An (undisclosed) FTSE 100 oil company won 80 per cent of licenses applied for with the UK government, expecting to win just 50 per cent, and partly attributes a well designed application by Prime Design to its success.
The company asked UK software house / design agency Prime Design for assistance putting together a license application with the UK government, so that it was easy to read and consistent.
After submitting the application, the company went on to win 80 per cent of the licenses it applied for, after expecting to win just 50 per cent; doing the same thing a second time, it won 90 per cent of the licenses it applied for. There was feedback from the authorities that the design went a long way to achieving those success levels.
Prime Design, established in 2002, has an interesting business model, designing company intranets, and even technical documents (such as licensing applications), so that they look appealing.
Clients include BP, Shell, Nexen Petroleum, Hess Corporation, Petro-Canada, Petros Geoscience, Ikon Energy.
Prime Design has two directors and a company secretary, with a further 7 consultants working part time. Ken Clark, one of the directors, was previously group design manager at Enterprise Oil.
The other director is Mac McEldon, who was previously a software developer outside the oil and gas industry until 2002.
License application
The license application the oil company submitted was very large, running to several volumes, including information from many corners of the company.
The oil company decided that there was no need to submit a boring looking document, as companies normally do in this circumstance.
The logic being - why should UK government staff, who have to evaluate the proposal, look at boring looking documents at work, and see well designed magazines when they get home?
Prime Design managed the process of putting the license application together, including taking images (in varying quality and differing formats) from all areas of the company, as well as scanned documents, spreadsheets and word documents, and managing last minute changes from different departments up to the last minute.
The final result had a consistent layout and page design, and was clear and easy to read.
To undertake the project, Prime Design needed to assess whether or not it needed some kind of direct access to the company's IT system (and how to achieve it); also how to make sure it would use the same naming systems the oil company uses, and fit in with its brand guidelines.
Prime Design was not allowed to interface directly with the oil company's IT network for security reasons, but it managed to link collaborate using a wireless peer to peer network.
The staff worked at the company's site, using Adobe Creative Suite 2, Adobe Bridge and Version Cue. The software had functionality to enable people in the company to get involved in producing the application, but with a version control policy in place, keeping a check on who was making which changes.
Prime Design worked with experts across the company to determine the best possible design, including geologists, geophysicists, lawyers and draughtsmen.
Making text clearer
As well as focussing on the design aspects, Prime Design provides advice and suggestions about the clarity of the text, so it is easier to grasp the important points, and easier to understand and assimilate the full text.
A common trick is to put the key points in a page down the left hand margin, so they can be quickly grasped and scanned.
Another trick is to put particularly complex material into footnotes, rather than the main text, so it is available for anyone who wants it, but does not interrupt the flow of reading for people who do not have time to understand the complex material.
Prime Design writes section headers, which precis what is in the section, so people can decide whether to read it or not, and can prepare themselves to get into the subject in more depth.
Corporate intranet
In another project, Prime Design was asked by a 'New York Stock Exchange listed' oil company to improve its corporate intranet.
The problems with the company's previous intranet included inconsistency between pages, out of date content, no system to control changes, and drawn-out manual processes to update the site.
The large amount of out of date content on the site in particular was proving a barrier to usage of the system by staff. There was no system for users to signal content that needed review.
The intranet had just flat HTML pages, with one member of staff managing all the updates manually.
Content was being received in all kinds of different formats (Excel, Word, and PowerPoint) and had to be transferred to HTML, which was proving very time intensive.
There was also no interface between the intranet and other business applications.
Prime Design's objective was to build a site which would make it easy to access information, and encourage different people to get involved in supplying (and owning) content, with the system integrated as much as possible with existing company processes, and would also support the company brand. It wanted to make sure the intranet was robust, secure, scaleable and easy to use.
Prime Design also wanted an intranet which staff would actually want to contribute to and use.
Prime Design started with an online customer survey to find out about user requirements for the site, asking about how important different features were and asking for suggestions about content.
We were careful to offer features that were supported by the business objectives of the intranet, rather than features people perceived as 'typical' intranet content, Prime Design says.
We focused on prioritization of features as opposed to a picking list, as people have a tendency to make selections based on 'more the better' – which is not always the case.
A prototype intranet was built and released to selected members of the client project team, to get feedback on the look / feel of the site, and functionality.
By changing the site the way staff wanted it, Prime Design made staff feel a lot more involved in the project ('buy-in').
The prototype was then deployed, using an open source content management system Mambo CMS. It was hosted by Prime Design, accessible with a web address and username / password.
For the actual intranet, Prime Design chose a product called Livelink WCM, built by a company called Opentext. Other software was evaluated.
Livelink WCM has functionality for departments to publish their own content, but keep the look and feel of the site consistent. The content storage database is all in one place.
All content is given 'go live', 'review' and 'expiration' dates, so the site is always up to date.
The design has a 'simple but practical' three columns, with a variable width, to maximise use of the screen. Corporate colours were adhered to throughout, but corporate branding was kept to a minimum.
All content has to be approved by someone before going live on the internet, with supervisors appointed in each department. The software has functionality to manage the workflow, alerting supervisors when there is content which needs approval, and automatically publishing it if it is approved, or submitting feedback / requests to the authors if not.
The core intranet was built quickly by Prime Design and tested fully before being made available to the company.
Prime Design then put the content from the prototype and interim intranet onto the test system, set up content groups, system users and processes onto the workflow engine.
The intranet server was then installed at the company (Livelink ECM server).
The system was run offline for a while, so users could start to input content and use the system, while there previous intranet was still active. Three day courses were held for system administrators.
A number of last minute changes were made. One in particular was that the intranet would be presented by the company global corporate interface, with pages displayed with an iframe structure.
Because of the way the framework was structured, with templates, it was possible to make these changes to all the pages by only changing the template, and the go live date was not delayed.
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Digital Energy Journal