From project manager to product manager

The line of communication between the inhouse project manager and the agency is a troublesome one as I outlined in the post on the agile project manager.

When things go wrong, the agency gets blamed no matter what. But what if it’s not the agency, but the dynamic of having multiple project managers that causes problems? Perhaps the time has come to rethink the project manager role on the customer side of the table?

Søren Ahlers-Jensen is a product manager in the IT department at the Region of Southern Denmark and will be speaking at the J.Boye Aarhus conference in November on the tricky discipline of product management. Below he shares his thoughts on project managers and how their function might be better handled by a product manager with great results to follow.

What's the problem with project managers?

The core of the issue is when the daily organization at the client is incapable of taking over and implementing the results of the project. Too many projects, without the proper resources and infrastructure to support it, can leave one without most of the benefits you were hoping when you started the project.

Think about it this way: The product is more important than the project

Even when a project is finished in a satisfactory way, you will not harvest all the benefits if you don’t have someone who can implement it into to the daily workings.

What a great project - can someone please take it off my hands?

I've seen this scenario countless times: An in-house project manager finishes a project and everyone suddenly leaves the building. The project is finished and it all went well, so the project manager can rest, but not in peace. For what happens with the project now?

It takes someone to govern the outcome of the project, and that transition can be more difficult than being a project manager for the initial implementation.

A product manager must take a longer view because their doublesided function will force them to think the project as an integrated part of the business's overall strategy. Also, in this way the winding road between project manager and the rest of the business is eliminated.

Product managers – when to have an octopus

So when should you have a product manager? A product manager is more of a function than anything else. This means that a good product manager needs to be able to grasp different areas of the company; he or she needs to be able to talk strategy with the director, but also handle the more technical stuff on an intranet.

Strong communication skills is important, but the essence is that he or she needs to be the one that knows the product and the bigger impact in depth.

“Thanks for summarising this, it is a challenge we face every day when working on projects for clients. The questions is how to raise the bar and make us more like product managers when we have strict budgets and deadline :)”

— Ivo Lukac

Everyone owns digital

By Janus Boye

Who owns digital? This has been a much debated topic over the past two decades.

According to Jonathan Sullivan, a Boye group member and chief digital officer at American The Health Management Academy, this question has a very simple answer:

“Everyone owns digital”

In this blog post, Jonathan argues why everyone owns and should own digital and why digital leaders should move beyond the question of digital ownership.

Digital ownership question is no longer useful

There has been a lot of debate over the past twenty years about where ownership of digital—web, e-commerce, blogs, user generated content, social media, email marketing, mobile, wearables, the Internet of Things—ought to reside within an organization.

I have often found myself in the middle of this debate (and sometimes instigated it) over the years. The result, as our very own Stephen Emmott recently noted, is that

for many organizations, digital is accommodated rather than assimilated into the structure and operation of the whole.

Recently, I have concluded that the question of “who owns digital” is no longer useful to helping organizations cope with the disruption of digital transformation and that it is time for digital leaders to move beyond this struggle.

Why everyone owns digital

Digital is now integral to every aspect of business (whether an organization has acknowledged it or not). Digital is no longer a separate business function, but is simply the way that business is done, all across the enterprise, all the time. Therefore, digital is now the responsibility of everyone in the organization (whether they have acknowledged it or not). Everyone in the organization owns digital.

Everyone owns digital not only in the context of their specific area of responsibility, but also as it pertains to the success of the organization as a whole. I think most digital professionals could agree with the former, but why the latter?

Digital by its nature involves customer experiences and data that cross business lines. Each individual digital experience created within an organization—even something as granular as the copy within a particular content item—is inherently part of the business’s overall digital customer experience. Each one also generates data, which has value beyond the context of that individual digital experience.

What digital means to non-digital roles

Let us look at an example of what it means for someone in a non-digital role—a subject matter expert who creates content—to “own digital.” Beginning at the most fundamental level, a content creator should be aware that their content will be used digitally, either in whole or in part—possibly in ways that are not yet known to them.

This has ramifications for how the piece will be composed. It also has ramifications beyond the traditional endpoint of accountability for content creators; the point at which they click “publish” in the CMS, or—gulp—hit the “Print to PDF” button in Microsoft Office. There are questions the content creators should ask themselves. What opportunities might exist for presenting this content digitally? Is there something about the audience, the context, or the content itself that suggests a potential digital usage or presentation? What has been learned from previous customer interactions with similar content that could improve execution on the current piece?

Stretching the boundaries of accountability even further, the content creator should think about how their content relates to other activities of the business. Has there been content created elsewhere which is complementary to this content, or to which this content can be linked to expand the overall content ecosystem? This example demonstrates how digital considerations are relevant to the traditional responsibilities of those in non-digital roles, and how digital pushes them to act beyond the boundaries of their traditional job descriptions.

Your role as a digital leader

What does it mean for digital leaders, if everyone in the organization owns digital? Aren’t we the digital experts? What is our role, if everyone is supposed to “wear a digital hat?”

The role of digital leaders will continue to be much as it has always been—to be the subject matter experts on how all of the aspects of digital can be used to benefit the organization. This means supplying the vision, evangelizing new digital tools and practices, providing governance, and modeling new approaches to doing business with digital.

Where our role will differ is in the doing. If digital is no longer a separate business function, but is simply the way that business is done, all across the enterprise, all the time, then digital execution cannot be contained within, or even controlled by, one part of the business. Our role is to go out into the business and empower non-digital subject matter experts to enter into the digital mindset, through education, partnership, the development of workflows, and yes, even by holding them accountable.

It is time for digital leaders to move beyond the question of ownership over digital. The reality of today’s business environment is that digital is a widely distributed business function in which everyone in an organization shares responsibility. As digital leaders we should take the lead in embracing this reality and advance an “everyone owns digital” mindset within our organizations.

Demonstrating Yammer’s business value

By Janus Boye

What can you do to create a flourishing and responsive Yammer service at your organization? How do you get your co-workers to embrace the platform and prove its business value to senior management?

Lesley Crook, IC Digital Lean Strategist and speaker at Boye Philadelphia 15 conference, tells the story of how GSK’s Yammer service demonstrated business value by adopting her ‘qualitative’ model in this posting. The below photo is from her popular conference presentation back in May. 

Read How GSK works with Yammer for additional details

Lean ways of working

GSK has a gold standard continuous improvement model called “Accelerated Delivery & Performance” (ADP), which is based on the Toyota Production System (TPS) model. It combines the best of Project Management, Organisational Development and Lean Sigma knowledge networking fundamentals. Coached in GSK businesses but not broadly encouraged in the internal communications area. Being curious I signed up for on-the-job Lean training with mentors and coaches. This opened my eyes to a different way of working and an output of mine was the creation of a unique Yammer “qualitative” business value model.

ESN’s have only previously been determined by using quantitative measurements such as the size of the network and the number of ‘posts’ within groups. Although these measurements are important they need to be put into context.

My model helped to do just that. Yammer group owners are asked a series of short questions that extract key information about their group in relation to areas such as business strategy, project management, organisational development and business transformation, plus cultural behaviours and values. The responses demonstrate how successful Yammer groups are providing real business benefits and helping employees to understand the relevance of Yammer to themselves and their work.

The model also introduces and raises the relevance of “business intelligent #hash tags” that enable searching and data mining strategic content. It helps to share knowledge networking stories cultural sentiments and captures meaningful, actionable tacit insights - not data. It enables working out loud in a network, creating a positive but somewhat disruptive flow - working up and out of silos. These stories can be shared back into the business.

#Yammer50k campaign

November 2014 the output of the model was our global communication campaign. This celebrated reaching the quantitative achievement of 50,000 registered users and demonstrated Yammers qualitative business value. Me and Matt Bartow took-over our intranet homepage and shared 10 Yammer success stories that spanned R&D, manufacturing, sales, marketing and corporate communications.

Each story contains a senior leader “golden“ quote describing how Yammer supported business objectives and company values. Also, how Yammer groups made their part of the business more “responsive” e.g., decreased email trails and increased collaboration by working across business, time zones and geographical boundaries enabled by powerful translate functionality when appropriate.

Leaning up your enterprise social network

Lesley’s model has been endorsed in the private and public sector, Yammer Microsoft management and a Cambridge University academic, but how would her model apply to your organisation? 

Feel free to leave Lesley or Matt a comment below

From too many websites to 1

What do you do when your online presence keeps expanding with websites, campaign sites and new online channels, but your resources (surprise!) stay the same? So far to most the futile answer has been to try to maintain and update the ever-growing mountain of sites and content. But that’s a battle you will eventually lose as many have found with bad and uncontrollable content; content that is forgotten, cases of no-one remembering why the site was launched initially, and no-one taking responsibility for the content.

The new and better answer that increasingly is appearing in many organisations here in 2012 is to take a more radical approach: To go from too many websites to simply 1.

Does it really make sense to have so many different websites?

In a not too distant past, each division, each campaign, and everything else with a budget, wanted their very own website, too often also on separate domains. This is what made sense from an internal point-of-view, just like it used to make sense to have many different brochures.

Now we live in a different time and with organisations facing the expensive consequences of having multiple content management systems and different agencies, the question whether this really makes sense is now not only a valid one to ask, but has also become a business critical one.

Across governments and the private sector around the world, numerous ambitious web projects are on the way, to bring down the number of websites. This will have substantial internal advantages as the number of CMS's and agencies goes down, but even more importantly, it also brings many benefits to the citizens and customers visiting the new consolidated website.  In short: Users no longer need to figure out your organisational chart to navigate your website.

Raise the quality by reducing the number of pages

Another benefit of going to simply 1 website is that the overall amount of content tends goes down.

When you have too many websites, you probably also have redundant, outdated and trivial content. With some effort you can use these 3 tips to raise the content quality:

• get rid of content that should not have been there in the first place

• get rid of overlapping content - merge similar content to the same pages

• focus on adding a few lines where needed to existing pages - even though it might not fit perfectly. This is easier for the editors than creating new pages and keeps the number of pages down

One website fits all

Yes, simply having 1 website means that you need to still produce all kinds of information to many different audiences.  You still have very different information about very different topics and also many different tasks that the users would expect to solve.

Yes, it requires careful planning and hard work to create a good user experience to avoid congestion and have a meaningful information architecture.

And yes, it certainly requires an easy-to-use and modern content management system that don't require that occasional editors need to attend week-long training before they can contribute to the website.

Going to one website, most likely also requires big changes in how you work and how you are organized. This tends to be the biggest challenge for most. Not information, not design and not technology.

Having said this, it can work. Some good examples are:

• rijksoverheid.nl - one website for all of Dutch government

• Siemens - one website for all the German multinational conglomerate company with 360,000 employees divided in 19 divisions

Learn more about going away from having too many websites

Last year my colleague Brian Bentzen wrote: Governments have too many websites.

Ann Priestly also wrote an interesting posting on whether everything on a website can be reduced to tasks. Read: Slash and burn: service delivery vs content

Avoid the top 10 errors in email newsletters

Email marketing is a crucial strategy to pump up holiday sales, but don’t forget that email newsletters are important all year long.  Here are the common errors you should avoid along with some tips to make your email newsletters better:

10.  Overuse of capital letters and punctuation in the subject line.Respect your readers. Don’t bludgeon them with an overly anxious call to action punctuated withgratuitous question marks and exclamation points.  What is urgent to you, might not be urgent to others.

9.  Pictures that distract attention. We say that a picture is worth 1000 words, but words are worth 1000 pictures.  Too often a picture is the first part of the email, and it doesn’t render correctly, so the receiver just deletes the email. Be sure to send a test message to yourself and see how the email renders both with and without pictures.  Be sure that your message can work even if the picture is not included.

8. Text that is too long or too short. Making effective newsletters is an art. It takes practice and testing.  The proper length can depend upon the topic and the audience.  An article or story that is too short without enough content to provide value is not worth reading.  Sometimes you can make a short teaser with a link to a longer discussion on your website. By the same token, avoid long emails. Break up a long topic into 2 or 3 emails on related themes.  A general rule is to keep your message to one page when printed--including pictures.

7. The broken record. Saying your message consistently is not the same thing as saying it over in the same message.  Make your point clearly and succinctly once in the message, ideally at the beginning.  Ensure that your message is consistent in subsequent newsletters.

6. Indiscriminate links. The art of a good email newsletter is to show restraint.  Avoid the trap of making every offer under the sun to your customer.  Instead focus on one topic and one link for the newsletter.

5.  Surprises: In life we like surprises, but not necessarily in the email newsletter.  Be sure to discuss the topic named in the subject line, not something else.

4. Overly fancy design: The principles of “less is more” and “keep-it-simple” hold true.  Today’s newsletter tools offer hundreds of templates with many designs, layouts, graphics and so on.  Be critical. Does the design improve the offer and quality of the message? When in doubt, leave it out.

3. Too many topics in a single newsletter.  A good email newsletter has just a single topic, no more. It’s good that you have a lot of topics.  It means you can make more newsletters in future!

2. Boring subject line. If you can’t be bothered to make an interesting subject line, why should the recipient read the email?

1.  Unknown sender, The recipient of the mail wants to know who is communicating.  Have a real person at the other end of the newsletter. If you can make your newsletter and email communication personal to the recipient, so much the better.

Learn more

Roslyn Layton has contributed to several Boye & Co group meetings with expert presentations on digital marketing. You can find some of her talks on Roslyn's Slideshare profile.

You can subscribe to the monthly Boye & Co newsletter using the below form on the right hand side.

10 European content strategists to watch

By Janus Boye

The task of identifying 10 European individuals that make a difference when it comes to content strategy has not been easy. The emerging field is dominated by US-based consultants and at least in Europe, many don't use the term to describe what they do.

I was first introduced to the concept of content strategy, when Kristina Halvorson, author of Content Strategy for the Web, spoke at the Boye 2009 conference in Denmark. She introduced and defended this still up-and-coming practice as a valuable, necessary addition to web strategy and user experience design.

Since then, content strategy has come up as a term mostly on my travels to the US. A recent blog asked when content strategy will break out of the US and in an interview with Gerry McGovern from last month he said he wasn't quite sure what content strategy really meant.

This is a list of 10 interesting European individuals who make a difference in the emerging industry and who share their thoughts with the world either on their blog, Twitter or elsewhere. It includes some well-known as well some new names. For each I have picked a selected quote or something they've recently shared to give you a taste of their style.

1 @faundex_alex: Alex Faundez is working as web project manager at UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) in Geneva, Switzerland. Outside his day job, Alex also organizes local Geneva Content Strategy Meetups.

Instead of starting the social media discussion on the tools, focus on the comm needs of your client or company first

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2. @boudewijnbugter: Boudewijn Bugter is commercial director and co-owner at Sabel, a Dutch-based communications agency. Previously he worked as content manager for the Dutch Road Traffic Safety Association (Veilig Verkeer Nederland) and as web manager for ProRail, the government organisation that manages and maintains the railway network infrastructure in the Netherlands.

Make your intranet as task oriented as possible to get more satisfied users

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3. @BrianBentzen: Brian Bentzen is online communications manager at Servicestyrelsen (The National Board of Social Services) in Odense, Denmark. A regular speaker in Denmark and previous Lecturer of Communication Studies, he has also worked at a local digital agency

Most important thing on the web? Content - nothing but good important content that matters to the reader. It is actually quite simple.

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4. CJ Walker is CEO of Firehead, a Swedish-based recruitment firm, which specialises in placing both contract and salaried English-speaking communications professionals throughout Europe. Firehead runs a popular blog which features columns by guest writers and must-read content strategy links.

Flowchart: Who can sort your content strategy?

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5. @destraynor: Des Traynor is lead UX designer at Contrast, a Dublin software firm. He’s also a lecturer in Computer Science at theNational University of Ireland. He writes about content in the broader context of business development.

No one joins an empty network just for the hell of it

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6. @elreiss: Eric Reiss has been actively involved in the creation of menu-based programs, hypertext games, service programs, multimedia, and web projects for over 30 years. Today he lives in Copenhagen and is the CEO of the FatDUX group, a full-service interactive agency. He is also a professor at the IE Business School in Madrid, Spain where he teaches usability and design.

Usability is often quantitative. But design is qualitative. Is this why usability experts so often make poor design recommendations?

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7. @gerrymcgovern: Gerry McGovern has been around the Web longer than most. Gerry has spoken, written and consulted extensively on web content management issues since 1994. Gerry has written four books including Killer Web Content in 2006.

Web content is not a cost to be minimized but an asset to be maximized. Tech. doc. is the new sales

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8. @lucidplot: Jonathan Kahn is principal and founder at Together London, the London-based agency behind Content Strategy Forum 2011.

It’s time to regain control of our content management systems by harnessing the power of content strategy

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9. @lisejanody: Lise Janody, president and chief content strategist at Dot-Connection, a small, bilingual consultancy based in Paris. Lise was previously with Alcatel-Lucent in various roles, including as Digital Content Management and Online Maketing Director, Enterprise Solutionsand Intranet Content Manager

Hard for geeky engineers to explain what they do in simple terms. Video great for this., plus can be used at events

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10. Nikki Tiedtke, senior content strategist at eBay Europe in Berlin, who recently presented at the Content Strategy Applied conferencewhere she told the story of how she turned business seller communications around from being reactive and driven by corporate needs to user-focused, consistent in tone and written in plain language. You can view her slides on Slideshare

A content strategy framework enables us to continuously improve, react fast and structured within virtual, international teams

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Who did I miss? If you think we have left out any unmissable European content strategy expert(s), please feel free to leave a comment!

Learn more

Web content and online corporate communications was the theme of our very first group launched back in 2005 and we've since expanded with several groups around Europe and North America.

What actually lies ahead for EPiServer?

“Acquisitions are usually seen as positive signs for those being acquired. Somehow, this one leaves a strange aftertaste with hints of turbulent times and notes of uncertainty for EPiServer. Customers and prospects in the US market may want to speak (and by “speak” I mean “really question”) to EPi about their future plans in this geography before planning on further investments in this Web CMS vendor.”

From CMSWire: Web CMS Vendor EPiServer Acquired by a Surprising Buyer (Nov 10, 2010)

It has now been a few weeks after the change in ownership for Sweden-based Web CMS vendor EPiServer and the initial critical posting by industry publication CMSWire. Typical for this industry, the news has left many customers, including several of our members, puzzled. EPiServer was bought by a European private equity firm on November 10, but was that really a bad thing?

Here’s our take from conversations with the wider community: While competitors are naturally fast to spin tales of doom, this is actually at worst a  “non-event” for prospects and customers, but may well turn out to be good news.

Since the EPiServer founder sold out to investors with global ambitions back in August 2007, EPiServer has been on a rapid growth path internationally and has successfully managed the transition from founder-led to investor-led. Unlike Danish arch rival Sitecore which went big internationally much earlier, EPiServer actually did not hire their first international employee until 2006 (in Denmark) and did not set foot in the US until early 2009. Today, EPiServer has partners around the world and staff in several European locations as well as a US team with local solution architects, sales, marketing and support. Experienced integration partners may still be few and far between in certain regions, but EPiServer has certainly come a long way since the founder left the company.

Unlike most direct competitors EPiServer has effectively been using venture funding to grow the company and it is highly unlikely that the newest owner, experienced European private equity IK Investment Partners, would have bought the company without being impressed by the management team and without having a detailed plan for continued growth. Replacing family ownership and multiple venture capitalists, this new single owner, positions EPiServer well in terms of preparing for 2011 and beyond in relation to their competitors Alterian, Ektron, Kentico, Sitecore and Telerik. To customers this should mean increased investments in local sales & marketing as well as engineering.

According to LinkedIn, EPiServer has been outgrowing their nearest competitors

As this unfolding story illustrates, it is difficult to conclude what actually lies ahead for EPiServer. As a prospect or customer, our advice remains:

• select implementation partner carefully

• negotiate license and support cost, since modules and bundles can quickly get confusing and expensive 

• talk to the vendor

Next steps

For an in-depth evaluation of EPiServer, I recommend the CMS Vendor Evaluations from Real Story Group.

To learn more about EPiServer or assistance with selecting the right CMS, please contact us for professional services. If you are interested in meeting with other EPiServer customers, consider joining our community or attending one of our industry events.

“As someone who’s gone through an acquisition when Autonomy bought Interwoven, I’ve learned that actions speak louder than words (and press releases) when it comes to trying to understand the future direction of the acquired company. It’s way too early to have any insight into the future of EPIServer, we won’t know much until a year from now. There is one interesting data point on the IK Investments website at http://www.ikinvest.com/templates/Page.aspx?id=2008:

“An important element of IK’s strategy is to acquire companies that are well-positioned in their local markets and to transform them into regional or pan-European market leaders through geographic expansion as well as strategic and operational improvement. IK believes that the successful execution of this strategy requires both an intimate knowledge of local markets as well as a pan-regional reach. ”

It would seem IK doesn’t have a track record in expansion outside of Europe, but then again actions will speak louder than words. To me, the acquisition is another sign that this space is on fire, as we’re seeing high double digit revenue growth from vendors across the board.

-Tom (disclosure, I work at Ektron)”

— Tom Wentworth, November 25th, 2010 0:03

“I would echo Tom’s words having been through the Mediasurface acquisition of Immediacy – which is probably why there has been this growing FUD around the EPiServer announcements.

In general, the CMS community has been ‘socialising’ a lot more in recent years – both online and offline – so the experiences of those who have been at the mercy of the ‘money men’ in these acquisition scenarios and the after-effects of post acquisition directions and decisions have been revealed and discussed far more openly than before.

As an EPiServer customer, I’ve experienced changes in the company over the last year as they’ve been preparing the company for sale that I think have impacted negatively on the ease of doing business with them. I think it has been described well in John Goode’s recent post about the ‘profit imperative’ http://johngoode.com/company-for-sale where milking what you can out of the license model takes precedence over improving user experience.

My real hope for the EPiServer team now is that they don’t start having the types of ‘product management’ meetings with their new owners that happened after the Mediasurface acquisition of Immediacy where all the focus was on maximising license revenue from the existing product and customer base and the long standing pain-points and usability issues in the product set continued to be ignored.

Right now, we have the complete contrast to this approach illustrated by the development and release of Drupal 7 – where the absolute focus of the development community has been on getting the product right which has resulted in delay after delay in it being released. The ‘profit imperative’ means that commercial developers simply can’t operate like that but sadly it also means that these products tend to degrade over time rather than continue to improve at their core.”

— James Hoskins, November 26th, 2010 0:03