What exactly are interactive media projects?

The range of iMedia projects just seems to expand constantly and it makes it hard to define exactly what a project type is. No one has to face this dilemma as much as those running iMedia awards. Every year they scratch their heads to come up with categories that match what companies are producing. Similarly iMedia companies scratch their heads to understand which category to put which project in as they usually just define the project by client name.

November is historically the month when many iMedia awards take place in our industry so it’s a good time to review this question. It is fascinating to see how diverse the projects are no matter what the award categories are called. There still seems to be a dilemma about denoting projects according to

1. the business sector of the client
2. the technical/media use of the application, or
3. the creativity of the media use.

That’s the old commerce versus techie versus creative bias that's been there from the beginning. Which set of skills dominates? Luckily there is a better blending and recognition of each other’s expertise now than previously. There is more of a team spirit than conflict of mindsets.

If we analyse the award categories across four of the main players we get a good grasp of the diversity of iMedia project types. Of course, we do need to concede that the organisers have to also pay attention to how to attract the most entries by the choice of category. Here goes then!

BIMA (British Interactive Media Association) is a generalist organisation representing the iMedia industry in the UK. It has 24 awards and splits the categories into Sectors, Disciplines and Premium. The Sectors are clearly business-focused – Branding, Business-to-business (b2b), Corporate, Entertainment, Leisure and Culture, Public Life. The disciplines are less focused and cover business thrust (commerce), platforms (techie), and creative use of the platforms. It’s here in the ‘disciplines’ that the traditional multi-disciplined factions of iMedia appear. Their Disciplines are: Advertising, Community Building, Direct and Targeted Marketing, Educational and Outreach, Engagement, Games, Integrated Campaign, Mash-ups and Data Visualisation, Mobile, Multi-platform, Self Promotion, Social Media/PR, Student and Viral. Their Premium Awards are strongly iMedia creative but also nominate a creative business for recognition of its contribution. For the awards see: www.bimaawards.com.

IMRG (Interactive Media and Retail Group) awards naturally have to focus on its membership of retailers, and the categories reflect this. But retailing is a strong, general iMedia sector so they are also represented in other awards groups without being so identifiable. These 15 awards are split across size of retailer probably in recognition that the size affects the budget, use of media and type of solution that the iMedia project can offer, types of platform used and creative use of media positively affecting the bottom business line. See their web site for specifics: www.imrg.org.

The Chief Marketer offered 27 PRO awards and their bias is marketing iMedia. They have a predominance of ‘promotion’ projects for awards since that business marketing need is being met across various uses of iMedia. They also specify some awards by platform (cross-platform, web, social, mobile, games, video etc.) and yet others by successful ‘event’ staged, and creative or innovative ideas. Check their awards out at chiefmarketer.com.

Then we have the Europrix awards that keep an eye on youth and innovation. Their finalists need to be from the 40 countries of Europe and aged under 30. This year the judging will be in Austria later this month and there are six categories divided by ethical subject matter.

1. Fight Poverty, Hunger and Disease
2. Education for all!
3. Power 2 women!
4. Create your Culture
5. Go Green!
6. Pursue Truth!

This clearly suits educational institutions and student projects but it’s good that someone looks strongly to the next generation of iMediaites.

Perhaps then there isn’t one answer to the question posed in the title and may never be. It’s an evolving industry so we can only take snap-shots at particular times for now.

So, there are plenty of bad leaders out there: are you one of them?

It’s a sad fact that most of us have suffered from poor management in our careers at one time or another. You can recognise it when you’re on the receiving end. But once you become a leader of people, as in being an iMedia team leader or project manager, do you consider your own leadership style? Apparently 1 in 4 leaders have a destructive approach to management!

“Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal.”
Northouse 2007

The important word here is influence. But the behaviour you exhibit to influence is pivotal because it drives the reaction in the people around you. This is why the terms leadership style and leadership traits tend to be prominent in the field.

It has not been very acceptable to dwell on anything negative like bad traits and we have been pushed to emphasise the positive in management terms, but I have always learnt from the negative, so I have welcomed the latest neuroscience research conducted by Orion into management with 2000 employees.

You need to work a bit to understand what their terms brain-fried and brain-friendly managers mean, but they makes sense. Brain-fried managers are over-stressed, poor communicators and lack empathy. These behaviours cause negative reactions in employees. Brain-friendly managers exhibit the opposite and therefore produce positive reactions in their employees. The behaviours you exhibit cause reactions first in the brain of others and then in the actions they perform. That’s the cold analysis bit prompted by The Online Recruitment article 11.10.12.

I’d recommend the expanded humourous interpretation on this research done in a Halloween spoof by Leading with Trust, Ten Signs You Might Be A Frankenboss, 28.10.12, as it’s probably more memorably brain-friendly!

Is it worth improving your leadership style? Well, maybe you and the rest of your management need to consider if your work-force are firing on all cylinders or not. That might be the price your company is paying, according to Jan Hills, quoted in Personnel Today, A quarter of bosses have destructive leadership style, 12.10.12

Then as a final brain-teaser ... have you got a mixture of extrovert and introvert mangers? It seems it is a common misconception that introverted people are not management potential according to People Development Team, Are introvert leaders better at identifying unconscious bias?, 11.10.12. The traits of introverts – reflection and criticism – can be beneficial.

Objectives: are you using them to your advantage?

If you’ve had anything to do with objectives, the mere mention of the word makes you groan. They are hard to define if done properly, but despite them being around for ages, (started in the 1940s and given more credence by Robert Mager, educationalist, in the 1960s) they are still being misused.

It doesn’t help that so many terms have been used with the same precept such as:

• Learning objectives
• Outcomes
• Enabling objectives
• Terminal objectives
• Educational objectives
• Performance objectives
• Instructional objectives
• Competencies

An objective is a precise definition of a result that is wanted, in terms that will allow the result to be measured. (Glossary, Managing Interactive Media, 4th edition). The key thing is that they are defined with a measurable outcome. The test is built into the definition - a bit like Agile scrums. So, if the measure is missing, it isn’t an objective. It might be a goal or a general aim which are more nebulous or woolly, but it isn’t an objective.

How can you use them to your advantage? Well, if your clients - especially at the beginning of a project - are having difficulty in defining what they want to achieve with their interactive sites, and if any of them understands or has had to use objectives it might be the spur you need to get them to be more precise. If they can give you measurable objectives in business terms of what they are trying to achieve, it makes your job so much easier. Remember, we have tried to influence you to work in measurable ways so that you can prove that you have achieved what the client wanted. We have placed the burden of defining objectives or the equivalent on you. But if your client can define the measures - for example "increase traffic to our site by 30%" or "increase sales on our online site by x%" or "decrease the complaints about poor usability of our site by x%" - you can see how these concentrate your focus and efforts.

Note the construction of the objective-style sentence. We will do this (use a tangible verb in the first part of the sentence) by doing this (stating a provable/measurable outcome in the second part of the sentence).

There you are: sorted. It’s not as problematic as many make out. You can do it and so can your clients. Once you understand the tricks, objectives can work for you. You don’t have to call them objectives; which may be why there are a lot of alternative terms around as in the list. This blog just covers the basics. If you are motivated to learn more about objectives there’s a good summary from an educational stance at The University of Ohio.

Then you just have to consider how to apply them to your situation. Good luck.

Thoughts on the RACI Matrix project management technique

The RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) matrix is accepted as a best practice tool for management especially in projects. Establishing the matrix is a process at the beginning of a project for the Project Manager. It identifies the people involved with project over different stages, their level of involvement and decision-making.

By using a RACI matrix, as we’ve seen in past blogs, the project manager identifies who, how and how often he/she needs to communicate with the key people who have the power to influence the project. But through its creation, the project manager locks down the people who control the various development stages of the project by defining them and getting them to agree to their responsibility/accountability. This makes the PM’s role clearer. We all recognise terror striking when the person you’ve been dealing with says, ‘I just have to show this to X’. This is what RACI tries to avoid. You deal with the key person at the right times to help smooth decisions in the project.

Sounds convincing, and it has been. That’s why it’s a best practice tool. However, as with all tools, it depends how it is used. Some have found it hard to establish roles and responsibilities when they have not been clearly defined in an organisation prior to the PM asking. The ‘golden’ rule is that there must only be one person accountable for each stage otherwise you can’t get sign-off efficiently. (See Management Study Guide for a list of rules for use, and, David Morris’ blog (6th April 2009) for several more rules and his use of the tool under Agile development processes).

To help when there seems to be too many people without clear responsibilities, some have included ‘S’ for ‘support’ as a role and turned RACI into RASCI. This is explained in IT Toolbox.

We all need to try and streamline our processes to be more efficient and Simplicity recently posted an article from The European Business Review on improving a company’s performance by simplifying organisational structures.

This advocates ‘getting radical’ with RACI matricies so that they are only used at key points, not for everything. We certainly understand the over-complex organisation, the over-involvement of some people in decision-making, the problems a large organisation has making fast decisions and this call here for radicalism in this context. But we’d argue that iMedia projects are serving to move these organisations forward and should be considered key projects since any indecision over any stage of development increases time and cost factors for the organisation. We should point out that RACI in this article is interpreted as Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Involved – yet another variation. It isn’t explained here though.

Do you treat large, medium and small clients differently? If so, in what ways?

Scoping interactive projects – any progress?

It occurred to us that a lot of progress should have been made in scoping practices for interactive projects because, as we all now accept, the initial stages of defining a project make or break it. We have always given away detailed questionnaires for the scoping stage in our courses and books, and advocated that people tailor them to suit their needs/company practices. But our implication was that you had to have one!

We have been disappointed in our present search for on-the-ball scoping questionnaire templates for interactive media projects. We assume that you are all using something to define the projects that you take on, so where are these? It may well be that they are considered so valuable and business sensitive that they remain shrouded in mystery. Actually ‘econsultancy’ has a template for assessing social media needs (among other templates with a marketing perspective) but you’ll have to pay £250 for it. See econsultancy.com.

It seems that despite being a few years old now, our scoping questionnaire remains a good basis for defining projects. But, we have found some extra recent advice for you. Derryn Cotezee outlines 10 key questions for web projects. He covers essentials like users, time, turnaround, competitors, likes, features and so on. See www.xtmotion.co.uk.

Elizabeth Sosnow finds 11½ questions needed for defining the scope of a social media project. This covers things like: what’s driving the client to do this, who will they wish to reach, timing, integration with other marketing strategies, content, and audience behaviour among others.

Louie Conceicao uses a delightful set of images to show the course of a project and how it doesn’t meet what the client wanted because of all the mis-interpretations over the scope. His title says it all. Project Scope Documents Help Manage Client Expectations.

Well, anyone out there prepared to share their scoping templates? We all need them.

Staff or non-staff: that is the question

The balance between staff and freelancers keeps bubbling to the surface. Many moons ago we discussed freelance culture and the IR35 rules that related to people working as if they were employees of an organisation but through their own service company. MPs on the UK public accounts committee have recently complained about how many people in public service are paid through service companies but this good analysis on the BBC web site points out that it's usually the contracting company who benefit rather than the contractor. And it doesn't even go into the extra accounting costs of running a company!

The question of whether using freelancers is inherently good for business is an interesting one and brings us to another use of our term iProfessional ... as follows ...

The IPro Index is a landmark research study conducted by Monash University and sponsored by Entity Solutions about the contract workforce in Australia.

In this case the I stands for Independent rather than Interactive and the basic message is For instant productivity, engage a white collar contractor, as Entity explain on their blog. The study is wider than information technology but is definitely worth a read. You'll have to register for an email link.

Just what constitutes a 'freelancer' can be unusual as well. The most unusual I've come across is to break a software task into components that are run as competitions: code crowd-sourcing. This is the basis of Topcoder and there are currently over 430 thousand members of the community working on projects for people like DARPA, NASA and Intel.

So now not only can your processing and storage be in the cloud ... your workers can be as well!

The irresistible rise of JQuery

Last month a survey on W3Techs determined that the JavaScript library jQuery is being used by over half of all websites. This is a rise of 40% over a year and, according to the survey, means that a top website was adding JQuery every four minutes. Those fades, slides, calendars, form checks you see (and probably use on your sites) come from this amazing set of code. It stems from a software engineer named John Resig, who wrote about using Selectors in JavaScript almost exactly seven years ago. (See last month's item in the Register.)

I was very sceptical about JavaScript when it first emerged. It seemed to be an attempt to mix functionality with markup that harked back to earlier multimedia days: and many people turned it off in their browsers. Now that web-wizards are routinely separating form from content in web pages, and using CSS to deal with the form, JavaScript makes its stunning comeback. As it's an interpreted, if often arcane, scripting language it's easy to learn from others and freely distribute code.

What are the advantages of using Javascript-only versus using JQuery-only? That's a question asked on the Programmer Blog only a couple of days ago. The answers are interesting and make points that apply to libraries in general - such as the load overhead (you'll probably not be using all the library so you're loading unnecessary code but if you load from Google then it'll probably already be in the user's browser) - and some advantages of JQuery, notably the gentle learning curve. I'd add the open/free nature of it, particularly when compared with Flash.

Web designer depot looks at the the Good the Bad and the Ugly of JQuery (with some useful comments too). The author, Richard Lawson, makes the point that "John Resig and the other developers behind the jQuery project genuinely understand the time/money equation that faces web developers on a daily basis".

I should also remind you of the venerable CSS Zen Garden, if we're talking about form vs function. It's been around for a long time (and is expecting CSS1) but basically has a set piece of marked-up content and you're invited to add your own CSS to change the look. It's a neat demonstration of a key principle.