Developing a Usability Plan for the organization

> I've been working in a Fortune 500 company that traditionally has been
> low on the usability maturity scale - see Jakob Nielsen's Corporate
> Usability Maturity Alertbox:
> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/maturity.html.
> 
> We made a big step 3 years ago by forming a User-Centered Design team,
> but still had no authority to enforce UCD processes and methods across
> projects, so we've had to rely on our advocates, our own education
> attempts, and soliciting project team involvement (seeing is always
> believing, especially when it comes to your struggling users). The
> ground-up, grass-roots approach had been our only tool. Consequently,
> we considered ourselves fortunate when we could even work on key
> projects. Bottom line, we could handle the usability workload with 1-2
> usability specialists and 2-3 web designers. 
> 
> We're about ready to make an even bigger stride -- we now have gained
> the authority position in the company to enforce -- and we intend to
> integrate user-centered design in every project with medium to high
> user impact. I'm looking for your success stories and lessons learned
> on how you've seen your fledgling team grow through this period -- how
> did you plan for it and manage it? It's not clear yet what the
> resource requirements will be, so I'm assuming we'll utilize some
> additional internal staff that have skills and interest, contractors,
> potential FTEs, and as always --- a prioritization model that helps
> guide our involvement per project (i.e. a heuristic review may suffice
> for some projects). We'll need to plan for additional usability and
> design resources. Any feedback and lessons learned on how you've
> staffed up would be helpful! 
> 
> Please send directly to me, I'll collect and summarize in a week.
> Thanks!
> 
> Kevin <[email protected]>
> Sr. Usability Analyst
> 
> 

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