It’s tragic when you have one of those projects which seemed like a great idea at the time, but the longer the it goes on, the less enthused people become and everyone despairs of achieving success. Managing these is not a cathartic experience: it’s a time to pity the stakeholders and fear for the project benefits.

On the other hand there are laughable projects where you took so long to define requirements that your implementation and testing are squeezed into an impossibly short period. These would be funnier if wasn’t for the fact that as a stakeholder, you’re the one being mocked.

So how do you avoid plunging into despair or feeling ridiculous? Here are three theatrical tips:

1. Get adequate direction

Your governance structures are there for a reason. Use them. If you think the project is going off track, then engage with the project board and escalate issues for them to make a decision on. Stick to the script and resist the temptation to ad lib.

2. Engage with the whole audience

If only some of your stakeholders know what’s going on, your project will be in big trouble. Project reporting needs to be broadcast, not sent to individuals. Set up a project repository where anyone can read reports and documentation, ideally with RSS feeds, and let any stakeholder subscribe. That way everyone can engage with the project and show appreciation, or displeasure.

3. Use actions, not just words

The performance of your project won’t be measured by how much you talked it up. Take on the role assigned to you, step up to the front of the stage and perform as best you can.

Finally, remember that acting and project management are both about empathising with people’s emotions without succumbing to them yourself. If your project’s going badly, you should be able to understand why your stakeholders are upset without getting upset yourself.

Get your website out of the scullery!

Promoting your web presence isn’t about just finding some kind of SEO godmother so you can trend on Twitter or make a splash on Google. You need to have content that’s stimulating, up-to-date and relevant to your target audience. If you simply tart up your presentation and wave it under people’s noses, your website will be about as popular as the ugly sisters.

So how do you get to the ball?

1. Make your content presentable.

Cleanse, freshen, and exfoliate! Remove anything that’s unsightly or redundant, accentuate your positive features by promoting them in your navigation and ensure that your design is focussed on your users’ needs.

2. Get out and network.

Once you have a website you think people will want to visit, you’ll need some kind of vehicle for getting your website in front of them. The channels that you use will depend on your target audience, but clearly SEO, social networking profiles and non-web media are all legitimate ways of getting yourself noticed. Unlike Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage, however, there needs to be honesty in the way you promote yourself. Habitat shot themselves in the foot recently by tagging their sales tweets with keywords about the Iranian election. Similarly if people are drawn to your website because it has popular but irrelevant keyword matches, they’re not going to hang around for long.

3. Keep that glass slipper.

Once you’ve got people to visit your site and experience your well-presented content, you need something to keep them coming back. RSS feeds are an obvious way of doing this, but you need to keep publishing good content if you want the party to carry on past midnight.

There’s not much point in having a website that’s an ugly sister – in your face but unattractive – or that’s beautiful but unknown. Every little website can grow up to be a princess if you can just show off its inner beauty.

Some further reading:

• Lon Safko – The Five ‘P’s of Social Media
• Patrick Lynch – Visual Decision Making
• Rick Sloboda – Internet Users Place More Weight on Web Design

As a brief aside, did you know that Cinderella’s name comes from having her behind covered in cinders because she used to sit in the chimney to keep warm? And that her slippers were made from squirrel fur: vair in French, converted to verre (glass) by Charles Perrault to make the story more magical. Honest, guv’nor.

But what the books don’t tell you is that while piglets 1 and 2 were sheltered by their less than robust housing, piglet 3 faced rocketing costs, toil, tears and the emergent threat of swine flu.

In the seldom-told sequel, pigs 1 and 2 are forced to vacate the house that was designed for one small piglet rather than three growing hogs. They lack the skill and resources to build their own brick houses and end up destitute and living in fear of Tom the piper’s son.

As an architect, piglet 3’s end vision is certainly the right one — or would be if he foresees having to accommodate his two brothers. But in order to fulfil that vision you need the skills, resources and time.

If you’ve an immediate problem finding the right shelter for your content, then long-term strategic planning for a robust future vision is likely to be the wrong approach. You need to find a quick way to protect your resources, assess the situation then plan your next step. You’re unlikely to face a fatal threat – it’ll just be lupine bluster – and even less likely to have enough time and money to mitigate against the problem anyway. Start building, see if it works and, if it doesn’t, tear it down again. Being able to manage even a small amount of your content in a robust way is better than just having a visionary strategy.

Those three tips:

1. Choose two high-value objectives; one that should be simple to achieve and the other likely to be complicated.
2. Select a technology to deliver these objectives that is in your existing skill set and technology stack. Only buy licences required to meet the project objectives.
3. Implement the project as quickly as possible and evaluate the success or otherwise six months later.

ECM doesn’t have to be a swine to implement. As long as you don’t try to go the whole hog from the start you’ll avoid making a pig’s ear of the project and be sure to bring home the bacon. It’s a ham-fisted analogy, but it’s no fairy tale.

Further reading on the failings of web strategy:

1. Anthony Bradley – Your Web Site Strategy is Destined to Fail
2. Dennis D. McDonald – How to avoid common strategic planning mistakes
3. Maish Nichani – Mapping your website redesign strategy
4. Gerry McGovern – Web redesign is bad strategy

Wikis, forums and other collaboration technologies provide the tools for organisations to get the most out of their staff. For public websites, ratings features, comments and social bookmarking enable authors to see which aspects of their content attract positive interest.

If your website ignores its public’s needs, or your systems deny their users the opportunity to add their feedback, they’ll just go somewhere else. If you’re lucky. Mencius also advocated the just overthrow of despots and one of my favourite Chinese stories, Outlaws of the Marsh, also known as the Water Margin very much follows this code.

So the message is clear. You can learn from your audiences and stakeholders, inside or outside your organisation. Provide them with the tools that will enable them to enhance your systems, and you will flourish with them.

The way to understand the world is through continual contemplation. We actually begin to understand by comprehending what we have not yet understood.
A waterfall approach to gathering requirements would therefore be anathema to a Taoist. How can you say a requirement is complete without understanding how it will be met, or indeed what it will look like once its complete, or if the requirement was correct to start off with?

Requirements, design and implementation are part of the same whole: what the project will deliver. Instead of engaging in a futile activity to capture every requirement before you move on to designing how you’ll meet them, you need to engage the whole team in assessing what a requirement really looks like tangibly in the target system. That means discovering the requirement, prototyping and reviewing through a series of iterations, until the feature meets its objectives. These are the principles of agile development.

The subtlety of individual requirements is almost impossible to capture in a strict, documented fashion. If you want to see your requirements met, rather than your project brief adhered too, a more contemplative and iterative approach is necessary.

More on China and WCM to follow.

In the web content management world, it is the public website that commands our exclusive attention. The only relevant question is: Is the site meeting its objectives and delivering required information and services to its visitors?

Adequate governance needs to be put in place to ensure that it is impossible to break what makes the website successful. If you allow people too much flexibility, they’ll make self-interested decisions rather than good decisions.

When a sage governs a state, he does not rely on the people to do good out of their own will. Instead, he sees to it that they are not allowed to do what is not good. If he relies on people to do good out of their own will, within the borders of the state not even ten persons can be counted on.

So, if you’ve accepted that your templates are well-designed, why would you enable people to move content around? Just give them a web-based form to enter content. It’s less glamorous for the content editor, but much more likely to produce the right effect. Similarly, provide people with enforced structures in which to classify content. This will ensure consistency and a better end-user experience. Otherwise, people will simply drop content into new website sections that they think might be more relevant, rather than those that everyone is used to getting the information from. If you decide your food is spicy, don’t give people an option to make it Mexican or Chinese or Indian. It’s spicy.

Clearly, this command-and-control approach may be difficult for some organisations to implement. But remember what Han Fei tells us: “An enlightened ruler holds up facts and discards all that is without practical value.” If your design and approach can be proven, no one in your team should be allowed to break your website by undermining these principles.

More on China and WCM to follow.

The sage, Confucius tells us, is not afflicted by men not knowing him, but is afflicted by not knowing men. Translate this to a website and you should see that we shouldn’t be affected by not being able to disseminate our range of services, just so long as our users can access them simply.

There’s no point in showing how artfully you can put your brand across on your website if your audience can’t use it. Consequently, you need to base your designs on real user experiences and continue to revise them based on their interactions with your site.

1. Start by conducting paper-prototyping to determine requirements.
2. Test wireframes and user journeys on real people.
3. Continue to monitor the design by implementing continual soft changes and evaluating their impact.

A good website responds to its audience.

More on China and WCM to follow.

Sun Tzu, on effective management

The Art of War was a favourite text for the Reagan-ite wannabe executive who viewed business as a perpetual battle. Yet effective management is rarely about deceiving others and taking control over their realm, despite what some departmental managers may think. Indeed, Sun Tzu stresses the need for delegation as a means to enjoying more control. Management is about delivering an end product.

There are five main obstacles to success:

1. recklessness: consider what impact your decisions will have before you enforce them;
2. cowardice: don’t be afraid to implement what you know is right;
3. hasty temper: don’t be provoked into arguments with stakeholders or suppliers;
4. delicacy of honor: you don’t need to appear all-knowing; recognise your weaknesses, be open about them and engage people to help;
5. over-solicitude for the team: people will be unhappy during the project, but if they see that what you’re doing is right, they’ll buy into the cause.

Successful implementations are about pursuing a common objective without having to appease people along the way. So delegate responsibility to your implementation team and ensure that they enforce your decisions for you.

More on China and WCM to follow.

Firstly, in the last year or so, users have become much more familiar with these kinds of interfaces. Most webmail systems make use of the tool and there are countless portal-type sites and map applications that use JavaScript to create smoother browser-based interfaces. This should mean that people will be more comfortable with richer interfaces than with simple web forms.

Secondly, Downes and Walker tell us that Ajax generally equates to better performance. While the interface may give the end-user an impression of efficiency, this isn’t necessarily the case for the server. Remember that with each interaction, you’re sending a request — albeit small — to the server. Given that most CMS licences run on a per CPU basis and many environments have as a consequence been under-specified, introducing these tiny rapid requests could put some serious strain on your hardware and your budget.

These interfaces can be more user-friendly than some client software, but as with any CMS selection process you just need to be wary, size your environment appropriately and test with real editorial users to see if they get the desired usability benefits. It’s pretty safe to say that the smaller the number of users, the more benefit and least risk in deploying these kinds of tools.

A final word of caution: in the Iliad, Ajax was certainly mighty. But he was passed over by his peers for a hero with more guile and ended up destroying himself. Is this the sort of technology you want to unleash in your CMS campaign?