This is Milk...a business change consultancy – but how did we come up with the name?
​Angela Prentner-Smith

If This is Milk has any frequently asked questions, the one that tops the list is “How did you come up with the name?”
The truth is the name was the end-result of some serious deliberation about our brand. It went a little like this.

Gillian (This is Milk’s co-founder) and I began by batting about some ideas about what and who we wanted to be, then taking the time to refine those statements into the words that best described how we wanted to appear to the world. We wanted to be different, to stand out from the crowd, to be a breath of fresh air.

At the same time as thinking about what we were going to call ourselves, we were also considering our Vision, our Mission, our Ethics, and our Visual Style.

How it all started

Here are our original company description and some thoughts we had about our corporate identity and brand.

• Company Description

This is Milk provides services to business in response to specific problems, perceived needs and complex processes. We will understand and articulate the problem, provide a plan of action and work with companies to improve their capacity for change, their growth and their market offering.

• Corporate Identity

A consistent brand is key to our company’s growth and identity. This brand includes all communications - verbal, visual and written - as well as the services we offer. Our brand will be developed around the concepts of simplicity, authenticity, accessibility and aspiration.

• ​The Brand Spectrum

We looked at the brands we thought personified these concepts and plotted them on a spectrum.

The Competitor Landscape

We also looked at what we didn’t want to be, and how we wanted to set ourselves apart from our competitors. The competitive landscape was clogged with ‘men in grey suits’ with fairly meaningless names (in our opinion). When we looked at the brands that embodied what we wanted to be, many of them had simple, everyday names. So we focussed our hunt for a name to something simple.

What about Milk? We liked it. But a quick search, and we realised there was already a digital agency in England called Milk, and they had bought up the domains. But This is Milk was available.

​Making a Declaration

It was a declaration, not just Milk, but This is Milk - it made a statement. A statement of who and what we were. It was simple, yet effective – like us! When we thought more about it, milk embodied many of the qualities of change – the very premise of our business, and our ethics and values.

Change, like milk, is an essential thing - it’s ubiquitous and everyday. Yet it's also transformative and adaptable. Milk can change your coffee; become a tart or pudding. It is also nourishing and versatile. Milk feeds your baby, and if cow’s milk isn’t for you, there’s soy, oat or almond.

We also liked some of the cultural connotations around milk, such as pouring fresh ideas; or Milk – it’s natural and does a body good.

The Visual Language

​Our name, our vision, our mission and our ethics, once defined lend themselves nicely to a particular visual language. We sought out a graphic designer and created a design brief around all of these elements.
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The words we asked them to embody were:

Now we have our logo, our colour scheme and a developing written brand. We are also working hard to define our culture to make sure This is Milk is as brilliant a place to work as we envisioned it being. 

So what’s in our name?  A lot of thought and ultimately our company values leading to a brand that we can be proud of and will continue to develop as we go. 
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It wasn’t just about a name, but in the end, the name works for us. ​

​Interested to find out more about us?

We say goodbye to Stefan Taylor, our BBC Make it Digital in Scotland intern, with a video interview
Angela Prentner-Smith

We’re sad here at This is Milk to say goodbye to our BBC Make it Digital intern, Stefan Taylor.  Over the last 3 weeks, Stefan has become part of the TiM team. Before he left, we took some time to do a little interview with him and find out whether his first impressions of life at This is Milk held true, what he learned and what he most enjoyed. The interview was Stefan’s idea too.

From our perspective, we learned a lot from Stefan and feel privileged to have been able to offer a young person vital work experience. He surprised us with his excellent report writing and research skills. A few examples of the work he did for us: a report on B2B social media best practice; competitor analysis for a client; customer journey workshopping and digital presentation tool research.

He gave us some excellent insight and a fresh perspective we simply wouldn't have had without him.

Asperger Memos

Stefan also opened our eyes to the difficulties that young people entering the workforce face and more so those affected by Asperger’s syndrome. Stefan has used his experiences and new digital skills to create and design his own website, aspergermemos.com, sharing his personal struggles and triumphs. 

Stefan is clearly highly capable with much to offer any workplace, and through working with him we've realised just how much of a hurdle traditional recruitment processes must be for young people with Aspergers and other disabilities. A new angle for us to consider when working with our partners and clients - how can we help make this part of business better?
 
BBC Make it Digital in Scotland

This is Milk had the pleasure of taking part in the BBC Make it Digital in Scotland pilot, a collaboration from Skills Development Scotland (SDS), the BBC, DWP and colleges around Scotland. It’s a pre-employment work placement programme for students (age 16 to 24) to build the digital skills they’ll need to prosper in the modern workplace.   

Learn more about the programme here

Michael Gill, Agile Business Analyst, on the origins of Waterfall methodology

There were rumours of course, that decades before, some fool called Copernicus had spouted the same nonsense on his death-bed, but nobody's taken him seriously. This Galileo, however, well he's a different story. To say that the Earth orbits round the Sun and is not the centre of the universe is clearly heresy. Fortunately the Church knows how to deal with him; place under permanent house arrest and force him to recant. 

And as for that so-called genius Sir Isaac Newton, who claims to have mathematically proved Galileo and Copernicus were right all along, what does he know?

Ever tried to climb up a Waterfall?

Let's transport ourselves forward in time, from the heady heights of astronomy into the heavenly world of software development. It's 2001 and the launch of the Agile manifesto. Living in more enlightened times, no one's threatening to burn this group of self-appointed industry experts or have them imprisoned. But it's right to be sceptical. After all why change what we've been doing for years? We have the Waterfall methodology.

You gather requirements, analyse, design, code, test, release. Alright, so quite often good communications are lacking. It doesn't facilitate change particularly well. It's hard to accurately plan and poor old test always seem to have their time squeezed, but after all it's only test. The finished product rarely matches the original business vision and delivery is frequently over budget and late. Better not tell the shareholders.

But should it have ever seen the light of day?

What if the adoption of Waterfall was built on shaky foundations? What if it's sequential model was never the intention?

With ever improving technology, software engineering as a new industry, had to find ways to manage the development of larger and larger systems.

As a contribution to the debate around this problem, in 1970 Dr. Winston Royce, now credited with Waterfall's introduction, issued the white paper 'Managing the development of large software systems'1

Dr. Royce lists each stage of the process:

• System requirements
• Software requirements
• Analysis
• Program Design
• Coding
• Testing
• Operations

We can all recognise this familiar model.

'I believe in this concept,' writes Dr. Royce, then immediately goes onto say 'but the implementation above is risky and invites failure.' He argues that by leaving the testing phase to the end, there is little or no opportunity for change should an error be discovered in a previous step. He concludes his premise by stating: 

'Either the requirements must be modified, or a substantial change in the design is required. In effect the development process has returned to the origin and one can expect up to a 100-percent overrun in schedule and/or costs.'

To address this issue Dr. Royce proposes a series of elaborations iterating around the process, to capture errors and to avoid a calamity during the testing phase. The end result is a complex process diagram, which, when compared to the the basic waterfall model, so the story goes, led a Pentagon official to adopt the simple route instead of Dr. Royce's complex elaboration. And we've been living with the consequences ever since.

An earlier example of a fledgling Waterfall process in action appears in the reissued study 'Production of Large Computer Programs'2 by Herbert D. Benington, originally published in 1956. The paper describes the broadly successive steps undertaken to develop a large system and the per instruction costs around its production.

If it's broken, fix it

Reflecting in 1983 what he would have done differently, Benington concludes:

'I would have worked to test and evolve a system. I estimate that this evolving approach would have reduced our overall software development costs by 50 percent.'

Both Dr. Royce and Herbert Benington understood the flaws in the sequential model, not from any academic standpoint but from hard experience.
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In 1992 Pope John Paul II officially recognised that Galileo had been right all along; 350 years after the event. It would be a pity to think that the software industry would take as long to recognise the broken software development methodology being used to this day, instead of promoting the practice of iteration and early testing as espoused by those heretics who launched the Agile manifesto in 2001.

1 http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Process/waterfall.pdf
2 http://csse.usc.edu/TECHRPTS/1983/usccse83-501/usccse83-501.pdf