Level2wo

Wow! I can’t believe it’s been over a month since my last post. Actually, I can. I’ve been busy. Very busy. Been working on a pretty large web project that’s requiring a lot of hours during the day, and a lot of hours during the night to complete. It’s a challenge, but I have confidence that the end result will justify the means–even if the means means long hours in front of a computer without being able to publish my normal Level2wo blog posts. Sorry, sometimes priorities get in the way. That’s a joke.

I think for today’s post I just want to jot down some off the cuff notes about what’s been going on in the project that’s taking so much of my time. It’ll help me think, and maybe give you some insight into another project manager’s world, so you realize that you’re challenges and difficulties may just be normal. Or, maybe, make you feel that much better about your management skills.

The project I’m working on has many moving pieces, including a project team in four locations, English as a second language (for some team members), difficulties in communication (at varying levels among various resources), and lots and lots of digital assets spread across multiple business units. Managing the project is like lasso-ing a hurricane…but I must admit, the lasso does work.

As in previous lives, you come to understand that, while there is chaos all around, understanding that chaos and ensuring everyone on your team is comfortable with that chaos is key to project success. As a PM, I often strive to bring comfort and to ease my team members when they are stressed, over-worked, and when they simply need to step back, take a deep breath, relax, and get their second (and third and fourth) wind. As any project manager knows, there is pressure coming from all around to ensure client expectations are met, to ensure the little details fit into the larger project, to ensure that budgets are met, to ensure that everyone is communicating what they need to be communicating to each other for the health of the project, to ensure that all contingencies are in place, and on and on. It’s normal to get stressed out, both as a team member and as a project manager. Read it again: It’s Normal.

I’ve found that, given you’re doing everything you need to be doing, given that you’re prepared and understand that there will be very, very busy times and some not-so busy times, given that you understand the need and value in coaching and making people smile from time to time, you’ll do fine. That’s not to say you’ll not go through the ups and downs yourself, but you’ll do fine. It’s managing the inputs above that will provide you with the output–a completed project that is polished at the end, even though it may have started as a rough boulder in the beginning.

No matter how many projects I work on, and no matter how many agencies I work with, it seems to be a common thread that processes need improving (in some cases creating), and that there needs to be an advocate or champion within the organization that ensures that these processes are created, implemented, and most importantly, followed by all of the internal stakeholders. In the heat of the battle–projects coming in at a rate a little more than what a normal project manager can handle, requests popping up from developers, designers, information architects, clients, and copywriters, deadlines creeping up, new SOWs you have to kick out, requirements documents that need completing, Project Organization Manuals, etc., it’s easy to understand how actually following a process can get in the way. Or seem like it will, anyway.
But I can’t stress enough just how important having the processes in place–not only for the PM’s working but the newbies that arrive to rescue the day–is to ensuring you can not only manage your current projects but be able to take on and effectively manage new projects. But how can we actually implement anything if we’re all busy managing projects, you ask? Simple. Outsource.

Sometimes you have to bite the bullet and hire a Project Management consultant or someone with a similar title who understands the ins and outs of project management, in my world a project management consultant in the Interactive space. If you’re a large agency, this shouldn’t be a problem–but I know for the smaller agencies with more limited resources, shelling out $75-$100 an hour or more can be a painful proposition. In the end, however, at least in my opinion, it’s definitely worth it for many reasons. Some of the reasons include:

1. Bringing in someone from the outside helps clarify what you may already think is clear.
2. Paying someone to work just on process improvement will get the job done faster.
3. Bringing in someone that isn’t assigned other projects will allow that person to focus, and thus allow them to be more effective.
4. Another set of eyes and experiences that will help strengthen the experience of your current PM organization.
5. You may just have your next project manager already working for you.

But before you jump up and down for joy that you have the budget to hire someone to fix what’s been broken for so long, make sure you’ve set the goals and objectives very clear in your mind, so that the person coming in to fix your project management organization has a base to work from. Make sure you’ve outlined what’s expected of the new PM consultant. Some things to consider making clear you want:

1. Documentation.
Make sure that the PM consultant creates documents that are useful to your organization for not only presenting to the client but that are effective information gathering tools that will help consolidate any and all project-related information that will be needed internally. A standard set of documents could include: POMs (Project Organization Manuals), SOWs (Statement of Works), BOM’s (Bill of Materials), Invoices, Contact lists (both internal and external), Vendor lists (in case you need to outsource any of the work to outside specialists), Escalation procedures, Change requests, Business requirements documents, Project Plan examples and templates, Design element documents, and any other documents that will be needed or produced by your project teams.

2. Communication Tools.
You want to have your communication tools evaluated for your projects, including file transfer tools such as FTPs and other software that you would use for transferring not only externally to the client but internally to those working on the project.

3. Finance.
Make sure you’re getting paid for your projects, and make sure that you’re documenting and following up appropriately. I hear and have seen how easily it is to forget to get paid. Clients aren’t in a rush to pay you–it’s only you who will ensure you get paid.

While I have covered a good deal of why processes are important, I’ve really only created a general overview of what you need to do to ensure your PMO needs to do to get closer to running a smooth operation. There will absolutely be pains associated with the process, but they’re growing pains that you’ll need to do as a creative or interactive agency, at least if you want to make your life easier. If you have any of your own suggestions you’d like to share, please feel free to comment. 

If you own a website, or are in the business of optimizing websites, you’re obviously reading plenty on what do to optimize the site for search engines by focusing on one-way links, keyword rich content, taking care of your meta tags, description tags, and so on. But there’s one area not to forget–your internal link structure.
Optimization is all about seeking an advantage, executing at the tactical level to satisfy all of the SEO strategy requirements that will improve your search engine rankings (although, truth be told, most people likely only have google come to mind). Part of that advantage is internal links–or links within your website that point to other pages within your same website. Besides having keyword links pointing to your site without you pointing back, internal links create the structure on your website that search engines follow like breadcrumbs in a forest.

What should you do from an Internal Links perspective?

1. Have text links to all important pages in the navigation and footer
   Search engines like google work like a train–they need a track to follow, and text links that point from one page to another within yoursite provide that track. Fancy images can’t be read by google or other search engines, at least not as well as they can read text links (I know, you’re thinking, “I just read google can read Flash”, etc., but it’s not that simple yet.) Make sure you have text links pointing to every page you want to optimize.
2. Use the rel=”nofollow” HTML tag
   Google and other search engines use algorithms to measure the importance of the various pages on your website. Part of those algorithms is that your internal pages may not rank the same, which makes sense based on a number of factors. One of those factors is the worth or value the page has based on its having a link from the Homepage, which will probably be a high ranking (if not the highest ranking) page on the site. If your pages are all relatively equal in terms of optimization factors, but you don’t want them to be, use the rel=”nofollow” HTML tag to ‘push’ all of the importance from one page away from itself and to other pages.
3. Be descriptive and alternate keywords in your quest
   The goal is to get the search engines to rank your pages highly on search engine results pages, or SERPs. Make sure you use anchor text that uses the same keywords on all of the different text links on all of the various pages where you have links pointing back to a particular page. If your anchor text is ’search engine optimization,’ for example, make sure to vary the words. So, for instance, you may have anchor text that becomes: “great search engine optimization,” or “search engine tactics,” etc., so you’re getting ranked for different terms that refer to the same or similar subjects.
4. Links within the content on the page
   This is probably the simplest seo tactic for internal link building. Blogs software such as the software that level2wo’s blog (this blog) use allow for quick and easy internal link building, which is great for people who don’t know how to write code and think HTML is some foreign language that only geeks speak. Basically, if you’re writing content for your website, and you’re including keywords for which you want to rank, turn those keywords into text links pointing to other pages rich in content on your site. It’s that simple.
5. There’s no place like Home
   If you’re a Wizard of Oz fan, I hope I just got a smile out of you. In SEO, your homepage is very important, as it is for your users. But text links that point back to your homepage, while they should be easily found, should not necessarily say ‘Home,’ unless that’s the word you’re trying to rank for on search engines. Be creative–but be user friendly, when creating that obvious link back to your homepage.

You’ll notice that every single link in this article points back to another page within the Level2wo blog, with the exception of the anchor text link pointing to Wikipedia’s definition. I did that on purpose here, obviously, to show how I built the internal links on my page–which you’re reading. So, hopefully, I’ve shown you as well as told you (which is also one of the main rules of fiction writing, in case you’re a fiction writer, as I am, and can’t help point such things out! ).

Enjoy.

Project Management Issues

Projects are rarely easy. Well, let me rephrase that. Projects often have difficulties. Hmm. Let me use Robert Burns’ or John Stenbeck’s more popularly known phrase: “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” Or, maybe…well, you get my point. Projects of any kind face difficulties, from scope creep to communication issues, over-promising and under-delivering, and quality and cost issues. There’s more, but I just don’t have the time to get into them all.

So what do you do? It’s simple, and yet it’s maybe not that simple. Nothing beats planning. Nothing except for luck, great clients, great teammates, and, if you’re lucky, a combination of the two. But that’s not something you should count on. Issues arising, clients changing their minds, less than efficient team members. That’s what you should expect; if you get anything better than that, then you, my friend, have a heck of a team that you need to hold onto.

 In interactive projects, much can and does go wrong. And by wrong I don’t mean failures of massive proportion, but rather websites becoming a lot larger and more complex than agreed to in the SOW (statement of work), quality being produced by outside vendors not being up to what your (or worse, the client’s) expectations are, technology failures (server crashes, missed deadlines, delayed client approvals, PHs (person hours) over budget), etc.

What do you do? Truthfully? Roll with the punches. Learn from your mistakes, and learn from the mistakes of others, so that you don’t repeat the mistakes. Learn how your organization works, and learn how your client’s organization works. Once you understand the big picture, managing the minutae gets better. But learn. Be patient. Understand that everyone has an agenda, that everyone is probably as just as busy as you are and lacks as many resources as you do, and that they’re making the best of it. Have a smile on your face, because the storm will pass. It always does. And keep your head in the game, showing confidence and glee the entire time. You get your teammates to stay in the game, you’ll get that much more done that much quicker. And focus. You’ll be fine…just know it, and all will work out.