Citizens Advice chose an agile development process to build a new content management system (CMS) and inform their digital strategy due to past disappointments with large IT projects. User testing throughout development helped shape the new CMS. Some benefits of the agile approach included early visibility into developments and the ability to change priorities and releases easily. However, it required significant time commitments and testing resources. User experience testing informed many aspects of the project from initial designs to beta testing. While exhausting, agile allowed for continuous iteration and reprioritization, encouraging more user testing. Lessons included getting the development velocity right and allowing for stabilization periods. Overall, agile produced a better final product through more client and user involvement in development

1. Making Agile development and UX work at Citizens Advice
Adrian Hunt, Publishing Manager, Citizens Advice
First time agile

2. What I am going to talk about
 Why Citizens Advice chose an agile development philosophy to
develop their new CMS and inform their digital strategy
 How user testing has informed that development
 The lessons learnt – plus points and drawbacks
but first ...

4. This is a picture of the 1.8 million people
who attended Barack Obama’s first
inauguration as US President.
 That’s roughly how many people
walk through our doors each year
 Twice as many ring us
 Nine times as many use our
websites

5. A well performing website but...
Citizens Advice’s advice website has seen traffic consistently
increase over the past five years. Last year was its most
successful ever with nearly 16 million unique visitors.
However it is built on a creaking,15-year-old CMS.

6. Vince Cable saves the day
In March 2013, Citizens Advice was awarded additional funding
to develop their online offering, some of which was allocated to a
new CMS, a refresh of our website design and the development
of a new digital strategy.

7. Scope of the project
 Technical – Replacing a content management system and developing new
functionality
 Data – Migrating the content of six existing websites
 Information architecture – All sites on a single domain with some sites
merging
 Design – Refreshing existing and introducing responsive design
 Workflow – Changing the editorial model of intranet to include workflow
 Commercial – Setting up a web subscription service for one of our websites
and ...

8. Agile project management
 Following disappointing experiences in previous ICT projects, we
decided to develop the new CMS using Agile principles. This
decision was made before any CMS had been chosen. It was an
experiment and the first time it had been adopted at Citizens
Advice.
 After a procurement exercise, the EPiServer CMS was chosen
with Sigma as the developer. One of the particularly convincing
arguments that Sigma had made was the emphasis they placed
on user experience and continual user testing within the
development cycle.

9. Why Agile: Key differences

10. Agile against traditional development
Pros
 Early visibility of developments
 Changing priority of features easy
 Changing order of releases
easy
 Testing done throughout
Cons
 Requires a lot of time
 Almost dedicated input from
business owners
 Lots of testing needed

11. Our Agile approach
 Story – item/feature to develop
 Backlog – prioritised list of items to develop
 Sprint – 2 week mini development cycle taking top items from the backlog,
developing and testing them before presenting them
-
 Showcase – Where developed stories are presented. They are then tested
against the specification
 Each story costs a certain number of points
 Each sprint contains a max of 120 pts = velocity
 Intention: early and continuous visibility of development

12. Agile – Sprint meetings
Week 1
SPM
Week 2
“Sprint”
Showcase
Look
Ahead
Week 1
SPM
Week 2
“Sprint”
Showcase
Look
Ahead
Week 1
SPM
Week 2
“Sprint”
Showcase
Look
Ahead
Week 1
SPM
Week 2
“Sprint”
Showcase
Look
Ahead
Week 1
SPM
Week 2
“Sprint”
Showcase
Look
Ahead
Week 1
SPM
Week 2
“Sprint”
Showcase
Look
Ahead
Week 1
SPM
Week 2
“Sprint”
Showcase
Look
Ahead
Week 1
SPM
Week 2
“Sprint”
Showcase
Look
Ahead
Release
Sprints
SPM
Look
Ahead
Showcase
Week 1 Week 2

13. Intended velocity
July August September October November December January February March
BMIS CABlink Adviceguide
BMIS
CABlink
Corp
Adviceguide
Advisernet
AdvisernetCorp

14. User experience approach
At the outset of the project, we had the goal to test new ideas,
designs and functionality with users and place each site in a beta
version prior to rollout…
Feedback was gathered through a variety of techniques, including:
 Workshops and focus groups
 Interviews, surveys and questionnaires
 Natural environment observation
 User testing (remote and observed, guerrilla)
 Analytics
 Website feedback mechanisms

15. Where UX counted
 Benchmarking of existing sites
 Template design
 Paper prototyping
 Strategic goals
 Internal stakeholder requirements
 Key external stakeholder requirements
 Accessibility reviews at each site launch
 Beta testing of the internal sites, BMIS and CABlink
 200 Citizens Advice super testers recruited
 Two focus groups representing the public and power

16. Agile and UX in action
My sketch of a section
start page with the
different types of feature
Agile and UX in action (idea generation)

17. First draft of the design of
the section start page in
Photoshop
Agile and UX in action (design 1)

18. Agreed design of the
section start page in
Photoshop
Agile and UX in action (iteration of design)

19. Functionality specified
and uploaded onto
project tool, Trello
Agile and UX in action (specification)

20. Testing of functionality
by Citizens Advice,
comments and findings
recorded on Trello
Agile and UX in action (staging)

21. Agile and UX in action (live)
The home page of one
of our intranet sites,
CABlink, which is built
from interchangeable
blocks developed for
the start pages of other
sites

22. Milestones: Where are we now
 Sep 2013: Presentation to Annual Conference
 Oct – Dec 2013: BMIS beta
 Jan 2014: BMIS live
 Feb – Mar 2014: CABlink beta
 Apr 2014: CABlink live
 Jun 2014: Last two development sprints planned
 Early Sep 2014: AdviserNet launch planned
-
 Mid Sep 2014: Corporate and Adviceguide sites merged and new
citizensadvice.org.uk launched
 Autumn – Winter 2014: UX review of sites

23. Lessons: Agile
 Exhausting – get the velocity right
 Testing resource
 Bugs – with complexity comes bugs
 Specifications are still required
 Tracking of progress essential
 More stabilisation sprints
 There is built-in redundancy
 Co-location helpful, though not essential

24. Lessons: Project specific
 Make sure you have real content in the CMS on which to develop
 Know the technology – as the client you will be specifying and testing
 Think design/templates and then develop functionality
 More UX
 Second staff full time
 Was a shift-and-lift migration project suitable for agile development?

25. Successes
 More client involvement in development
 Don’t go too far wrong
 Continuous redefinition / iteration
 Constant reprioritisation of stories
 Encourages you to test with users
 You get better at it as the project progresses
 Better product as an end result

26. The future
 Agile is now being rolled out to other projects and areas of Citizens Advice
 On the websites, we are adopting Agile and user needs wholesale as a
means of producing and reviewing content and tools
 User experience is central to our future content strategy
 Testing resource is recognised as an essential component to any
development

27. Thank you and questions
My name is Adrian Hunt.
I am Publishing Manager at Citizens
Advice.
I can be contacted at:
adrian.hunt@citizensadvice.org.uk
or
adrhunt@googlemail.com