Alex McLachlan
User experience of agile project: I have never known a project to develop at such a rate."
- Job Title
- Senior Consultant
- Bio
I work mainly on Agile Change Strategy projects for our not-for-profit and commercial clients including Agile CIO roles, strategic IT reviews and IT system procurement support. I specialise in IT architecture, website strategy, CRM, website CMS and web services.
I regularly contribute to the Agile Business Change blog.
Before to joining IndigoBlue, I worked as a project manager, consultant and design authority for Logica across a number of market sectors. After leaving Logica, I worked for security X-ray company CXR/Rapiscan as a programme manager reporting at board level and systems engineering manager on the company's key £50m new X-ray product development project.
My Most Recent Posts
The Importance of Business Agility
16 MAY 2012 | Posted in agility, business strategy, IT strategy | Author Alex McLachlanToday's highly competitive and rapidly changing markets that see the rise and fall of the likes of Nokia and MySpace places business imperatives on companies. In particular, companies need to be innovative, introducing new products, updating others to react to changes in the market (or predicting or even creating these market changes).
HTML5 in the Headlines
08 MAY 2012 | Posted in HTML5, internet, semantic web, web 3.0 | Author Alex McLachlanIt's not often that a technical subject like HTML5 hits the headlines, so I was interested to see that a BBC article "HTML5 takes the internet by storm" was in today's top 10 most read articles.
HTML5 will include a number of new features such as video and dynamic graphics allowing animation without Flash plug-ins and semantic web mark-up.
New Microsoft Dynamics CRM Features
25 APR 2012 | Posted in CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, social CRM, testing | Author Alex McLachlanMicrosoft's recently announced Q2 2012 service release of Dynamics CRM 2012 will have some very interesting features, including mobile access, multi-browser support and industry templates.
When is the Cloud Right for You?
18 APR 2012 | Posted in business strategy, business value, cloud computing | Author Alex McLachlanThe Cloud is a huge opportunity for organisations to improve speed to market, provide operational resilience and increase value for money. However, there are complexities that need to be considered and you need to be careful to select a solution that is appropriate for your business.
Self service - a win-win and a challenge
26 MAR 2012 | Posted in business value, CMS, CRM, finance system, self service, service | Author Alex McLachlanPicking up a thread from my last blog post, I thought it would be useful to discuss self service. Self service is both a win-win - it provides better service at lower cost - and a challenge - implementing wide-ranging self service has its complexities. I've talk on a number of occasions about the advantages of self service. In this post, I'll focus more on the challenges.
Lean Service
08 MAR 2012 | Posted in business value, self service, service | Author Alex McLachlan |
1 Comment
I've written a few times on providing best service and believe it to be something that a number of household names don't deliver currently and should be aspiring to deliver in the future. So I was interested to come across a Harvard Business Review (HBR) blog post suggesting how to provide best service for best value.
Mobile Web to replace Apps
13 FEB 2012 | Posted in apps, HTML5, internet, mobile, website | Author Alex McLachlan | 2 Comments
Further to my previous post "Mobile web, mobile apps and mobile commerce", web usability expert Jakob Nielsen predicts today that mobile web will become preferred over apps in the long term.
Currently, developing apps for different mobile platforms provides the best user experience if you can afford it (ie if the expected return justifies the expense). In contrast, web content formatted for mobile devices is currently the cheaper approach, but often doesn't provide the richness of user interface that apps do. The increasing use of mobile phones and tablets is leading to more companies reaching the point where investing in apps becomes worthwhile.
Incremental Processes and the US Primaries
10 FEB 2012 | Posted in agile business process, agile value, business value, incremental delivery, incremental process | Author Alex McLachlanIt’s interesting to look at the US Republican Party presidential primaries as an incremental process and to contrast it with the incremental process at the heart of Agile software development.
It seems to me the main advantage of the series of primaries is that it reduces financial commitment and risk, allowing candidates to evaluate their progress through the process without committing to the full investment that a nation-wide “big bang” approach would need.
CRM Strategy - Vision Statement
31 JAN 2012 | Posted in business change, business strategy, CRM | Author Alex McLachlan | 1 Comment
Implementing a CRM is a business change - usually a major business change - that will have a wide impact on the organisation. I've found it useful to provide a vision statement for the CRM Strategy, based on a common structure. I try to keep the vision statement to a single page to make it more digestible to different groups of staff, so keeping the individual topics as bullet points.
The structure and contents of the CRM vision statement I've used are:
MY RECENT BLOG POSTS
Today's highly competitive and rapidly changing markets that see the rise and fall of the likes of Nokia and MySpace places business imperatives on companies. In particular, companies need to be innovative, introducing new products, updating others to react to changes in the market (or predicting or even creating these market changes).
MY RECENT ARTICLES
There were three excellent presentations at yesterday's seminar Business Change in the Cloud, and an interesting question and answer session. Summary notes and the presentation slides are:
