Let me start by saying this is a purely anecdotal post. But what is lacks in statistical evidence it makes up for in my own eyewitness accounts of projects doomed to fail. I’m sure you’ll have seen this too.

Time and time again I’ve seen institutions running projects that will significanly affect their day-to-day business, but they clearly haven’t thought about what to call them. They’ve invested in governance processes, supporting tools, getting the right people involved, but not the name of the project.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Juliet knew nothing about project management. If she’d been better at planning she wouldn’t have been so star-crossed.

The name of the project is the thing that’s most readily communicated to the project team and stakeholders. It’s the daily reminder of the work that they’re doing and the benefits that they’re expecting. And yet the name we give a project typically detracts from its core values, with these examples as the most typical culprits:

The new technology

Why oh why have you called this project the “Social Media Marketing project”? Or the “CMS upgrade”? Or the “Intranet replacement”? What useful information could that possibly convey?

1. Does everyone involved in the project – from the people who’ll use the system to those who have to approve its budget – actually understand what that technology’s supposed to do? Does it really give all the stakeholders a good idea of project scope?
2. Why are you upgrading? Surely it’s not just so that you can say you’ve the latest version running… or is your organisation full of Apple fanbois? You upgrade because you’re missing key functionality, or because the existing system is underperforming, so at the very least call it a content strategy project which has an upgrade component to it.
3. And if you’re replacing a system, you’re actually compounding those two issues: do people understand what you’re getting rid of and why, and aren’t you replacing it with something that does a lot more? So it’s not a replacement, it’s a new strategic platform which enables the business to function more effectively. You’re not just throwing a wad of cash at a technology supplier in order to end up with exactly what you had before.

Naming a project after the technology is missing the whole point about what technology is. It’s an enabler, not an end solution. If your organisation thinks that by updating its technology it will solve its problems, you know that you’ll never meet your business goals.

The website redesign

I’m at a loss as to know where to begin with website redesign projects. As with new technology projects, the redesign isn’t an end in itself unless it’s some pure vanity project. The redesign is about improving how your audience achieves its tasks and that usually necessitates people who create content finding new ways to manage it, as well as identification of business objectives, target markets, persona, user experience testing, information architecture and so forth.

But calling a project a website redesign masks an endemic issue. It sets the expectation that once the project is complete, they’ll be no more work to do. Website redesign isn’t a project. It doesn’t have a start and an end. It’s a process of continuous improvement where your web team analyses audience interactions, responds to them and adjusts the website to improve how your organisation communicates with its customers online. If you turn it into a project, you’re effectively saying that you’re not going to fix what you know to be wrong until the project goes live, and that when it goes live you just need to sit back and measure the benefits. That approach is anathema to everything the web stands for: innovation, engagement, simplicity.

Clearly there will always be website projects that need to be run as projects, not least because corporate governance requires it. But they’re not redesigns. They’re projects to improve user experience, or to update a corporate brand, or to plan out a content strategy. Redesigns are fails before you even pass Go.

The acronym or buzzword

Some project management offices think they’re cool. That’s the only explanation that I can find for organisations that give their projects codenames or buzzwords or acronyms.

And guess what: project management offices aren’t cool.

I’ve worked with at least three organisations that called a project Prism. What for? None of them were about optics. It’s just someone thought it was a good idea to call them something cryptic. I’m pretty sure one was an intranet, another was a finance system but I really can’t remember what the third was… document management, perhaps?

The only thing that I can commend about those projects is that they didn’t fally into one of the first two traps. But they didn’t address the issues either. What on earth is project Prism, or project Orange or project Stan all about? Is it something that’s deliberately meant to exclude the majority of employees? Because that’s what it looks like, and it’s hardly going to get stakeholder buy-in if that’s the case.

Buzzword projects are doomed because they isolate the people working on them from the rest of the organisation and – worse still – they give the impression that actually the people working on them don’t really know what the project is about. I’ve seen many a buzzword project (though not the prism ones) being strategic projects where the organisation felt it had to do something, but it wasn’t exactly clear what that something was, and didn’t want other people to know about it until they’d figured that out so they could deliver the right message.

But they’d already delivered the wrong message. That no matter how competent the project team, they simply didn’t have a clue.

Choosing the right name

So if you can’t name the project after its core technology and you can’t call it a redesign and you can’t call it something you thought was cool, what can you call it?

Call it something relevant.

I realise that’s a boring answer, but you know what, every project you ever work should have a business objective. Call it the project content strategy improvement or expenses streamlining or improving our brand reach.

The name of your project should make transparent to all the stakeholders why you’re doing the project in the first place and keep the team focussed on what it is that they’re meant to achieve. Just because developers have done their bit doesn’t mean that the project will be a success.

So if your project is failing and you’re looking for a quick turnaround that might improve it, try renaming it according to where the team needs to focus. You might just avoid tragedy and a plague o’ both your houses.

In our previous post, we looked at how content is being produced for sale in multiple formats, but in this post we’re going to look at how people then buy it.

It’s worth noting that many new business models aren’t based on people buying content in the traditional sense of taking it away and owning it. Rather than always having the content, you’re effectively buying access to it for a set period of time. This is true of music over Spotify and its various competitors, the vast majority of newspaper paywalls, satellite and cable TV subscriptions and Kindle lending through Amazon in the US. Effectively we’re leasing content rather than buying it, as we don’t think it really retains its value.

One effect of this leasing is to create something of a distribution oligopoly as a few key providers try to corner the market for selling or leasing content produced by others. This creates a serious problem for content producers: the smaller ones can’t afford to fight back by establishing credible director to consumer channels, while the larger ones often don’t have a strong enough brand to compete. That last point is serious: do you know whether the book you’re reading is part of Hachette, or whether the music you’re listening to or the movie you’ll watch this evening were produced by Time Warner? For music, books and film the brand is based on the product, the author or the star, not the publisher.

I believe that a second effect of this oligopoly is to encourage piracy. If distribution appears limited and pricing controlled – whether by the publisher or distributor – people are going to look elsewhere to get hold of content. And that is compounded by the lack of brand loyalty. Now, I’m not going to comment at all on the SOPA / PIPA issue, as many more knowledgeable people have written about this already and I’m based in the UK anyway. But people who create content for sale really do need to consider a few key issues if they want people to buy it rather than steal it.

One person’s piracy is another person’s viral. Susan Boyle sold over 700,000 copies of her first album in the US largely due to a clip of her on YouTube. It was in breach of copyright but of massive benefit to SYCO music. Content producers need to “stop treating the customers as users, and start treating them as fans”, as Rovio CEO Mikael Hed puts it.

Fundamentally, however, “Companies don’t rise and fall due to piracy, but they do based on the quality of the products they release.”. If you want to sell your content, you need to create good quality content in the first place. This means finding the best creatives, acquiring rights based on all the formats you’re going to deliver to and developing brand loyalty that extends beyond a single title or artist.

Content producers need to convince us that they frequently find music, TV or books that interest and adhere to that fundamental tenet of sales: it’s easier to farm repeat business than hunt for new business. But they also need to keep their content separate from its presentation so we return to buy it in whatever format happens to suit us. That is how to manage saleable content.

Our previous post looked at how content can depreciate in value.

If content is king, the guillotine is being sharpened. Those publishers and producers who have failed to embrace the multi-channel model are already in the tumbrils.

One key to this model (and I’m grateful to Edward Smith for the term) is asset liquidity. If you can create your format so that it’s suitable for consumption on multiple devices, you can keep on selling your content even if one delivery stream’s market dries up. That’s where content management comes in. Publishers who are stuck with antiquated production processes are going to struggle to produce multi-format content efficiently and yet this is something that the content management industry has been used to doing for many years. Whether this is providing templates for print, web and mobile, or encoding video, or producing multiple image formats, the technology is established and proven. And yet a number of challenges to the multi-channel approach still remain.

Firstly, there are presentational challenges. While text on a web page and typically on eBook readers is “flowable” – unconstrained by the area it’s displayed in – it’s fixed in print and in some other devices, particularly when you have text presented with images. So a news article could appear on a single long web page or be in a short column on the front page of a newspaper and then continued on a separate page. This creates issues during the production process because editors need to understand where those breaks will appear. Moreover, on reading devices where text size can be changed by each individual user, it’s practically impossible to define where breaks might appear for that device. This is far from limited to text: if you can zoom images, or you want to produce media content for devices with different screen sizes and resolutions, you’ll encounter similar problems of trying to deliver an optimal experience for your entire target audience.

Secondly, publishing to multi-function devices increases this problem of the optimal experience, with the most obvious example being the iPad. Neglecting iPad delivery is tantamount to commercial suicide these days, as lean-back media experiences a resurgence. Unlike a Kindle, the iPad screen is backlit, making extended text reading tiring. While the screen on an iPad is good, it’s not going to be better than watching programmes or movies on a good television screen. And if you don’t want to listen to music through the iPad’s speaker – and why would you? – it’s a lot less portable than most other music players. I realise that there are ways around most of these issues that are available on the market, if not widespread. But for people who want to get through to the iPad market, this also means accepting a degree of compromise in how their content is consumed.

Which brings me to the third challenge: difference in consumption habits and the uncertainty that these cause. People who produce content for sale don’t actually have that much say in the determining which format is the most popular. Book publishers want to be a lot less dependent on the Kindle than they currently are, while newspapers – notably in Italy – are at significant risk of shutting down as people move away from printed paper. We’ve already seen in our previous posts how people simply don’t buy CDs any more and it’s only a matter of time before DVD sales are similarly affected.

If you invest a lot into producing content for multiple formats, you also have to accept that not all those formats will exist forever and you’ll have to take a financial hit if you spread too thin or gamble on the wrong one.

Producers and publishers are going to need to find tools which enable them to automate multi-format production and that are flexible enough to accommodate new formats as they emerge. And it’s not just new formats; it’s new content consumption channels too. The way we choose to buy our content is changing along with the devices that we use, as we’ll consider in the next post.

Our previous post paints an uncertain picture for traditional media. New delivery channels imply new sales channels and new commercial models.

One of the biggest questions that commercial providers need to consider is whether their content is an asset. And by asset, I absolutely do not mean this in the sense of how the content should be managed. I mean this in the sense of whether that content retains its value or depreciates over time.

Consider reference materials: an encyclopaedia for example. One of the reasons why Wikipedia does so well is because it’s always up to date. You can pretty much guarantee that when a news story breaks, someone will update a relevant Wikipedia page about it that day. I’m not sure when I’m going to publish this post, let alone when you’re actually going to read it, so just try it now. Go to a major news site, find the top personality or place involved in that news and look them up on Wikipedia. Does the entry refer the news story? How can your encyclopaedia at home possibly keep up?

Of course, the massive speed advantage of multi-contributor online reference material has to be weighed against the academic rigour that you get through content that takes longer to publish and which needs to charge for that expertise. That’s the approach the Guardian newspaper is looking to adopt in its fight against more rapid news media. In a recent email the editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger tells subscribers:

But we’re well aware that, increasingly, you tell us that what you want from the printed newspaper changes as you seek out, or absorb, breaking news from the web, mobile, TV and radio. Half of you now read the paper in the evening, by which time you want more pieces that explain events and contextualise them.

News is – as we’ve seen from the figures provided in the previous post – hugely important to people. But currently people don’t need to see it as an asset because the supply seemingly outstrips the demand. (I’m slightly cautious about that supply because we all live in countries where some of the news sources – whether free or paid for – can be less than reliable.) So for saleable content to be an asset and retain its value, it both needs to be hard to get hold of and offer some degree of added value.

Ross Dawson wrote a post that touches on different ways of creating that added value and there are a few examples I wanted to touch on:

• If you turn the focus away from real-time consumption (as the Guardian intends to), you can extend content’s “use by” date and therefore increase how long it holds its value, as Louis Gray explains.
• The New York Times is trying to improve engagement with its content, by adding trusted commenting.
• Faber’s chief executive has a manifesto for change for the book industry.
• The movie industry (what we in the UK used to call “film” but is clearly a redundant term given this discussion) has developed the UltraViolet licensing system so that customers can “buy once, play anywhere”.
• Amazon have a similar approach with their Kindle so that digital books can be read on a variety of platforms from a single purchase.

How content producers exploit the multi-channel model is going to be key to their success. That’s what we’re going to look at next.

Following on from the previous post about the need to separate commercial content from its delivery medium, let’s consider how various industries have been addressing this issue.

The most obvious place to start is with music, where traditional physical media has all but disappeared. Not only are people not buying physical media, they’re not buying what was previously the most saleable format (albums) and sometimes not buying music at all. Putting piracy to one side for the moment, music is effectively leased rather than bought through services like Spotify. This is a feature I’ll return to at a later stage.

Newspapers and magazines are undergoing a similar transformation, but struggling to find appropriate business models. Out of people in the UK who get their news online, fewer than 1 in 25 pay for that service, despite the millions who visit newspaper websites like the Mail (17.2 million unique visitors from Europe in June 2011) and the Guardian (13.5 million) (Ofcom report [pdf, 2.05MB] page 213, section 5.3.7).

Television is changing radically and rapidly. Over a quarter of the UK web population used the internet to watch TV programmes on a weekly basis even though only 7% have a TV that’s actually connected to the internet (Ofcom report, page 7). This has prompted Sky to go beyond its investment in TV programmes to any device (through Sky Go) to TV over the web as well as via satellite, which has until now been its core business. Both Google and Apple meanwhile are preparing their imminent and doubtless disruptive incursions into the television market.

Which brings us to the similarly turbulent world of book publishing. While Amazon posted extraordinary figures (the 1.3 million eReaders bought in the UK over Christmas represents 1 person in 40 receiving one), the printed book industry is suffering: there are now no major bookstore chains in Australia, while major retailers in the UK and US are struggling. Meanwhile Apple is trying to corner the production (and to some extent vet the publication) of iBooks and where Amazon can’t encourage authors to bypass traditional publishers through its self-publishing model it simply acquires the publisher instead.

Every form of saleable media is in a state of flux. If publishers are going to move forward, they’re going to need to address some fundamentals which we’ll consider in our next post.

This industry has spent years thinking about how to govern content, rather than about how to really make the most of it. We know the function of the content but we don’t know its value. Fundamentally, content – whether text, images, audio or video – would fall into these categories:

• records, which either need to be retained or deleted;
• processable content, which typically needs to be scanned or validated automatically;
• collaborative content, such as co-authored or peer-reviewed internal documents;
• public information, typically made available on websites but also in print brochures;
• user-generated content, created by people outside the organisation, whether through facilities made available to them by the organisation (website comments) or through external services (social media, e.g. Facebook, Twitter).

These functions carry some implicit value which a business analyst might define on a project-by-project basis. But content often has an explicit value: it’s created for sale.

Now I – and I think much of the content management industry – didn’t think too hard about this saleable content for quite some time. But then again, nor did the industries that own it.

While those of us who work in content management focussed on classification, permissions and workflow, publishers and producers thought instead about TV programmes and albums, hardbacks and newspaper supplements. The fundamental separation of presentation from content was not well understood; as Paul Graham already related in 2009:

Consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either… Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant.

Perhaps the distinction was too theoretical to be worthwhile. Now, however, it’s essential for anyone who hopes to make money from the content they create: you have to be able to exploit multiple delivery channels, both to reach a broader market and to survive the turbulent changes in how people buy and consume their content today.

We’ll consider these changes in the next post.

L’enfer, Jean-Paul Sartre tells us, c’est les autres. This is so commonly and simplistically mistranslated as “hell is other people” that it’s become something of a fallacy. Hell for Sartre is not other people; it’s others. It’s about our faulty relationship with others and most particularly our psychological other, our id: the basic, instinctual drives that motivate us to seek out pleasure or avoid pain.

Those instinctual drives are very much at the heart of every project. A desire to move the organisation forward, to mitigate against business risks and seize profitable opportunities. And this desire underpins the project team, gives it a sense of togetherness, a common purpose. FTW! WOOT!

But this also means the team can just pile into a project without thinking it through, particularly if it’s being driven by someone with seniority in the organisation. The JFDI mentality prevails in these projects. Let’s just do it, get it over with and watch the cash roll in. Then, as complexity increases and mistakes are made, other emotional responses take over: blame-storming (particularly for teams who aren’t there: third-party suppliers or off-shore), hindsight, and the eventual withdrawal of project budgets. Suddenly you’ve gone from projected heaven to project hell.

Project management can of course help to control these urges. It provides the rational ego to counteract the emotional id. By introducing formal methodologies, you can moderate the project team’s urges and lead them to a more successful outcome. Theoretically, you could take any project and use ego-based techniques to deliver it. But that doesn’t mean you’d actually be delivering the right thing…

For that, you need a superego, a conscientious faculty to ensure you do the right thing. For projects, this means a governance process that ensures you have a reliable business case and that you continue to measure the business value of features that you implement, so you’re asking whether they’re valuable, rather than just whether they work or not.

• Super-ego-driven, conscientious projects will ask “is this worth doing?”
• Ego-driven projects will ask “is this working?”
• Id-driven projects will ask “why don’t I have this stuff?”

That’s an instinctive question, but the wrong question. It’s a question that’s asked by others and the question that will lead you to project hell.

Also worth reading:

Failure is not a positive by Piewords

When you reach the end of a sprint, you look back and consider what went well, what went badly and what can be improved. There’s a similar process for waterfall projects when you produce a lessons learned report to share with the rest of the PMO. While I’m sure you floccinaucinihilipilificate about this company’s 12-month performance, allow me to highlight three things I’ve noticed come to the fore in the last 12 months.

You need to demonstrate the tangible benefits your project will deliver as quickly as possible.

Of course, this has always been true. But the pressure to be lean and value-driven is greater than ever, driven I think not just by wider economics but also because the technologies we work with are more mature and with that, so are customer expectations.

Many people are in the third or fourth significant implementation of a content management system, whether for web or across the enterprise. Marketers have already made their initial forays into social media. Not seeing returns on information systems or web engagement simply isn’t good enough. So before putting their hands in their pockets, they’re quite rightly asking what they’re going to get back. As an industry, we need to answer that question quickly and credibly.

Events are being stretched.

People are increasingly participating in events from a distance and after they’ve finished. Television has stretched beyond the screen by broadcasting with hashtags which allow an audience – not all of whom are actually watching – to discuss programme content beyond the control of the programme’s producers. Whether this is music or politics, it’s a long way from the controlled comments policies of newspaper discussion forums. Huge numbers of people are using tablets and smart phones to communicate as they watch TV.

This applies to football matches too, whether from the armchair or the stadium; and very much to music, be it at a festival or on Spotify. The discussion extends way beyond the geography and the duration of the event; supported by the fact that the media doesn’t need to be watched there and then either. There’s gold in those hills, I just haven’t figured out how to extract it yet…

We could understand our market a lot better if we just took the time.

Sales people and analysts have been harping on about big data as the next big thing without too much detail around what it is or why it’s useful. But consider this. People now reveal huge amounts of personal information under highly obfuscated terms and conditions. If you could join up Facebook profiles, Flickr, Amazon, loyalty cards, credit ratings, browser history, and online social interactions, you’d have an incredibly complex and potentially frighteningly accurate picture of your market and how to sell to them.

If you’re a D2C organsiation or want to become one, getting that kind of data and being able to process it in a meaningful way is going to make your current online engagement look… well, pretty poor. Start thinking now about how you can get more data legally and how you might exploit it to reveal business information that will give you a competitive advantage. You can be sure that if you don’t, your competitors will.

Some people seemed a bit miffed by my last post. All that silence and then I say their product’s not as beautiful as some others. But as Arsène Wenger said, “Everyone thinks they have the prettiest wife at home.”
Well I’m not in the business of software-bashing. I deal with clients who have complex systems that they’re trying to get the most of in order to boost their business. So I do want to highlight a point in the last post that some readers seemed to have missed: Tridion is a really useful tool for supporting a content strategy.

What do I mean by that? Well, as Brain Traffic tells us:

Content strategy plans for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.

And isn’t that what you want WCM software to do? I’ve recommended Tridion on the basis that it gives web managers good visibility over who owns content on the site and where it should belong, as well as providing powerful ways to devolve ownership. There are few products that do this as well as Tridion in my opinion; although I seem to be in a minority when I say that I like the way TeamSite does it too.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like everything about the product. User interface may be a matter of personal taste (and one of the posts that I still haven’t written questions how important editorial UI is anyway). But I’m yet to see a really good demonstration of a product that supports both content strategy and customer engagement in an integrated way. I’ve seen bits and pieces in different products, but:

• where are the security and content-type models that we see for standard content being applied to UGC?
• where’s the personalisation of content based on a visitor’s publicly-shared profile, e.g. Twitter and Facebook?
• how are you tailoring your website content to relevant trends on the rest of web?
• how are the performance ratings of your page content then reflected in the way other users navigate content? Does your WCM even let you track those KPIs?
• can you promote content to a visitor based on what other people – and most specifically people that they trust – found useful or enjoyed?

Those are just examples, but fundamentally I think vendors have found this kind of integrated content engagement strategy a challenge because WCM and UGC approached content from polar opposites. I don’t think they’re wholly incompatible, but I think we’re still in an earlier stage of evolution than most vendors would want to acknowledge.

So let’s just say that true web engagement on content-driven sites is still somewhat immature, as I would suggest that there are others who might prefer to express that more robustly.

As SDL continues to release modules and connectors to enhance the breadth of its web engagement offering, many of its customers find themselves operating dated user interfaces and struggling with the obscurities of Visual Basic scripting. If you put Tridion side by side with newer .Net CMS like Sitecore or EPiServer, you’d see the difference straight away.
Alterian’s WCM has a much slicker editorial user interface and delivers dynamic rather than static content. How you scale your website, integrate with other systems and personalise content therefore requires a completely different technical approach.

This personalisation aspect is particularly relevant as both vendors have been positioning themselves in the web engagement / customer experience market. Even though SDL is at the crest of Forrester’s online customer experience wave (and remains firmly ensconced in Gartner’s magic quadrant for web content management), I would argue that neither tool is that well-suited to handling the kind of user-generated content that some lighter weight open source tools like Drupal can offer. SDL seems to me to be particularly well geared to organisations that have a thought-through web content strategy, while what sets Alterian apart in online engagement is its social media marketing tool, SM2. Indeed, this is what SDL seems to covet most:

“We think that there are synergies with the marketing analytics and content delivery,” Mark Lancaster, SDL executive chairman, told the Financial Times.

Allow me to express some degree of scepticism here. Alterian have owned both WCM and SMM technology for over three years and made little (if any) headway in their integration. SDL may have greater resources to achieve this, but we’re looking at completely different products here. Any quick fixes would simply be a rebranding exercise with no under-the-bonnet coordination. Of course, SDL may have a clever plan and I stand to be corrected on that point.

Overall, I’m quite positive about the takeover. I think SDL will benefit from the niche benefits that Alterian brings, particularly in terms of focus on improving editorial interfaces. I think there’s a great opportunity for Alterian partners who previously worked with Immediacy to get to grips with a Tridion CMS that’s similar but more powerful than what they were previously used to. And I think that customers, particularly in Europe, will get a broader set of implementation partners to work with who have great web experience.
Yes, it’s yet another merger and apparently less choice in the market, but actually for the two software development teams, I hope it’s an opportunity for them to learn from each other and for synergy to mean establishing a really good, forward-thinking product rather than just an excuse to downsize.

See also:

• SDL Acquires Alterian, Beefing Up Its Customer Experience Story
• What the SDL acquisition of Alterian means for customers