McKinnell Consulting

Project Planning

Anne will kick start your project by facilitating a project planning workshop with key stakeholders to define the initial scope and requirements for the project. As a seasoned workshop facilitator, she will lead the scoping meeting to ensure objectives and strategies are fully explored and the deliverables and timelines are feasible.
A project charter document will outline the agreed upon scope, objectives, strategy, deliverables, work plan and timelines for the project.
Change management is an important consideration and Anne will address this by managing client expectations, encouraging early participation of stakeholders, and ensuring thorough communications.

Requirements Gathering

Using an approach known as Rapid Agile Business Systems Analysis, Anne will facilitate requirements discovery sessions to define and document the necessary business and system requirements for the project. The goal of the workshop is to identify each "event" or "user story" associated with the software.
The key to the approach is a combination of listening skills and knowing what questions to ask in order to fully understand the needs of the client and elicit business requirements. It is essential to use a seasoned requirements facilitator in this critical initial step in order to ensure that all user stories are identified before any modeling or design is undertaken on the proejct. This prevents the "catch22" or endless loop between incomplete specifications and requirement inflation.
Once the events or user stories are identified, the objects and attributes associated to the event are defined.
Use cases are written and verified with the client.
A business requirements document is produced. It communicates requirements information to both the client and the systems development team. The document contains information created by other team members, such as the technical architecture, in addition to the user requirements section.

User Interface Design

User interfaces are designed using an "interaction design" approach. Rather than focusing on the arrangement of items on a page, interaction design investigates user types and their needs and expectations in addition to the business requirements.
In planning the user interface, the first step is to determine who the users are, what they'll be doing and how your business requirements fit in. At that point, Anne creates a number of design options for the client to choose from. A prototype is developed as a tool for obtaining client feedback and may be used for usability testing to be sure the design is on the right track.
Interfaces are implemented using CSS for design and layout. This effectively separates content from presentation making your web application faster and easier to maintain.
View samples of Anne's designs on the portfolio page.

Quality Assurance

First a test strategy and plan is developed. This outlines the types of testing that will be performed, how it will be performed, the number of testers required, the defect tracking mechanism and timelines.
Depending on the size of the project, both systems and user acceptance testing may be required. On large projects, build tests or "sanity" tests are implemented.
Test cases are written.
A defect tracking tool is utilized to document systems bugs, prioritize them, and track the fixes and re-testing effort. The tool can also be used to prepare reports that measure whether standards are being met and ensure the project keeps on schedule.

Online Help

Anne has earned certificates in help technologies and web-enabled help and uses RoboHelp as her primary help development tool.
Help your audience use your web application effectively by allowing them to learn and understand the software at their own pace at any time. The multi-media capabilities of online help, such as interactive demonstrations, significantly assist e-learning.
Eliminate paper manuals to help ensure information about the application is always up to date.
Online help should be the knowledge portal that accompanies a web application. This means that anything that is not the application should be maintained in the help system. For example, in addition to help topics, this could include interactive demonstrations, downloads, community forums, job aids and access to live support.

Software Simulations

Anne uses Macromedia Captivate to create engaging software simulations to assist in e-learning. These simulations help users see exactly how to enter information and how to interact with a web application. View examples of Anne's software simulations by viewing the demos for Corporate Online.

Training

Training presentations and workshops assist staff transition to new operational policies and procedures and help them become familiar with a new web application. Anne can prepare the training materials and facilitate training sessions.
Operations and Procedures manuals can be produced when required, although the preference is to have this information online which is easily accessible and always up-to-date.

Website Maintenance

Website maintenance is more than just making text changes. It includes keeping the website up to ever changing standards, implementing dynamic content to make the site fresh and encourage repeat visitors, and soliciting user feedback and implementing change based on that feedback.

Usability Evaluation

Some design decisions require customer feedback because there's no "right" answer. Usability testing is the way to find out how real users react to your website because we watch them using it (or a prototype). It helps resolve design decisions and find design problems early on, before they result in usability problems and annoyed users.
Usability includes the following five dimensions:
- Effective: the completeness and accuracy with which users achieve their goals
- Efficient: how long it takes to complete a task
- Engaging: how pleasant or satisfying the interface is to use
- Error tolerant: ability of the interface to prevent errors
- Easy to learn: how well the product supports initial orientation and deeper learning

Technical Writing

Anne is dedicated to the creation of print and online documents that are clear, concise and easy to use. This includes effective research, planning, and audience analysis.