a whirl.
You can check out all the projects over at http://musichackday.org/info/Hacks and prepare to be impressed!
A massive thanks goes out to Dave Haynes, the other organisers and sponsors for putting the weekend on, I cant wait for the next one!
Cheers to Alexander Ljung for the photo
Edward wrote this on 15.07.09 – 3 comments
It's filed in the Development, Events & conferences, Internet, Web technology box
This is one of the most exciting WordPress news our team of developers has had this year!
VideoPress is a well thought through offering from Automattic (the company supporting the awesome blogging platform that is WordPress) that allows bloggers on WordPress.com to quickly and easily upload and share HD video content online. Read more…
Telmo wrote this on 20.05.09 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Blogging, Development, Social media box
We were pleased to relaunch the Good With Money blog for Co-Operative Financial Services on Monday. Coinciding with a refresh of the main corporate site, the blog gives CFS a platform from which it can engage visitors in conversations around it’s ethical stance and the projects that are supported by its unique funding structure.
We initially launched a single issue blog last year, dedicated to showcasing CFS’ commitment to Microfinance. It told the story of Belma, a bank employee returning to her native Bosnia to see the impact CFS funding is having within local communities. As a pilot project this site gave CFS an insight into the advantage of using a fast, flexible platform to share stories in an informal way. Customer response via comments was fairly positive, and as the banking crisis hit, highlighted the benefits of providing an open channel for dialogue with the bank – a real point of difference within the industry.
This first foray into blogging created an internal appetite to showcase more campaigns, like those against Toxic Fuels or financing renewable energy , and also publish regular news content to create and sustain a dialogue with the various communities of interest. Populating a site of this nature and nurturing the community is a considerable and important task and CFS has made the commitment to the blog’s success by putting dedicated resource into place. We’re looking forward to seeing how this community grows and develops and continuing to help CFS demonstrate how they truly are ‘good with money‘.
Jenni wrote this on 30.04.09 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Blogging, Business, Design, Development, NixonMcInnes, Our sites box
Here at Nizomk Towers, we have been following, with keen interest, the conversations flying around teh internets about the perils of URL-shortening services, such as TinyURL et al. Apparently, with both the number of available URL-shortening services growing, along with the reliance on them, what we have is a ticking time bomb, just waiting to explode in our faces! Yikes!
Read more…
Steve wrote this on 07.04.09 – 9 comments
It's filed in the Development, Internet, Web technology box
Do you have a project that you would like to discuss with us? Or perhaps you know someone who is thinking about how to implement their digital strategy for 2009 and could do with some useful, actionable input and direction?
If so, we are running a limited edition special offer to help you shine online. Check it out.
If we can’t be of assistance or if you are not satisfied with the results then we will send you a delicious cake from the lovely Brighton cake boutique Choccywoccydoodah. Mmm, how can you refuse such a tasty proposal?
“And if you want to know a little bit more about our practice areas and service offerings then check out our “What we do page”. This will give you guys, the wonderful NixonMcInnes audience, a little more information about the kind of work we are helping folks with.
Just so you know in case it is still not clear; we are a full service agency; this means that not only can our skilled social media consultants help you apply social media to your marketing strategy and help you use this medium to plan specific campaigns, but the consultants are backed up by a fully formed delivery team made up of talented developers and designers able to make your ideas for websites, widgets, applications, blogs, social media press rooms and anything else web wise a reality. You can even get to know the team in advance.
So go on, book your conversation with us now, we are ready, poised to listen to your challenges and lend a hand; guaranteed!
Just e-mail or pick up the phone:
ruth@nixonmcinnes.co.uk
01273 648315.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Thanks to EpicFireworks for the image.
Ruth wrote this on 26.03.09 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Business, Buzz monitoring, Design, Development, Free things, Marketing, NixonMcInnes, Social media, Social networks, Strategy, Web analytics, Web technology box
Some responses suggested not to show the amount:
