Transitioning Between User Experience Projects

Aquilent employees at #Drupal4gov event.

AQUILENT, located in Laurel, MD, is an IT company with a large commitment to its stakeholders, including its employees and customers. The company, like many located in the Washington-Baltimore corridor, provides services to the federal government. With all of their IT services comes the culture of the Aquilent Way, involving a commitment to:
"*Solve problems for our customers
*Support and invest in our employees
*Collaborate with our partners
*Provide a reasonable return to our shareholders
*Demonstrate corporate responsibility to our community"

Recently, Ali Tobolsky, who is a usability specialist and information architect at Aquilent, wrote a post on the company blog about what to consider when switching from one project to another, as a web consultant. Some best practices when adjusting to change in general include learning your clients' needs, methods and styles of communication, and work culture. You have to know the mission and vision that the organization is presenting, along with how that interfaces with the technology platforms utilized.



Many of the above best practices can also apply to project transitions. There are three questions to consider.

Have you left your vision at your previous project?

In other words, at the end of this project, is your footprint visible? Do those clients know how to locate the information and assistance you were providing? In your departing e-mail to the involved parties, you want to leave documents, deliverables, correspondence, and strategy notes, in an organized fashion, with their locations clearly stated. It has to be enough that when you leave, they can continue the work without you. All lose ends should be tied up, with nothing left uncompleted.

Are you able to energize and advocate?

No matter what the client's experience has been with user interface, they have requested your services for a reason. Because of your expertise, you have to be able to educate your client's users, so they can work together and complement each other. No matter what the work environment, "it is your job to advocate for the user and energize your teams. This may be of particular importance in cultures that emphasize design over user research."

Do you Agile or not Agile?

Federal government strategy generally embraces the idea that delivery is the strategy, giving the consultant leeway to influence processes. So, ask yourself - How lean and mean do you make the user interface? Do you use iterative processes, relying on continuous improvement rather than documentation?

CTO Mark Pietrasanta speaking about evolving digital services with federal government.

Especially when working with the federal government, it is important to remember that you can take advantage of the commonalities that operate across offices. Some of the links to review include: HOW TO RUN AN AGILE PROJECT IN GOVERNMENT, and GOVERNMENT GOES AGILE,

Aquilent helps beautify the community by helping with roadside clean-up.

Thanks to information from this post on the Agilent blog: http://www.aquilent.com/blog/2016/03/three-questions-uxers-should-ask-themselves-when-transitioning-projects/; and the above links.

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