Process and Project Management

Save yourself tears with the Econsultancy Online Resource Manager

Do you outsource your website and related services? If so you must ensure you retain access and ownership of your online resources to prevent any potential negative impact to your businesses.

To help manage this process I’ve put together a resource which is now part of Econsultancy’s Digital Marketing Template Files.

This is the second in a short series of posts which aims to primarily benefit small website owners, but consequently helps the web designers producing sites for those types of businesses.

How do you build a great ecommerce team?

Launching an ecommerce channel is a no-brainer for many companies as it’s undoubtedly one of the most effective ways of building your business for the future.

But while the decision to launch an online store is a relatively easy one, knowing how and when to develop to ecommerce team is far more difficult.

To make the process easier we’ve just published our new report, Building an Ecommerce Team: A Best Practice Guide, which focuses on the challenges facing ecommerce managers as the digital channel grows and diversifies.

The guide is aimed at client-side ecommerce practitioners and includes recommendations from seasoned professionals on how to build and manage your team; how to create a framework for understanding the key challenges; and details on how changing market conditions are impacting the demands on ecommerce teams.

The rise of the temporary organisation

What’s permanent? What’s temporary? Perceptions of time frame the way we work together.

I was debating project and service management standards the other day. (Yep, I lead a sad life.)

To be honest, it wasn’t much of a debate. We all agreed on the big stuff – that projects and services overlap; that we all need to work together to deliver value; that people and skills matter more than standards and controls.  

A lot of motherhood and apple pie really. Boring.

Throughout the debate, I felt we were missing something. There was a big divergence in our underlying mindsets; we just weren’t getting at it. Afterwards, I realised this was due to the framing of the debate.

A case for UX testing and Agile

A recent report, published here on the Econsultancy blog, revealed a staggering 45% of companies aren’t performing any UX testing when developing a creative project.

Whether it’s a website or an app, user experience (UX) is an important factor in both the success, and the scalability of a product.

Together with the flexibility of the Agile approach to development, it can help you to build a better, more satisfying product. 

The rise of the psi-shaped content marketer

psi-shaped content marketingModern marketers have to juggle many disciplines and wear many hats in order to succeed.

You may have heard of the T shaped marketer and even the Pi shaped marketer, but now it’s time to embrace the Psi shaped content marketer for digital success.

It’s time to do away with a project focused view of the web

Are you about to launch yet another web redesign project? If so, think again.

One of the reasons organisational websites fester and decay is because companies are good at projects and poor at iteration.

Most organisations like to think in terms of clearly defined projects. In many ways this makes a lot of sense. Projects are easily quantifiable in terms of the budget, resources and time involved. It is easier to find budget and resources for finite projects rather than ongoing investment.

This is why redesign projects are so common within web design. Organisations love them because they have a clearly defined scope and provide an easily identified deliverable.

In short, for specific investment you can see a tangible change.

Why you need real options

Things were simple when I worked in the games industry. If the company’s owner liked an idea, he invested in it. One guy’s gut feel drove our entire investment strategy.

Back then, in the 90’s, a typical console game cost maybe £1m to develop. Our boss could afford to invest in several at once, giving himself a pretty decent chance that at least one of them would make money. And he only needed one or two successes to pay for a long tail of flops.

Nowadays, a high profile console game costs upwards of £20m to develop. Even large companies can only afford to carry a small number of failures of that size. Gut feel just doesn’t cut it any more.

Big Data: key takeaways from Digital Cream London 2013

Whilst the discussion was ripe with technical tongue twisters, the overall message was clear. Big Data, and its implications on Big Marketing, remains a mystery for many.

There is an endless stream of Big Data platform providers clamouring to prove that only they provide the most verifiable and cleanest solutions.

What is vital here is to not become fixated by promises but instead challenge the vendors’ capabilities to provide specific, applicable data which allows you to achieve the true purpose of engaging with data.

This purpose is to make more informed, Big Marketing decisions.

Start Me Up! A profile of Grafetee

Launched last year, Grafetee is a mobile app which enables anyone to create a location-based service in minutes for web and mobile devices.

I asked founder Juha Huttunen about Grafetee and its plans for world domination…

Why you need to avoid governance vacuums

Say “governance” and blame never follows too far behind. Accountability, so far as I can tell, is a synonym for “who shall we sack?”

No wonder most people avoid discussing governance.

I’ve been facing it head-on recently. I’ve run several workshops on product development governance within a variety of organisations.  

In particular, we’ve been looking at some of the key decisions that people make during the course of product and systems development, and at how they allocate responsibility for those decisions.

Using human motivation to assess website optimization

When evaluating the influence and quality of your website, sometimes it helps to take a step back and prioritize the site’s fundamental needs from the ground up.

Often times we get so entangled in optimization tactics that we don’t realize that the most vital elements of our websites can be what’s hindering its performance.

Before you start investing a lot of time and energy into improving advanced characteristics of the website, it’s important to ensure the most basic needs are met.

Mapping web optimization priorities in an anthropomorphic manner can help to understand the best way to prioritize website improvements.

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