The Big City

Compare and contrast.

The school my daughters go to has a terrible website. Not only does it look bad but also it can only be updated by someone knowledgeable going in to the school during school hours and sitting on a tiny chair to do the typing. This means the content is very stale and thus mostly useless.

So I suggested a site hosted on an external server that could be easily updated by anyone. Great, they said, let’s do it. I did it. The site was running by March 2007. I didn’t want to provide the content so a couple of people involved in the school volunteered to take over the actual running of the thing. I showed them how to use Wordpress and off they went.

Time passed. The summer holidays passed. I contacted them and asked them if there was anything I could do to help. Eventually they showed me what they had done. They had produced quite a big report about the site. It said how often various sections should be updated, who would be responsible, how the navigation could be organised. The site itself was unchanged. In fact, Google analytics told me that nobody has visited it at all for several months. The site is still sitting there, unused. I’ve edited a few things - the term dates are correct now. It only took me five minutes.

Fast forward to nowadays. My dear friends at Stan’s Cafe, a trendy theatre company in Birmingham, had a big meeting last week to talk about their future. One of the things they decided to do was to experiment with some kind of private forum for keeping people in the company informed about upcoming shows and maybe to promote more discussion between members. I offered the director, James, a couple of options: A wiki and a Bulletin Board. He went for the latter, it’s already live, the members are being added today. The meeting took place exactly 7 days ago.

The Stan Talk forum might be a success, it might not. If it’s useful it will thrive, if it isn’t it will wither and die. It doesn’t really matter either way because we didn’t spend too long making it and it didn’t cost much. The school site has already had many more words written about it than it will ever contain. Maybe it will serve a useful purpose one day but it won’t be there to impress the OFSTED inspector who is coming on Thursday.

I’m tempted to conclude that this is the difference between effective organisations and ineffective ones. But I know that the school is very well run, the leadership is excellent and they handle the business of schooling children very well. It’s the accompanying bureaucracy that cripples their ability to move quickly and act decisively.

I’m not sure what the moral of the story is, apart from watch out if you ever get asked to work with a Local Education Authority. Make sure you don’t rely on them to make any decisions and don’t allow them to have any role that could impede your progress because it they can, they will.