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What the Royal Wedding Can Teach Us about Project Management

3 Apr 2011

Will and Kate’s big day is only a few weeks away and the shops are full of street party essentials like flags, fairy cake decorations and paper plates branded with poor quality pictures of the famous couple’s faces.

However for all the excitement, pomp and circumstance around the royal wedding, things seem to be going smoothly. Thinking about some of the big projects that governments, corporations, small businesses and individuals must undertake, there may be some lessons from the royal wedding that are applicable to more than just a young girl’s dream wedding scrapbook. Here are five things that the royal wedding can teach us about project management.

  1. Recognise individual contributions
    Everyone from the chef to the florists are getting a nod in the run up to the royal wedding – there’s enough publicity for the big day to go around and the royal couple and family aren’t being stingy with (and, to be fair, are probably quite glad to let others share) the limelight. Who’s behind the scenes in your project that deserves some special recognition? Individual contributions can make or break a project so be sure to let them know their work is appreciated.
  2. Know when to let the little things go
    In one word: confetti. (Credit to @sparkyannc for that one!)
    Also, in sharp contrast to the upcoming 2012 Olympics, where full crackdowns are enforced on counterfeit goods promoting the event, the streets of London are awash with knock off royal wedding memorabilia – and no one’s batted an eye. It’s clearly impossible to keep local shop keepers from cashing in on the hordes of tourists hoping to get their hands on a Will and Kate mug or royal couple gingerbread man so why waste time hunting them down? It’s important to pick your battles and not let endless, unwinnable fights take away from the overall success of your project.
  3. Make sure all the info is available and keep everyone up to date
    Whether it’s the colour of the bridesmaid dresses, the fact that Will isn’t going to be wearing a ring or whether or not the corgis will be in attendance (of course they will), there’s been no detail spared when communicating to the public about the upcoming event for those that seek to find it. Group projects should proceed the same way – make sure the key info is available in some form or another or directly communicate the details to ensure everyone is up to date and on the same page.
  4. Give something back to those affected (Alternately: If all else fails, give everyone a day off)
    Londoners will no doubt be affected by the royal wedding, whether it’s a rise in traffic, extra security measures around central London or finding their public transport system inundated with tourists. These grievances have been successfully mitigated with a public holiday – everyone in the country gets the day off work and no one is going to turn down an extra holiday. Likewise for your project, think about the people who are peripherally affected by your work, possibly inconvenienced, and about what you can do to recognise and head off any ill feelings from those around you.
  5. Celebrate the outcome
    A royal wedding is a national day of celebration – there will be parades! Dancing in the street! Funny hats! Everyone can take part (and for those who choose not to – not to worry, they have the day off) in the royal couple’s celebration. Take time to celebrate you and your team’s achievements at the end of a big project.

So when the royal wedding arrives, think about the big projects in your work or personal life and although there may not be a best man’s speech or cake, you might find that you can have more in common with the royal couple than you expected.

Great Marketing Internships

26 Mar 2011

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the internships I had when I was younger that allowed me to develop my career and get a great idea of what kind of job I actually wanted, and trying to apply that thinking to what sorts of internships I’d like to run myself. Here’s a list of the top level takeaways that I think really made a difference to me when someone was considering my internship application and that I want to bring to the table for internships I run.

Select interns with the same rigour as hiring a new member of staff.

Because internships in the UK are unpaid, and very low pay in the US, it’s easy to make excuses for great (or not so great) internship candidates that you’d never make for potential full time employees. Just because these interns aren’t taking a salary doesn’t mean that they should be any less of a fit for the company. I’m not talking about experience – if they had that they’d be applying for the full time job. This is more about company fit, drive to succeed, skills like the ability to work independently or learn quickly (or whatever is relevant for that particular internship role), and ability to be successful in the particular internship for which they are applying. These are people who will be sitting in the office, interacting with the entire team, working on important projects and contributing at a significant level – their bad attitude could bring the entire team down. There can be internship vacancies which never get filled – or take months to find the best candidate. While it does mean that a company may be short-handed for longer than anticipated, it also means that when they select an intern, it’s the right person who can really make an impact. A related point to this – the best interns often make the best employees. On the other hand….

Be clear up front about whether or not a job is available at the end.

One of the things I wanted to hear up front during the interview process is whether or not there is any possibility of a job at the end of the internship. In some cases, a company may be looking to transition an exceptional intern into a full time staff member – and are aware of that at the beginning of the process. Unless that is the case, talk about the experience you can provide, the skills an intern will learn and the success of past interns but never make false promises about the likelihood of further work within the company. This is a make-or-break point for some candidates if there is no job available, and a powerful driver for interns when there is.

Have a clear daily, weekly and monthly timeline for interns before even posting a vacancy

I think with marketing internships, especially when the team is growing quickly, it is easy to feel the need to bring in a spare set of hands to help with the general day to day work. This can be standard in a start up where there is so much work to be done that getting a skilled, excited intern through the door can seem like the perfect all-rounder solution to pick up the slack. Inevitably interns are then involved in a variety of great projects around but sometimes it can take a couple of weeks to find out which of those activities were best suited to the intern in question. What’s much more efficient is to define specific tasks and roles – even going so far as to do a first draft of a daily timetable as well as weekly targets and monthly goals. This helps in drafting very specific internship listings ensuring the role not only attract potential interns who are interested in that aspect of marketing but also ensuring that potential interns know up front what will be required of them – and can get them started right away without wondering if the tasks are suited to their particular skill set and interests.

From day one – and every day onward – show how the intern’s role is important in the company

While a senior level staff member or someone managing an intern can often see how important that intern’s role is in day to day work, if the work is just a part of a bigger project, it can be hard for the intern to get that same view. While interning for a Bay Area start up, I had a task that could have seemed repetitive and dull – until I was shown how this was setting up the company to run A/B testing on a critical part of the new user registration process which could be measured against how much lifetime revenue new users generated. Now this was an exciting project and I could clearly see that what I was doing could directly lead to increased revenues in a significant way. Making it clear how an interns task relates to a bigger business objective is helpful in engaging them in day to day work and putting their role in a context that can be articulated in CVs or interviews.

Make personal development a priority

An internship is an opportunity for a less experienced individual to learn skills that will allow them to get a full time, paid job – not a service created for companies that don’t want to pay for more staff. Internships work best when there is a balance between the benefit the company receives and the benefit to the intern. I was encouraged to interact with other employees of the company outside my own department, to ask questions about the running of the business, even to invite the CEO for lunch – all of which contributed hugely to my own personal development. Having supportive and mentoring environment can make the difference between an internship that is  successful and rewarding and one that is not.

Top Floor Flat Takeaways:

–          Developing a great internship program, especially in marketing, is an ongoing process that requires a lot of thought and dedication from the entire company.

–          Companies should select interns with the same rigour as hiring a staff member, and should be clear on the daily tasks and weekly goals of the internship before bringing someone into the office.

–          Make personal development a priority for interns by talking with them about where they want to go professionally, being up front about whether or not there is a job for them in the company and showing them how their role affects the company overall.

Becoming a Marketing Department (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Metrics)

20 Mar 2011

As I mentioned, I’ll be writing less about travelling and London tourist sites (having reached a bit of a been-there-done-that level with the city) and focusing more on the lessons I’m learning working at a technology start up in London. This is mostly about documenting my own experiences in a way that will be memorable and relevant for my future work in my current role, any future jobs I take, or any companies I start.

A good place to begin is with my own marketing role and how it’s changed in the nearly three years I’ve been working at Spoonfed Media. I think this is an important path for me to remember as, no matter what my job title or role is when I begin a project, chances are that it will evolve as the company grows and changes – even moreso if I’m working in another start up.

This is quite a long post (my role has changed quite a bit!) but there is one key point that characterises each of my role’s transformations – an increase in the metrics available to measure myself, our company’s success and our strategy against. Without those new metrics supporting our activity at every stage of the marketing team’s growth, I doubt we could have been successful in the rapid transitions we experienced. What I’ve come to realise is that, used properly, key metrics within the business have allowed me to grow as a professional and to grow our company’s marketing team from a small time effort to drive web traffic to a consumer website to a fully functioning department within a revenue driven software company.

When I joined the company, there were ten full time staff members, including the two founders, a 7-person editorial team and one developer. There was no marketing department to speak of, “website development” was primarily focused on creating content for our website, an events listing service, and there was no real concept of a revenue model other than display advertising on the site.

In those days, I was responsible for running marketing activity that drove traffic to the website – and kept people engaged once they got there. There was no budget so our primary promotional channels were social bookmarking sites, social networks and search engines. I spent days posting our links on forums, made friends with the power users of StumbleUpon and Digg, and created search engine-friendly site content.

One of the things that is particularly interesting looking back is the relative inefficiency of the work I was doing. Social bookmarking, writing on forums, even going to university campuses to hand out flyers are all immensely time-consuming processes for relatively small payoff in terms of traffic. In my early days in the job, there was nothing to compare our progress to – and certainly no budget for paid promotions – so this not only seemed like the best option but the only one. It was a challenge for sure – in mid 2008, Facebook wasn’t quite the behemoth it is today and Twitter was unknown outside an early adopter community so there were fewer sure fire ways of reaching a large online community at a low cost. One of the issues at the beginning was a lack of metrics by which to measure our success. We saw traffic growing (albeit at a sedate pace in those early days) and that seemed to be enough.

I’m not saying it wasn’t useful or in fact vitally important for the work I do today – in many ways what I learned from doing the manual, hands-dirty labour of trying to get our content out on the web without any advertising spend has provided the knowledge I needed to decide on which audiences to target and on which channels to focus. If I were to take this experience to another start up, one question I might ask is how this initial process of promotion can be made more effective, and more quickly transition into more efficient methods of growing a website. Certainly I would avoid the mistake of thinking that time consuming work that doesn’t directly use cash resources from the company is free. Creating a costing model for the social bookmarking, forum and social networking work around the time spent and as a proportion of my salary would have given me more insight into how much we were indirectly paying for the relatively small amounts of traffic and would have possibly helped us move more quickly into our next stage as a marketing department and to the first real shift in my own role in the company.

As we grew, it became apparent that social bookmarking, forum posts, competitions and the like had been an incredible way to learn about our target audience and about content on the web but were neither scalable or sustainable long term. The next step was to strip away each non-scalable piece of our marketing strategy until what we had left was search engine optimisation (SEO). For the next two years, SEO would be the magic acronym in the office, affecting each part of the company from the developers, who had to think about technical changes to improve the way that search engines understood our website, to the editorial team who at first were sceptical, then fanatical about using SEO to drive more page views to their articles (who doesn’t love to know more people are reading their work?). My days were no longer filled with dubstep forums and leaving comments on blogs about London but instead with spreadsheets of keywords, Google Analytics, search optimised content creation and tracking down the owners of related sites in the hopes that they might link to us from their website.

One of the major differences between this and the first stage of our marketing work was the presence of many additional measurable metrics. Not only were we paying a consultant for help in developing our SEO strategy, but there were keyword rankings to measure, volumes of backlinks to track and the overall ranking of the website to monitor as well as the incoming traffic. What this meant is that we were able to monitor success and failure more quickly – and adjust our activities accordingly. SEO is notoriously a long term marketing activity as work done today may not affect search rankings and incoming traffic for weeks or even months but with a range of metrics to measure, and more concrete checkpoints, I found my work not only more efficient but more rewarding. It’s not surprising that between July and October 2009 we tripled our traffic – something that had taken the preceding year to do with our older strategies.

During this time, while the day to day marketing activity was still focused on growing traffic to the site, overall business strategy was looking ahead to a scalable revenue model – and even with the greatest level of optimism for our new marketing tactics and the potential web traffic available, display advertising wasn’t going to be the answer. The developers were hard at work on a software-as-a-service product that complimented our event listing website and could be licensed out to venue owners, event promoters, theatres or others involved in the events and entertainment space. The completion of that software paved the way for the biggest change in my own role as marketing director yet. While one day I was responsible for driving traffic through low cost online channels to our consumer website, overnight my job became focused on supporting the sales team in a revenue-driven business to business software company. Yikes!

By August 2010 my list of main objectives had expanded to include generation of high quality leads for the Bullseyehub sales team, increasing awareness and traffic for the Spoonfed.co.uk website, producing collateral for other company departments, identifying relevant market groups of potential customers and developing communications and promotions to connect with these audiences. Like the transition from social bookmarking and forum posts to SEO, this shift was not only accompanied by but also successful because of a significant increase in the number of different metrics available for us to measure ourselves against and use to define strategy and progress. An unbelievable wealth of information was now available to track our successes and failures, from number of leads generated to cost per lead to average value per sale to customer retention, not to mention the still-growing site traffic and SEO statistics. The challenge suddenly became seeing the valuable takeaways in the sea of numbers, a welcome challenge after the early days when no measurement was available.

Today, Spoonfed Media has 30 full time employees and is growing quickly. The marketing team, including interns, includes six outstanding individuals who are all contributing to an impressive array of projects that raise the bar for the business daily. The thing that has changed the most over the last three years has been the way our work has become metrics-driven, and as such more efficient. While I never expect my role to be fully static, I feel I am beginning to reach a point where what will change is the reports I generate and the takeaways I receive from key metrics, rather than the concept behind my day to day activities – although that was certainly an exciting experience as well.

Top Floor Flat Takeaways:

  • Just because there isn’t a cash charge for promotions work doesn’t mean it’s free. Finding metrics with which to measure early success with less efficient channels can help early start ups move more quickly into more efficient ones.
  • Focus on scalable marketing channels even if they aren’t the ones that you’re most comfortable with at the beginning. Being really good at something that won’t scale won’t grow the company.
  • Use metrics to support major changes in strategy, employees within the company and growth to better understand new projects and efforts.
  • No matter how dramatic a shift in focus within a role or company, having the right supporting metrics can make employees more confident, process more clear and growth more significant.

Blog Pivot

20 Mar 2011

This blog has been a source of stress for me lately. I have years of great content, photos, reports of my travels and recollections of London but after over 30 months of living in London, there are fewer things to share. I go to the same parks, visit the same museums, see the same theatre shows, have the same commute. I even travel less than I did in my early days in England, back when I thought I had six months to see all of Europe as well as explore London.

For a while now, I have begun to wonder if there might be another subject I can cover in this blog – something a bit more relevant to my day to day life and something that will help me think about my professional future. While I’m certainly no expert in business by any stretch of the imagination, the things I am doing and learning while working at Spoonfed Media are so fascinating to me, and so relevant to any job I might take or company I might start in the future, that I want a way to record these lessons learned in a start up environment.

With that in mind, I’m hoping this blog will, to borrow a lean start up phrase, pivot into a new form. While I’ll still share photos from my travels (Italy or Thailand this year… so hard to decide!) and of course highlight any interested London sights and scenes, my main goal moving forward is to start to share some of the general lesson I’m learning about business, start up technology companies, working in a start up environment and hopefully growing a successful business. I look forward to getting started!

Where I’ve Been for the Last 8 Weeks

5 Jul 2010

The problem, once I’ve passed a month of not blogging, becomes finding a way to get back into the habit with an overwhelming backlog of things to write about. But pushing 8 weeks of no content, I’ve got to bite the bullet and see what I can cover in an epic recap post. Here we go….

On 12 May, not long after my mother got to experience the amazing Fulham win against Hamburg at the wonderful Craven Cottage, Fulham travelled to Germany to play Atletico Madrid in the Europa finals. The momentum of the team, the belief of the fans, the absolute impossibility that they would make it to the finals at all left Fulham fans with every assurance of a win at the end… but it was not to be. In a pub in east London, I felt a true sportsfan’s despair as Fulham played a fantastic match but couldn’t overcome Madrid to take the final trophy.

On 20 May, I attended the first tech event for a long while and made up for lost time with the very well organised Social Entertainment and Tech Breakfast at the Edelman PR firm offices in London. A great lineup of speakers talked about the role social media is playing in the entertainment space, particular in broadcast entertainment.

26 May saw my rather impromptu decision to apply for the UK Apprentice (the show made famous by Donald Trump in the States) and with the help of my Top Floor Flatmate, I whisked off an application, under the vain delusions that I am clearly better than any of the other applicants in the country (that’s the California optimism coming through!)

I’ve been keeping busy at the gym throughout the last two months with 29 May marking the date that I smashed the girls’ record for the indoor triathalon at my gym, shaving about 1/3 off the previous top time. Was quite proud of myself and got to enjoy the rest of the day of an international food celebration with Ann in honour of Eurovision, a strange European tradition where representatives from a variety of European and non-European (but nearby) countries sing terrible songs while viewers from each country vote for the countries that would probably end up on their side in a war. It’s all very strange.

By 30 May I had decided that I would have to start seriously applying myself to GMAT studies if my vague plans for “oh business school someday” were to ever become a reality – more to ensure I don’t forget any more math than because I wanted to get going on the application. I took a break on 1 June to celebrate and panic at the fact that date marked two years since I arrived in England – and to fully embrace my new-found Britishness, I spent the evening on a rainy football pitch, trying out for an 11-a-side girls’ team (translation, I tried out for a girls soccer team).

Not to make myself out to be too healthy and cultured the last couple months, as 2 June saw me indulging in the sin of gambling at a PokerStars tournament where I was seated at a table with Victoria Coren, one of the premiere female poker players in the world (who in addition to robbing us all blind is a gorgeous, talented writer of both a fantastic autobiography and a weekly column in The Guardian). Despite my competition I still ended up placing 5th overall and picked up a bit of a poker bug. Fortunately there was no buy in and no cash winnings otherwise I would have been totally hooked.

To atone for my gambling sins, I surrounded myself with incredibly talented, driven and entrepreneurial women at the Women 2.0 dinner on 4 June where I met some fantastical ladies and had a chance to catch up with a few old friends.

My terror at realizing I had been in the UK for two years was only equaled on 7 June, the date that marked 24 years since I arrived in the world. I had a low-key birthday and the opposite of a low-key cake created by the incredible Top Floor Flatmate Ann.

Although my birthday day was quiet, I was going to make up for it on 12 June with a little celebration in honour of my birth and, more importantly, the USA vs England match in the World Cup. From then on out, the World Cup and work began to dominate my life. Group rounds proved an emotional challenge as the USA was robbed of goals, saddled with horrendous refs and still managed to pull through at the last minute. England was causing heartache for their fans as well with dismal performances against the USA and Algeria.

On 15 June I got to squeeze in a visit with a friend of mine from Colby. Chris was stopping off in London on his way back to America from Austria. He had joined us for my birthday celebration and we managed to catch another World Cup match in a classic British pub for dinner on a gorgeous sunny day. I can’t for the life of me remember what match we saw but it was great to spend the evening with a friend from Colby and his lovely girlfriend in a traditional, riverside pub.

I had a slight break from football on 21 June when Wimbledon kicked off in earnest with Roger Federer coming dangerously close to losing in the first round but fortunately he hung in long enough for me to turn my attention back to USA and England’s performances and on 23 June they both eeked through to the next round of the World Cup, USA amazingly leading the group and set to play Ghana in the match ahead. Landon Donovan’s goal with less than four minutes left to play was probably one of the top 10 sporting moments I’ve ever experiences, right up there with Fulham beating Hamburg and the Red Sox winning the 2004 playoff series against the Yankees.

Poor England was stuck with Germany and not even the loyal fans, generally ready to forgive them early performances, had much hope for the outcome of that pairing. The day wasn’t over yet as this also marked arguably the most epic Wimbledon match in history, the 10+ hour marathon of Mahut and Isner which began before the football and, as I incredulously followed on my phone, continued during my commute, through my walk home, until I got back to my television and so late that they had to postpone the match into the next day (the third day of play).

Sports continued to play a dominate theme in the month. While I was looking forward to the USA v Ghana match, I got some bad news about Fulham – it seemed their manager, Roy Hodgson, had performed so well with the team the season before, and so well as a pundit during the world cup, he was getting eyed by the bigger, and wealthier teams in the league. Rumours were flying that he’d soon be off to Liverpool, leaving us Cottagers behind.

Rumours were still unconfirmed heading into the weekend of the USA v Ghana match but before I could focus on football, I first had a visit from Nina, a close friend from high school who was in London for a few days between Oxford and Cambridge jaunts. Selecting some favourites from my London in 48 Hours tour, we raced around the city on her first day, then took advantage of the sunny weather to head out to Greenwich on 26 June.  That evening, while Nina opted for a different kind of British culture (she was off to the Globe for a production of Macbeth) I returned to my local pub for an evening of white-knuckled USA supporting.

The eventual defeat of the Americans shouldn’t have come as a surprise but I was devastated when their World Cup trip ended. My only consolation was that, less than 24 hours later, on 27 June, Englanders would feel my pain (times four) as Germany beat the England team 4-1. A weekend of rubbish refs, the crippling confirmation that Fulham was to lose Roy, and too much pub food was balanced with how fantastic it was to have Nina visiting, and the glorious California weather she brought with her.

With all of the sports of June, you’d be forgiven for thinking that I had done very little work but despite my sports fixation, in fact 90% of my mental capacity was focused solely on Spoonfed and the upcoming product launch for Bullseyehub, our fantastic new bit of software which allows companies in the entertainment space to better communicate with their customers. My role at the company transformed into full-time bug tester as we barreled our way through June and to the looming launch party date, by which we needed to have tested, perfected and released Bullseyehub to the world.

I needn’t have worried as our incredible team pulled it off without a hitch and on 30 June, we got to show friends, family and London press what we’d been working on for the last 12 months. The launch night was incredible and something I’ll never forget – one of my proudest moments. I was so rewarding to have been involved in the project from start to finish and to be able to share that with the Spoonfed team as well as the attendees of our launch event.

The good news at Spoonfed didn’t end there. On 1 July, New Media Age, one of the top trade publications for marketing and advertising, published an article about listings websites that heavily featured Spoonfed and some of the great work we’d done with advertisers in the past.

The whole team was ready to celebrate and as a reward for all of our hard work, on 3 July the company directors had arranged a special day out at the horse races (yes, more gambling!). Ladies dressed to the nines (with hats that looked more like small allotment gardens than headwear) strolled through the green paddock while the nation’s top horses prepped for their sprints. The Spoonfed team, of course, celebrated in a private box overlooking the finish line, quaffing champagne, losing unfortunate amounts of money and generally having a wonderful time.

The 4th of July didn’t register on my American holiday radar until I got a text in the morning wishing me a happy Independence Day. I was more distracted by the Sunday Times, which featured Spoonfed once again – a whole article on grads making good with a big picture of our Spoonfed offices. The weather seemed to be celebrating as well and I got to take advantage of the sun with a tennis match on a clay court (the first time I’d played on anything other than a hard court) with Spoonfed director Alex before we gave up our own attempts at tennis greatness to watch the end of the Wimbledon final.

Whew! I knew I’d get there in the end! I’m all up to date with the exciting things that have been happening lately. While I hope to get a full commentary on World Cup mayhem from an England perspective, my most lasting and proudest memories from the last 8 weeks will be related to Bullseyehub, the Spoonfed Media team and our successes as a company. I’m so excited for what the next six months will bring us and am looking forward to the rest of my British summer.

Hopefully there’ll be quite a bit more time to keep my blog up to date.