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Digital Project Management - An Underrated Discipline

October 16, 2008 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Best Practices

Digital Project Management - An Underrated Discipline
By Ian West

There are hundreds of companies and individuals out there to help companies with their digital projects, from web developers to search marketers. But the biggest issue seems to be managing these projects. Big organisations may have a team of managers charged with digital or new media marketing and management, but many do not… and few SME’s1 have such a resource. So most organisations dump digital projects on some already overworked marketing or IT person. Most of the problems I see with companies unhappy with their digital marketing stem from failures in project management.

Project management isn’t a difficult discipline, but does require a broad knowledge of the industry and available technologies and solutions. But above all, it is a process, involving all the tools familiar to project managers in any industry. Good digital project managers - internal or external - are worth their weight in gold.

Listed below are some best practices in digital project management (most of them apply to project management in general):

  • Agreeing and setting objectives - obvious but so often overlooked
  • Strategy planning - not a 100 page document, the best strategies are less than one side of A4
  • Identifying internal resource - do you have the people? Who will execute and manage the project long term?
  • Selecting third party help - absolutely critical. There are some great people out there, but a lot of cowboys as well. Your web developer is not necessarily the best person to mount an email marketing campaign or handle your search marketing.
  • Identify performance indicators and measurables.
  • Creating the digital brief - a verbal briefing is not enough. The terms of the brief should include deliverables, performance indicators, cost indicators and timescales. This will form the basis of contracts with external suppliers.
  • Evaluating proposals and tenders - are we sure the outside suppliers understood our brief, and do we understand their proposals.
  • Negotiating - life is never straightforward and compromises have to be made
  • Liaison - keeping all parties connected
  • Reporting - how is the project progressing? To brief, on time, on cost?
  • Time and budgetary control - speaks for itself, but needs constant vigilance
  • Sign off - know when the project is over, don’t let it drift. Easier to manage if you set discrete stages.
  • Evaluation and tracking - did it work? Quantify the results.

Yes there is a lot to be done and a lot to control on even the simplest projects - this is why things often fail through lack of tight project management. Use a specialist if you can. A friend of mine uses the analogy of needing a shirt: you can either go out and spend £20 on a shirt or you can make one. You can learn how to do it from a book, buy material from the market, stay up late at nights cutting and sewing and at the end of the day you have saved yourself £20… but would you really want to go out in a shirt you had made yourself?

1 Acronym for Small and Medium sized Enterprise

Ian West has spent most of his life in marketing and marketing communications managing projects for businesses of all sizes from blue-chips to SMEs. Since the early 90’s he has specialised in handling digital projects, nationally and internationally. Ian’s company, UK based One-Marketing Ltd, describes itself as ‘Project management in marketing – on-line and off-line’. A speaker, lecturer and trainer, he blogs on many digital related subjects on http://thedigitalian.wordpress.com and on branding on http://brandmaster.wordpress.com.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 16th, 2008 and is filed under Project Management Best Practices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 people have left comments

Ian,

This post is especially true to me as I make it through a digital project of my own. I think that flushing out the user experience is key to providing that understanding to a third party vendor. And I don’t think its going overboard to go over objectives for each page of a website or each module of an information system during initial conversations with a third party vendor. The key is know what you want, and then making sure that the vendor is on the same page.

-chris

LouisvillePM wrote on October 17, 2008 - 6:58 am | Visit Link

I agree, there cannot be too much attention to detail. All to often I see digital projects been presented on the basis of; ‘It’s all finished… except..’
I also like the idea of user experience being being used as one of the performance indicators of success.

Ian West wrote on October 20, 2008 - 6:12 am | Visit Link

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