December 2019 – Page 2 of 2 – Direction Forward

Ghana Property & Lifestyle Expo website

The Ghana Property & Lifestyle Expo (GPLE) takes place annually in London, UK and Atlanta, USA – and creates a professional global platform to connect real estate developers to the diaspora in the UK and USA.

We were asked to design and build a new site for the GPLE on a very quick schedule, to launch the events happening this year in good time.

The site is fully responsive and includes a full CMS for self management of content. There are funnelled enquiry channels for the different audiences for the events and integrated videos of the previous events.

We had the pleasure of being invited to work with The Belsize Society (TBS), formerly the Belsize Residents’ Association (BRA), on their rebranding and their annual booklet of trusted local service providers.

In March, the Residents’ Association took CIO status and become The Belsize Society. The organisation was formed in the early 1970s and over the past four decades has sought to represent the views of the community on planning matters and other local issues, especially on local services. The new CIO will continue the BRA’s activities such as organising events about the history and heritage of Belsize and engaging about what matters to the community.

You can see our branding, design and illustration on their new local services booklet. We look forward to working on updates to their newsletters, membership application and other forms soon!

Teams within organisations are becoming more distributed as a norm, with remote working becoming common. Remote working is new, relatively speaking and thanks to technology, and more recently has had attention regarding what works and what doesn’t.

Juan Pablo Buriticá and Katie Womersley have together authored a very useful and comprehensive guide on how to work effectively as distributed teams. Juan is VP of engineering at Splice, leading a team of over 50 engineers across the U.S. and South America. Katie is VP of engineering at Buffer and coauthor of Atomic Migration Strategy for Web Teams, leading a worldwide team.

The article gives a detailed guide as to what can make an effective distributed team. Six aspects are discussed, which are all important considerations to foster a healthy team. Synchronous and asynchronous communication and tone of language are highlighted for their importance. Coordination is shown as crucial to include all members of teams who are spread across different time zones.

Ideas are given for effective collaboration, such as mentorship and glue work to reward collaborative behaviours, and face-to-face meetings every six months. The authors discuss how to best organise distributed teams into smaller and cross-functional teams for efficiency – and why. Effective operations are assessed with respect to quality equipment and environment standards, including hiring tips.

Lastly, culture is discussed regarding the importance of praising and understanding team members, including people’s needs and emotional states for the best growth and success of a team.

With the six key aspects in place – communication, coordination, collaboration, organization, operations, and culture – an effective, healthy and progressive team can be built – regardless of the distribution of members. Allowing organisations to grow and reach wider audiences and locations.

Read the article here and contact us for advice on scalable infrastructure and collaborative communication systems to use within distributed teams.

Automating data retention for Tiro Partners

May 2019 saw one year since the enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Compliance is an ongoing concern, and the field in which Tiro Partners operates – specialist technology recruitment – is particularly sensitive due to the sheer amount of personal information within their workflows.

Last year we worked with Tiro to prepare for GDPR, and one measure was to create a SharePoint site where their consultants must save all files containing personal data that has not entered into a contract. Tiro has a retention policy of 12 months for such data, and so we have been busy writing a bot that automatically crawls the SharePoint site and cleans all expired data – saving a huge amount of time if this were to be done manually.

The bot runs daily and its activity is fully logged. Expired files are deleted and cannot be accessed, but retain a 30 day recovery window in the event of an error having been made. The bot is written in a combination of PowerApps and Visual Basic .NET, using a JSON instruction set, and Microsoft Flow to trigger and monitor its scheduled routine.

Website with online auctions for The Matt Haycox Foundation

The Matt Haycox Foundation is a charity which provides financial support to the lives of seriously and terminally ill children and their families. We launched their new website in early July, to coincide with their celebrity fundraising event at the London Eye!

The site was beautifully designed by our partners at Metric, and despite its friendly interface has a surprising amount of technical complexity, including:

E-commerce system including online auction functionality to enable bidding on fundraising experiences, such as dinner with actors and VIP tickets to events.
Social feed on the homepage automatically pulling posts from Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Custom campaign system that allows for individual and competing team events – real-time campaign donation totals are pulled from JustGiving using a custom integration, as JustGiving no longer provide this functionality in their API(!).
Countdown timers and custom graphs for the above campaigns.
Multiple taxonomies to enable different but interlinked categories of content, such as campaigns, events and, success stories.
Single or regular donation function integrated with JustGiving.
Parallax animations on images and objects across the site.

As always with our websites the site is also responsive, Retina compatible includes full CMS and integrates Google Analytics. We are very pleased with the results – you can find the new site now live at matthaycoxfoundation.org.