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.

Educate your clients: Acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, and design tips

I really did start off trying to find gripes by clients about their web design/iMedia companies. But I just kept finding moans (legitimate ones) about clients from iMedia colleagues.

It seems the tide has turned because, although recognised by all in the industry for many years, this was a pretty taboo subject - something about biting the hand that feeds you, maybe? It is a bit of a trap when your clients are driving you mad though they do grudgingly pay up, perhaps not regularly, or on time, or enough.

The more that these problems are shared openly, the better for the industry. Why not keep a file of moans and extract from it a summary of behaviour that is not acceptable and the reasons why. Then you can hand it to your clients as part of the pre-amble prior to a contract about the way you work. Yes, it might put them off. But that’s your decision. Do you want/need time and money wasters? We certainly know of companies that have got so fed up with their clients that they have deliberately given them a hard time and are delighted when they say they are leaving for another company. Sympathies to the ‘other’ company!

What do you think of, An Open Letter to All Clients On Behalf of Designers Everywhere, 12th September in the Tiger Monkey Creative blog? It rings so true. Then this is followed up by, 5 Rotten Things No One Else Has Told You About The Clients You’ll Work For, 18th September.

It seems that they are really getting it in the neck from some clients. I wonder what the other side of the story would be from the clients themselves.

Closer to my original intention is Andy Kilworth’s rant about annoying web design features, 24 Moans about Web Design and Usability from a Grumpy SEO, 17th September. This arose because he was trying to buy things online for himself and came across annoying features too often for his intention, his temper and his limited time. Perhaps you can use them positively with your clients to help you argue against these design elements if your clients want them. It always helps to have a professional third party say things that you would like to say yourself. That’s why there are ‘consultants’, you know!

Andy Kilworth goes through things like: intrusive Captchas, the efficiency of the transaction, clear/current pricing, no human intervention like sales calls/videos, ability to really buy online, constant registrations [one of our gripes too], asking for too much personal data, accessibility, intrusive multimedia, grammar and content issues, naff 404 error pages, interfering with recognised web-use conventions, unclear navigation, intrusive and inappropriate adverts, and so on. As an observation, I did find his post annoying myself because of its strange response to click-through! It may be just my machine/versioning/browser etc!

Overall it has always been hard to influence your clients in the way that they work with you and the way they relate to design issues. They do need to be educated and it is a shame that we have had to bear the burden of doing this. It should be part and parcel of their training now. Web and social media presence is the norm for business so let’s issue a wake-up call to the general training industry for business professionals – please.

Content Marketing and iMedia - what's your strategy?

We're all familiar with the content is king maxim, but how many of us have taken it seriously? As a segment of a marketing strategy, your clients might be very clued up and tell you what they want and when they want it. Their strategy might well be hidden behind their decisions. We might just be picking up their demands and grumbling about 'clients making changes again', or, 'clients adding in things again'. You know, they say things like 'put this up on the web site ASAP', then a week later 'why isn't it linked to the blog?', and the next day, 'we need to produce a short video segment based on it to go on Facebook in the next couple of days', and so on.

But it all might be part of their content marketing strategy. That should make us stop grumbling and change our attitude to some respect. Yes, they should have indicated that they had phased roll-outs of content for different purposes, but to them it might just be self evident. Understanding your clients and their business has got harder, that's true, but we can't serve their needs until we understand what they are trying to achieve.

Our clients' marketing people have traditionally driven many of the processes that have caused grief for the iMedia lot. It was interesting for us to dip a toe in their water this week for a change and look at some of the content pressures they are facing.

Apparently content marketing has been a strong topic over 2012. They are tasked with embracing all the interactive media channels at the salient time for their messages and addressing the right audiences with the right messages to maximise awareness/sales/brand-building and so on. Now, we appreciate that the different channels from website, microsite, blog, mobile, Twitter, Facebook, electronic billboards and connected tv appeal to different audience profiles, and that content needs to be tailored to suit the profile and the display, but perhaps what we haven't bought into is that the marketers are on top of the reactions to the messages and want to respond accordingly. So if your client needs fast response, how can you provide it and at what cost?

This is the crux of the matter for us. We need to know the type of demands on our resources and plan accordingly. This means that the questions should be asked about demands and response times across channels from the beginning of your relationship. Is that happening? Then you also need to consider reviewing your longer term projects where your client's offerings have grown organically as the channels have matured. Are they now asking for more content across more channels than anticipated? Should you reassess what you are doing, the stretch on your resources and the costs involved?

To give an example of what marketers have been facing this year on the question of content marketing, take a look at a summary of key speakers, Marketing Basics: 7 B2B Content Marketing Tactics, by David Kirkpatrick at Marketing Sherpa, September 12th.

Tactic 1 Understand that content comes in more than one format.
Tactic 2 Find content topics and provide value
Tactic 3 Map content to B2B buying stages
Tactic 4 Remember that content marketing is part of an inbound strategy
Tactic 5 Use social media to distribute content
Tactic 6 Think like a publisher – create a content calendar
Tactic 7 Think beyond free with content marketing

Their pressures become our pressures, so it's as well to be ready.