Archive for August, 2008

A lesson in client servicing an application development project

Posted in: application development, career, client service, enterprise, strategy, By: E. Long, At: August 20th, 2008

We recently completed our first integration with an external customer website and our e-commerce website. (By “integration,” I mean an API in which we pass configured product data from our site to a 3rd party shopping cart.) What ensued was an interesting learning experience for myself and our group of developers on the project.

Everybody has their own development process

Standards are hard to come by in the web application/development world and the process for managing development projects is certainly no different.

Case in point: We created a technical specification for an API and worked with developers on our own team spanning 3 different time zones. Add on top of this that our technical specification was an “ideal world” document which didn’t account for specific requirements of the external website we were to interface with. This meant further coordinating our simultaneous development of our API with the integration of the API (as we were building it). This essentially equated to “building the plane as we flew it.”

Agile development is great…but falls flat on its face when involving people outside the core team

In an agile software development world, code is written, tested, and released in several mini-stages. This methodology allows for us to be very open, flexible, and speedy with new development on our various web properties.

However, my takeaway from this project is that I would utilize a different approach when interfacing with external developers that are not part of the core team…taking me back to my agency roots when educating our clients about “our process.” What we found is that our process didn’t at all align with the customer’s process for development, testing/QA, and release management. In fact, it caused a lot of tension between the two groups throughout the project — especially in the home stretch.

Where we normally operate in a lean environment with small release gaps and short testing periods, the external party we interfaced with was accustomed to a more traditional waterfall model of building the entire application up front, test all of it at once, and going through several iterations of testing & debugging of all code at the very last stage.

Lesson learned: Provide a visual map of your process and timing

Multiple lessons were learned on this project:

1.) Provide a “site map” of the intended integration. This allows business stakeholders to visually understand where the API “handshake” occurs between the sites. It also empowers the external QA team to understand the bigger picture so they can see which areas need testing.

2.) Provide a map of the major components of the development project, timing on each, and the order in which they will be developed. Seems simple, but when you don’t manage the external developers, keeping tabs on the timeline proves difficult.

3.) Schedule regular daily meetings to check in on status and even if there’s no updates to report, it provides a crutch for the collective team to lean on so everybody remains on the same page (in terms of timing & expectations). Morning meetings are important so the day doesn’t get away from either party. This is particularly helpful in the final weeks/days of the project.

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Where does SEM fall in your organization?

Posted in: SEM/SEO, eBusiness, marketing, By: E. Long, At: August 5th, 2008

MediaBuyerPlanner reports ”Only about 55 percent of search marketers integrate their search efforts with offline marketing efforts; the other 45 percent make no effort at integrating SEM (Search Engine Marketing) with offline initiatives, according to a new study by iProspect and JupiterResearch.”

You may have an SEM management gap

The above article claims budgetary and resource concerns. I think the bigger picture is one of the following scenarios that many marketing organizations face:

  1. Marketing, being resourced constrained, probably pawns this off as an “IT project” because it involves technology.
  2. Marketing has assigned SEM efforts to a vendor specializing in SEM and no other marketing initiatives.

Scenario #1: SEM lives in IT

I can understand why SEM has traditionally been an “IT responsibility” because SEM in large part, is still a rather large mystery to marketers. They don’t understand the rules of the game and the execution of your organization’s SEM campaigns requires a fundamental knowledge of your website and the visitors of your website. It’s commonplace that a marketing communications department, who handles traditional print and television advertising, may not be the resident experts on web strategy and design. It’s easy to pass SEM off to IT — because they handle “the technical stuff.”

Scenario #2: SEM execution lives with an outside firm

There are many companies providing SEM services and not surprisingly, these companies are technical in nature and not traditional direct-marketers. Those that are direct marketers are generally small and have a localized client base, making it hard for them to penetrate the mold of Fortune 500 companies. Those that are technical may have a great technology to sell, but lack the marketing savviness of a direct marketing firm to truly bring SEM the return on investment it demands — resulting in poorly performing SEM campaigns. This leads to the disconnect in online and offline marketing mentioned in the above MediaBuyerPlanner report.

How do you close the SEM knowledge gap? Who should manage SEM?

SEM “belongs” in marketing and should be on the radar of anyone executing any outbound marketing and awareness campaigns (email, direct mail, or otherwise). “Belonging in marketing” and “being executed by marketing” are two different things. From marketing communications, to product marketing managers, to channel marketing, each group has their own functional needs/goals for SEM. Establishing a governing body to ensure the proper SEM techniques and optimization are in place is recommended — but simultaneously avoiding the bureaucracy that’s often accompanied by “governing committees.”

A good place? The web experience/usability group within your organization. SEM may be funded by marketing while the governing body and “gatekeeper” for SEM can be facilitated through the people who know your site inside and out and intimately understand the experience an end-user desires when arriving at the landing pages on your site via an ad. After all, not much ends up on the site that doesn’t pass the approval of this group. Any campaigns directing traffic to the site are right up the alley of a usability professional.

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Business and IT: A Love/Hate Relationship. But why?

Posted in: cio, enterprise, strategy, By: E. Long, At: August 4th, 2008

As I’ve transitioned from the marketing department as a web marketing manager to the IT department as an application/development manager, to my now current role of senior IT manager, I’ve gradually moved up the food chain of strategy conversations with both the internal business, customers, and vendors. The constant theme in all of these discussions whenever IT is brought up? Resources (or lack thereof) and the roadblock IT is viewed as to growing the business.

Is every IT department eternally busy?

I don’t understand it. Well, actually, I do, but I’ll say “I don’t understand” just to make it sound like I’m in more disbelief than I really am. The underlying theme of every conversation I’ve had with a customer, vendor, or otherwise is that IT is busy and doesn’t have the resources. It seems as if any project requiring IT resources automatically gets held up in the “IT vortex” of priorities. IT departments are really not this busy.

The IT prioritization issue

Something is fundamentally wrong when IT resources are scheduled 9-12 months out. My gut feel is that what the business is being held responsible to do compared to what IT is being scheduled to do is at times, misaligned. This is not necessarily the fault of IT but rather the business leaders (in which IT should have a seat at the table).

From an operations and manufacturing perspective, we automatically know that it’s standard procedure to have a lengthy-but-calculated process for launching new products to the market. Yet, there’s perhaps somewhat less frustration with operations & manufacturing on these timelines compared to the frustration I commonly witness with IT scheduling. How can this be?

The business doesn’t understand IT

Business users simply don’t understand what they can’t see. Operations and manufacturing have the luxury of producing physical products and business users can see the progress of this development and can visually comprehend the effort that’s put into a product launch.

The challenge for IT leaders is to visualize the various IT processes, illustrate how they plug into the rest of the organization, and be viewed as an ally to projects and not a barrier to entry. It pains me to think how many projects are killed in the course of 12 months because IT resources are required.

Business users need a scorecard for IT projects

Business users need help — they can’t be faulted for not understanding IT, their lack of understanding is on the shoulders of IT leaders. Business users need a scorecard to appropriately rate their projects. There will be some things that internal IT cannot do in the amount of time required. But this doesn’t mean “kill the project!” It may mean outsourcing the project to another firm under the guidance of IT.

Unfortunately, many IT shops are one of the following:

  • Run as if all IT-related ideas should be their own. This translates to extended timelines and lost time-to-market as IT puts the stops on a project because it wasn’t “their idea.”
  • Operated under the watchful eye of a CFO. This translates to IT operating under the perception that “spending money = bad”.

What’s an IT leader to do?

  1. Openly share your project pipeline (disguising projects that are sensitive, if necessary). The business as a whole needs to understand what projects are in the pipeline. If they don’t, they will approach you without any context to why your team is so busy — which is a problem.
  2. Openly share the methodology for prioritizing projects with the business users who are submitting the requests. This will help them understand the process so that when they come to you with future projects, they will be armed the right data…and not with a preconceived notion that the project will “take a while” because “IT is always busy.” Knowing the “why” behind project prioritization goes a long way.
  3. Accept the fact that you are not all-knowing. It’s OK for business users to come to IT with a new idea. You’re responsibility is leveraging technology to solve business problems and bringing their idea to life. Without you, it’s just an unrealized idea.
  4. Spending money is not a bad thing. If you report to the CFO, the CFO is not against spending money. The CFO views business differently and is looking at the return on investment (ROI). If you cannot put in requests for money which outline the ROI, then be prepared to have many of your projects denied.
  5. Don’t forget to position yourself as a “go to” person.

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