Re. procurement – in theory you would define and prioritise requirements up front (a product backlog in Scrum) then get a fixed cost for a number of sprints that would deliver the highest priority requirements. That gives you flexibility to change and re-prioritise requirements between one sprint and the next without incurring additional costs. But be prepared not to get all your requirements delivered in the sprints.

We’re Scrum newbies so we’ll have to see how it goes

The challenges for us I suppose include procurement (the detailed requirements are often specced before the developers are appointed); distance (our developers are hundreds of miles from us); and IT culture (I’m guessing, perhaps wrongly, that our project manager from corporate IT would look askance at an Agile approach)… would be interested to hear your experiences as the project develops.

You’re right about the constant changes in the web world. But that’s what I like about it. Lots of challenges. The reality in local government is that you’ll always be running to catch up. Local gov web sites are certainly complex beasts, not least because the users and their goals are so diverse and you may have a whole host of disparate applications to knit together into a supposedly seamless user experience, although many of them will not be web standards compliant.

http://www.uistencils.com/browser-sketch-pad.html

Which might be helpful to you.

There is one other force at work which you do not mention, probably because its so bleeding obvious, but in Local Gov I had to point it out like ALL THE TIME – that month by month, incrementally and oh so gradually, the web changes like shifting sand beneath our feet.

What was considered cool a year ago can be passé today, the predictions the pundits were making 2 years ago have been overtaken by technology, networks or browser makers.

What your DMUs (Decision Makers) read in the last SOCITM Better Connected report were old hat well before they they were written…

Love that cartoon too – never seen that particular version.

Thanks for the heads up on a few challenges… We’re geographically near them, so maybe meetings should be at our post-it-festooned geekhaus but I’ll be suprised if we manage daily face to face contact. I have visions of exposing our sprint backlogs and encouraging the localgov folk to reorder tasks we’ve not yet started to try and help with this;

I’m worried that our paper prototypes will be seen as simply a more interactive wireframe – as a blueprint of what will be, rather than our best concept of what will be at this point in time…

Thanks for the insight – very useful and very timely.