Tips and tricks on getting pre-school kids into a circle, organizing search
marketers and herding cats.
I’m a typical, relatively capable, multi-tasking, working women. How hard could
it be to get a bunch of pre-schoolers into a circle? A good number of
years ago (don’t ask!) while volunteering at one of my children’s school one
day, a teacher asked me to do it, and I soon found out! All my years of project
management experience and I couldn’t make it happen! Thankfully, the teacher
took pity on me, and showed me the process. It was so straight forward, the kids
had the job done in a few seconds. She simply had all the children hold hands in
a straight row, joined the two “end” hands together, had them to back-up until
their arms were stretched out, asked them to let go and viola! 25 kids standing
in a circle. I just didn’t have the information I needed to get the job done.
Lots of people (including our prolific writers here at Enquiro) write about best
practices for B2B marketing online, search marketing, web-site usability. Heck,
we even do research about how people use the search engines and write about that
too!
Have you ever tried to organize the work of account directors, search
strategists, media buyers, creative designers and researchers? In preparation
for writing this article, I Googled like mad to find articles on how to operate
a search marketing firm to no avail. Since doing that is my daily pleasure here
at Enquiro, I thought I would share some tips and tricks on how we make that
circle for our clients.
During the course of proposing a project, we collaborate with our clients to
determine the work as well as a schedule that meets their needs and considers
their ability to implement our recommendations. Once an agreement for a solution
is reached, we provide a Statement of Work that describes the project approach,
the campaign goals, the deliverables and the schedule (including a Microsoft
Project Gantt chart).
The project work consists of consulting services. We document those services by
preparing deliverables. These deliverables provide information and/or
recommendations for changes. When our client implements the recommended changes,
they achieve the campaign goals.
Project Planning
Once an agreement for a solution is reached, we create a project schedule in
Microsoft Project. We include a Gantt chart in the Statement of Work that shows
the deliverables and the schedule. The timeline is based on what we know at the
time we prepare the Statement of Work. As the project progresses, the schedule
changes to meet the clients requirements. We meet with the client on a regular
basis to review progress against the plan.
There are three factors that make us very confidant about the work and schedule
estimates we provide.
- We track all of our project work using MS Project, and as result we have a
wealth of “estimates” and “actuals” data that we use to estimate.
- We use a top-down estimation technique to estimate effort and we decompose the
project into deliverables, activities and tasks.
- Upon project execution, we create a project baseline, and then re-estimate the
project work on a weekly basis.
Change Management
We recognize that once work has begun on a project of any size, we continually
learn new things. In order to control costs it is imperative that we control
scope. Should there be work identified that is outside of the scope defined in
the Statement of Work, the changes are submitted for approval by both parties
prior to commencing with them. We make every effort to ensure we can accommodate
scope changes.
In order to manage change, every project includes a Change Budget. When change
is recognized and managed, it creates opportunities rather than problems.
The change budget provides an appropriation of dollars the client can draw from
without having to gain additional approval from the holder of the purse strings.
In our experience, there are two types of changes:
- Design changes are improvements or corrections to the campaign design after
the initial project has been approved. These changes are a natural outcome of
the process and are encouraged. We find that during the course of almost every
project, a need gets identified for something that was not known when the
project started. When that happens, we use the change request process to get
client approval to accommodate the need.
- Non-compliance changes are charged to the change budget also. These are
changes resulting from changes in the environment or from the failure of some
previously planned event to occur. These changes are undesirable and can delay
the campaign.
Should we determine that a change is required, we submit a Change Request to the
client to dip into the Change Budget. If the Change Budget is exhausted, we work
together with the client to create a new Statement of Work.
Issues and Risks We believe an important part of proactive project management is managing issues
and risks. We differentiate between issues and risks by stating that a risk is
something bad that might happen if an issue is not resolved. We know that active
management of issues and risks reduces the total number of issues in the long
run. Our goal is to detect issues as early as possible. The earlier they are
identified, the greater the chance we have of resolution before it impacts the
project critical success factors.
We use the Issue and Risk databases that are part of the Microsoft Sharepoint
portal for each client project. This is the same place we centrally publish
deliverables, post the most recent dashboards, etc. These databases also provide
valuable information when we review the project as part of our account review
process.
Account Reviews
As part of our project management process, we conduct regular account reviews.
The purpose of the review is to ensure we are meeting the clients success
objectives, are remaining customer-centric and focused on the client, and that
we are still pursuing the right strategy and delivering the best solution. We
get feedback from the client on satisfaction levels and areas for improvement.
We identify Enquiro team members who have provided great service and those who
haven’t, and pinpoint any hurdles, internally or externally, that are preventing
us from providing great service.
Continuous Improvement
We manage our relationship with the client projects as well as in the way we run
our business with the philosophy of continuous improvement. If fact, it’s built
right into one of our core values, “Excellence - Continuous Improvement. Setting
High Expectations. Learning. Flawless Execution. Being the Best in the World at
What We Do.”
As for those cats, I’ve never tried to herd them. I know better - I’ll stick to
search marketers any day.
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enquiro research
Barb
Newman