Harry Bailey

Harry Bailey is a technology and delivery leader who specialises in turning agency project chaos into clarity. With more than twenty years of experience as a developer, agency founder and fractional CTO, he helps digital and creative agencies build stronger engineering and delivery cultures and improve commercial outcomes. He focuses on practical, immediately actionable strategies, not theory, so teams can ship work on time and with less drama.

Less-Aligned Stakeholders: How to Carve Out Success

Once your client induction process is complete, you’ll need to make a decision on whether their next project has a key stakeholder that’s going to be high-impact. With those two key stages in the bank, it’s time to evalute the best way to move forward.

Also see: What is a stakeholder?

The options below are not intended to be a definitive list. Indeed I can imagine a rewrite of this article or addition of other options in the future. What you will be able to take from reading these thoughts however is the number of ways you could move forward (or not) with a client who isn’t ready to—or won’t—consider your purely Agile delivery approach.

Right, let’s dive into some less-Agile options!

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High-Impact Agile Stakeholders: Important Traits

Most of us are lucky enough to have worked with amazing clients during our agency careers. Those clients where your key stakeholder doesn’t just pass you a project and stand back. They sell you on it, buy into it, stay by your side for it and celebrate the success with you when it’s done.

But what exactly is it about those people that makes them different from the average stakeholder? How can we evaluate a client early to consider just what their team will bring to a project? Can we build them up to be more aligned before our project gets started?

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Semi-retirement done. Reboot complete.

At the beginning of October last year I wrong a blog post called ‘Retirement Diary – Week One‘. As you can probably infer from the title alone my intention was for it to be the first in a series. I was planning to document what taking a step back from work looked and felt like for me. I hoped it would both allow me to return and review the experience at a later date, but also that there might be some insights I could share which would be helpful for others.

It quickly became clear however that I wasn’t actually done with work, or the impact working too much in 2022 and 2023 had on me.

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Client expectations of the inspect and adapt process

Let’s compare a sports situation with software dev best practice. There was recently a huge failure in the refereeing of a football match. A decision was made that processes should have corrected. Gary Neville here is saying refereeing is difficult & sorry should be enough here. https://t.co/NN6tvZzW0X
— Harry Bailey (@HarryBailey) October 3, 2023

In software development we do ‘inspect and adapt’. That is we look at our processes and find ways to improve. We’re transparent about failure and actively look for places we can evolve.
— Harry Bailey (@HarryBailey) October 3, 2023

A ‘sorry but’ wouldn’t be acceptable. “Oh there is a demand for speed so we’ll fail occasionally” and “that’s just the way it is”
— Harry Bailey (@HarryBailey) October 3, 2023

The least we’d offer is…
Sorry
Here is why it failed
Here is what we’ve done to improve the situation
— Harry Bailey (@HarryBailey) October 3, 2023

When you don’t offer those things, people (clients or stakeholders) will go looking for the improvement / failure themselves
— Harry Bailey (@HarryBailey) October 3, 2023

And that is exactly what has happened with the football VAR failure. Where no change is promised, a change is demanded. It’s a valid ask, and a basic expectation of the consumer of any service. Here that’s refereeing.
— Harry Bailey (@HarryBailey) October 3, 2023

Check AWS Lightsail Bitnami WordPress PHP version

Before you spend time upgrading to a new lightsail instance in the hope of your PHP version meeting WordPress minimum requirements, it’s useful to know if the version available is high enough.

You can check which PHP version you’re going to end up with using the following steps:

Open your lightsail home page
Click the Create Instance button
Check the ‘Linux/Unix’ option is selected
Look for the ‘WordPress’ option and make a note of the number displayed underneath (Something like a.b.c-d)

Ok, next we’ll check the Bitnami WordPress changelog

Open the changelog file
Search for a matching number from your note above
Check for a bullet which begins Updated php to
If no match, keep reading down the file until you find the first match for Updated php to
That’s the current PHP version you’ll get if you spin up a new lightsail wordpress install

If it’s the same or higher than the message being shown inside WordPress you can go ahead. If it’s not then you need to set a reminder to check back regularly on the lightsail creation page to see when the version updates.

AWS don’t use the very latest version available from Bitnami.

The final thing to consider… strangely is if WordPress supports the PHP version you’ll be upgrading to. WordPress maintain a list of which versions of PHP they support (properly and in beta).

Work in a software agency where you struggle to delivery consistently to your unique clients and unique projects? I specialise in agency challenges.