Flicking Your Switch

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @hotpixUK

or LinkedIn here uk.linkedin.com/pub/tony-smith-bsc-hons-acih/a/979/351/

Thank you those two contacts who reminded me it was a year ago this month, our benefit changes started and the bedroom tax subsidy came into being. I was obviously too busy celebrating with two litres of 'White Lightening' and a budget Aldi 'Sunday Roast' for one to knock out my blog, on that last week. 

Seriously though, I and every RSL & RP out there, (well all the ones I work with, I can 100% be definitely sure of...) are still working with what facts they have. While IDS is storing 115% on his Universal Credit belief-o-meter, facts are still pretty thin on the ground unfortunately. This is still as far as I can see, hampering everyone. Housing Associations cannot plan and organise, HMS software providers have little to specify with. So frankly, its actually a bit of a mess on the ground, from where I am looking.

One bright-spot on the Universal Credit horizon, to address benefit paid direct, to citizens who many are ill-equipped to cope sensibly with it, is Switchback. The process of allowing tenants to switch back to having HB paid direct to their landlord / RSL provider, if they are getting into difficulty, specifically racking up rent arrears.

Now I say bright-spot, even this does not appear to have been well thought through. If your organisation just works in a discrete region, you just have one set of criteria to satisfy. If you are a housing group, many I work with span 20+ local authorities, life has got pretty complex on this one. bad news if you are a Sanctuary, Bromford or YourHousing.

Here's the current details, no-doubt subject to change and development....

• Southern England, (but not London) - Tenant has eight weeks arrears
• London - Can be switched after 8 weeks in arrears, after 4 weeks receive support from Rents officer. Placed on a ‘probationary’ category  and monitored and help with managing finances.  If tenant pays rent for 2 months they will receive direct payment again.
• West Midlands - After 12 weeks of arrears
• Wales - Tenant underpays by 15 per cent over 12 weeks
• Northern England - Tenant has eight weeks of arrears, Tenant makes no payment for eight weeks, Tenant underpays by 15 per cent over 12 weeks
• Scotland - Tenant has not paid before 25th of the following month

Early adopers have also encountered delays when applications have been made, when systems become paper based inside the DWP. More on that here - http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/nhf-calls-for-overhaul-of-universal-credit-payment-rules/7001881.article where my local ALMO Golden Gates, has already encountered difficulties.

 As I have mentioned, the nature of this being obscure, mean that to date to my knowledge, only one of the main HMS suppliers, have incorporated these rules neatly, into their next release. A major advantage for their cross-region housing customers. So if you are not on OpenHousing, these rules need to be embedded in processes or workflow elsewhere.

Are your IT or Better Business team looking into this? Worth flagging up if you aren't.
The wise will keep a careful weather eye on it, as with all of Universal Credit, this is a movable feast.

The early local authority adopters are quickly finding the limitations of the poorly specified and delivered Universal Credit systems. This week (11th April 2014), new welfare claimants in Shotton, near me in North Wales, discovered problems in the system, to replace existing benefit strands. The Welsh Government in particular are finding they are wrestling with UC at every turn http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/regulation/welfare-reform-will-cost-wales-almost-%C2%A31bn-a-year/7003165.article

Universal credit sure isn't going to go away, but it isn't coming in fast, particularly not too fit for purpose yet either. Tread carefully social housing brothers & sisters....

You can link with me on LinkedIn here - uk.linkedin.com/pub/tony-smith-bsc-hons-acih/a/979/351/ It would be great to connect !

Read on to, Universal Credit:

http://tonysmiththathousingitguy.blogspot.com/2012/09/universal-credit.html

Ladytron - Flicking Your Switch.

(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854655009

PS As usual, if there are subjects you might like me to tackle on this blog, please get in touch and let me know!

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Word Up

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @hotpixUK
or LinkedIn here uk.linkedin.com/pub/tony-smith-bsc-hons-acih/a/979/351/

Most organisations I work with have MS Office and have moved generally to version 2010. Recently, I have come across some still on 2003 ("well it does the job....") or with pockets of 2003 that are still to be aligned with head office ("it's like 'Fraggle Rock' down there, we should round to it eventually.."). In a few cases, the housing management system has only recently been upgraded to support Office versions higher than 2003.

For those who have already done it, you have probably forgotten the pain your users endured.For the rest, if its a task for more than 20 users, I would say its actually a mini project in itself. this upgrade as the potential to cause some hassle.

Now, I had heard people say that everyone has Office 2007 or 2010 at home and will take to it like a duck to water. Fair enough, some might, but they are unlikely to use Excel and Word like they do at work. They certainly wont link it to other applications. Also in recent years, unless you have a teenager doing school or college projects at home, you may have actually ditched the PC or laptop for a more convenient tablet.

So what should a project cover to make this transition much smoother?

Well, the loss of 'Clippy' (the friendly paper clip helper) is not the only cosmetic GUI change, from 2007 Microsoft found it necessary to randomly hide all functions behind half a dozen parts of the new 'Ribbon Bar'. I would estimate that without adequate training, this could add an overhead of users spending 4 or 5 times longer fustratedly looking to find the usual functions in Excel and Word. So training and access to good help is essential. This link http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/support/getting-started-with-office-2010-FX101822272.aspx?CTT=1 is a good starting point, although if it were me I would structure up some video training and have users 'sign-off' that they have undertaken and understood it, well before the upgrade goes live.

To give users a leg up with 2010, you can always provide them with an add-in, such as this one from UBit, that cleverly adds a new ribbon item called 'Menu'.

Upgrade to 2010 will mean that many .DOC, .MDB and .XLS files will need to be converted to the new .DOCX , .ACCDB, .XLSX , XLSM , XLTX, DOCM, DOTM etc. This will be the time that anyone who is currently using macros or links in Office documents will need to do some serious testing. Most organisations have a lot of these bubbling under the surface.

Where there are templates and merges utilised with your Housing Management or Finance System, these should all be checked carefully and ticked off, as still merging or being formatted correctly. If you use an integrated EDM application, ensure that is configured correctly, including any widgets you are using to automatically PDF your documents on the trigger of printing.

Being systematic will help everyone make the leap more smoothly and if you are in the IT team, I bet users will like you more...

If you have been through a 2003 to 2010 migration, let me know what unexpected issues you encountered or any tips you could pass on.

You can link with me on LinkedIn here - uk.linkedin.com/pub/tony-smith-bsc-hons-acih/a/979/351/ It would be great to connect !

OK, Red cod-pieces locked and loaded - Cameo - Word Up .


(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009

PS As usual, if there are subjects you might like me to tackle on this blog, please get in touch and let me know!

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Wishing (I had a Photograph Of You)

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @hotpixUK
or LinkedIn here uk.linkedin.com/pub/tony-smith-bsc-hons-acih/a/979/351/

Are there any users of Yahoo Flickr out there? A lot of my work contacts take photos and many are on Flickr. I have been on there for about 4 years. If you are unfamiliar with it, Flickr is a photosharing website angled towards a photographic community. People on there know me as HotpixUK and I have nearly 6,500 followers and have had 1.5 million views on my 1,055 images.  I take my photography seriously and Flickr allowed me to make friends around the world, share techniques and tips etc.

It is a community of people bonded together by photography and few of my contacts I know in real life. Most I will never meet as they are in Iran, Argentina, India etc. It was a very clean and minimal user interface. Like a gallery. I pay £15 a year for a Pro account with stats and no ads.

If I go to The Tate, The Photographers Gallery in London, Bluecoat in Liverpool, Cornerhouse in Manchester, Ufizzi in Florence or the Louve in Paris, we see images/paintings/photographs surrounded by lots of wall or white space. That's how those things are best appreciated. There’s generally a caption telling us about technical or image details. Flickr previously focused on the image, caption, comments on it, groups it may have been added to and sets that the photographer organised images into.

I have completed a number of projects over the years and organised them into sets. I have one of the homeless winter night shelter in Warrington - http://www.flickr.com/photos/hotpixuk/sets/72157622888049236/ , various numbers 0-30 http://www.flickr.com/photos/hotpixuk/sets/72157629892831953/ and Edinburgh Festival Performers http://www.flickr.com/photos/hotpixuk/sets/72157631463655258/ among others. I am proud of my images and quite keen to show them off to anyone who might appreciate it.

Change is a constant and I am an agent of change. I am constantly involved with helping change systems that people use and the processes they use. Change generally is worth doing if it saves time, effort, adds efficiency, improves things. They work best if the target audience are part of that process and over donkeys years have had this confirmed, time after time. This prototyping enables tweaks to what is being proposed before we are ‘pre-maturely’ physical. That phrase sticks in my mind from my old lecturer at Manchester Poly, Ian Beeson. I think he eventually ended up at Bristol University Of The West Of England. Get in touch mate if you read this!

A design project I have involved with recently has involved lots of prototyping with wire-framing (maybe more on a future post on the attractions/benefits of that) and that effort will drastically remove doubt and slash development costs. I saw that myself with a HPM (Housing Process Management) project at my old MIS-AMS shop with ActiveH. 15 months of discussion and only 9 months of development got us 90% to where we needed to be. More jaw-jaw, not code-code (adapted from Churchill). 

Anyone who knows me will perhaps confirm that I am a bit of a ‘sponge’. Sit me near any customer, employee or user and before long my curiosity will mean I ask and try to understand the context in which people work. What they need, what’s important to them and who they are, what they feel. Only by knowing that, can something (a product, software, service) can be shaped around them successfully. There needs to be a channel of trust too. For me that was my mobile number. If any customer of mine was dissatisfied they could phone me directly, any time of day. I still do it today. I doubt if any other customer of a HMS (Housing Systems Supplier) has a direct line to their system suppliers director, and could rely on fast action to resolve issues via it? Customer relationships are the keystone to successful systems.

Yahoo did a radical redesign change to Flickr this last week on a Monday Night with no prior notification or seemingly understanding of their customer base. A help forum thread at http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157633547442506/ shows the extent of the response to this upgrade. Thea Lamkin, lead on the thread (http://www.flickr.com/photos/thealamkin/8744800801/ ) has tactfully disabled comments, as the only ones expected are negative ones.

Spookily enough she was clever to do this as over 24,000 Flickr users (so far as at 24/05/2013) have shared their opinion on how they feel about the recent ‘upgrade’. Unfortunately 98% of feedback has been less than complementary. For some reason the tempting carrot of 1TB of free (yep free, really free, like Wild Willy Barrett) didn’t calm the backlash. Tackling that one, anyone with even a slight photographic skill, will probably not want people stealing their shots on the net. So like me they probably post small watermarked versions with high JPG compressions (5 or 6). 1TB would only be useful if I could upload RAW format, which I can’t. Therefore a free TB makes a great headline, but is worthless to 99% of Flickr users.

No users to my knowledge were warned this was coming or had the chance to provide feedback of any kind. The new layout is very much ‘montage of images’ which is slow to load. There is limited emphasis on comments and sets, one of the keystones of what I found useful and other semi-serious photographers. Many of the forum comments describe how Flickr has been transformed to a Facebook timeline style. In many ways Flickr has chased the FB way. Surely though, if photographers wanted to post on Facebook they would be doing that already? Well I do, but rarely serious stuff that I want to share with a very different audience on Flickr.   

Worse than not telling folk, Flickr (and Yahoo) are not now listening either. Apart from above mentioned irritations, pages now take an age to load (at least here on my ADSL line in Warrington, Cheshire, Old England). I am not in silicon glen or silicon roundabout, so not seeing lightning downloads on my devices, I am afraid to report. Customisation options are not available either like in the past. I cannot have a gallery type view with white space or easy and fast to navigate thumbnails.Yahoo knows best.

I am acutely aware that we all need to turn a dollar. I visited the USSR in the 1980’s and inter-railed Prague, Yugoslavia & Bulgaria in the soviet era and accept that capitalism is not perfect, but can and does work, if we tackle it in a caring way. If Yahoo are needing to move to an ads model for all, just give us pro accounts for free, give us an ad in the top right hand corner and some stats. If we click through we make the 30p for Yahoo. For goodness sake though, don’t mess with the mechanisms proper photographers use on the site, like sets, notes, comments, tags, white space etc. Don’t bother suggesting you are building massive data centres Yahoo either, to give us all 1 TB. As your bean counters will already be aware, only 0.02% of Flickr users might find that useful.

A very revealing insight into the lack of understanding of Yahoo’s Flickr customers is to be seen right here:
Asked at a Yahoo press conference on May 17 2013 whether Flickr would be "shuttering" its Pro accounts, CEO Marissa Mayer said that she wanted "everybody to have professional-quality photo space", and that "there's no such thing as Flickr Pro because today, with cameras as pervasive as they are, there's no such thing, really, as professional photographers". In response to "outrage" from professional photographers, Mayer apologized via Twitter for wording her answer "terribly", saying that she was referring to the changes to Flickr's storage space and the number of photographs that people take.

I find that quite insulting. I sell quite a number of images. 90% of people roaming the streets with an iphone, Galaxy or whatever who upload dozens of images a day, could never produce that type of stuff, or have images published.
Its ignorance. Understand your customers and you understand your product Marissa.

I am happy moving on however, search for ‘HotpixUK’ on Google and I am sure you will find me. Let’s see if Yahoo wakes up to the mistake that they have made here. There are plenty of Flickr alternatives more focussed to photographers, I will mourn the loss of my valued contacts, but here are some of the more tuned in alternatives:

http://www.technewsdaily.com/18170-3-flickr-alternatives-for-disgruntled-photographers.html
http://www.ipernity.com/apps/gm
http://www.smugmug.com/

I was so happy with Flickr up to last week, but now I find myself looking seriously at other places. Yahoo may becoming the 21st century version of Lycos, Flickr like Geocities. The moral of this blogpost is respect your customers. Remember we have two ears and only one mouth. More listening is what we are made for. Get into your customers minds, understand their needs, fears and aspirations. If you don’t, you may be toast. Little more than a footnote over at the internet archive, that's where you are heading Flickr, I am afraid.





You can link with me on LinkedIn here - uk.linkedin.com/pub/tony-smith-bsc-hons-acih/a/979/351/ It would be great to connect !

A Flock Of Seagulls - Wishing (I had a photograph of you).


(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009

PS As usual, if there are subjects you might like me to tackle on this blog, please get in touch and let me know!

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