The global web project I am running in my professional life is reaching it’s notional half way point. I say notional – in that creating, maintaining and managing a web presence never ends and I certainly hope the web development efforts will continue long after I’ve moved on. But it is a relevant time to capture some lessons learnt so far that may in some way be useful for others contemplating or undertaking similar projects.

The challenge has been to take a highly fragmented global web presence into a consistent global framework but continue to support the historically autonomous and localised web marketing needs. It’s covering 25 countries and 15 languages and during the course of the project ecommerce and social media have grown in priority.

An initiative to do this had been running in the organisation since mid 2005 but was a classic case of ‘waiting until you’ve got everything perfect before taking action’ – so there were understandable frustrations and a pent up desire for action when I arrived at the start of 2008.

It reminded me of a classic Franklin D Roosevelt quote I have used many times in web projects – “There are many ways of moving forward but only one way of standing still”

The overall approach, that I’ve used a number of times before, was ‘borrowed’ shamelessly from a Project Director I worked with back in the 90s at NTL. No doubt he ‘borrowed’ it from somewhere else. The essence is 100 Days ‘to Fix the Basics’ – 100 Weeks ‘to build the Future’. What I like about this approach is that it drives action while also providing a framework for longer term thinking and strategy.

The 100 Weeks is divided into 4 Iterations and goals are set at the beginning and reviewed at the end. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it was an entirely ‘agile’ approach but the time I spent working in an agile software development environment prior to this role has certainly influenced some of the thinking and approaches.

One ‘agile’ inspired aspect was the creation of personas to represent our web users which was subsequently validated and reinforced through online research. Clearly, making developments very user focused and using regular feedback helps to transcend internal views that may be, well, too internal.

My approaches in recent years have also been influenced by an excellent book I read on a long haul flight to Aus in 2000 called The Next Common Sense – The e-Manager’s Guide to Mastering Complexity. It was the first I’ve read that introduced the idea of landscape metaphors and story telling to help communicate visions and direction. By coincidence, the 100 Day and 100 Week milestones correlate to the accepted route and method of climbing Mount Everest and it was certainly clear early in this project that the organisation had a mountain to climb to achieve its goals and has been a useful metaphor for describing progress and also challenges.

Fixing the basics involved putting in place the systems and processes to manage the organisation’s websites on a global level. There is a great debate going on here about some best practices and different approaches to selecting and implementing content management systems. Top of my list is, at a minimum, getting full access trials that you can get your would-be editors using and comfortable with and talking with other organisations who have similar requirements sets and been through the processes you are planning. This helped lead us to conclusions about the system and the implementer. At the shortlist stage we also went through a matrix approach of comparing different tiers of system that met requirements with different calibres and types of implementers. This used classic project management ‘iron triangle’ principles to look at the cost, time, scope and quality factors involved and also the constraints and tolerances we were dealing with.

What became very apparent at an early point in the project is that in an organisation where country teams operated very autonomously there simply wasn’t an instant view of what the company did globally and capturing that electronic view of all the variances and language descriptors was key to creating a foundation on which subsequent iterations could be built and more advanced functionality could be developed.

Here are a few key areas of learning from the last 12 months…

Be resolute about the process. If you’ve spent time and effort mapping out a process, you’ve done it for very good reasons. If you bend those processes then the chances are it will come back and bite you further down the line. In this instance, being very aware that one particular country was ‘the star’ of the operation I bent the processes on their insistence to get them onto the new platform and live before the originally planned date. The consequence of that is they’ve become frustrated at having to wait longer to move to the next phase and we are also having to tidy up the messiness created by doing something before it was ready to be done. It may be uncomfortable at the time but better to stick to your guns.

Collaboration doesn’t happen by itself. During Iteration 1 we agreed a Web Steering Team and 3 Task Forces to drive cross- region collaboration and agreement on subsequent Iteration requirements. Responsibilities, outputs and timeframes were proposed but in a group of operations used to only focusing on their own aims and goals it has been hard work pushing this collaboration forward. Using examples of where cross-region collaboration has got results in the early phases of the project has helped and also the economic downturn has worked in the project’s favour to emphasise the importance of working together.

Face-to-face training is essential. During the first Iteration of the project we used Webex and conference calls extensively to help communicate the project and train editors around the world. This worked up to a point however it became increasingly clear that unless you get to see people’s body language and can look them in the eye when conducting a training session it is very difficult to determine how much they’ve understood and how confident they are in putting the training into action. So while Webex sessions will remain important for follow up and refresher training, we have tried, wherever possible to meet editors at least once face-to-face.

Sometimes IT workarounds are preferable. I’ve been through the classic IT/Marketing divide scenarios over the years but my approach over the last decade has been to work with the IT department wherever possible rather than working around it. However, the net result in this instance is that I’ve waited a lot longer than I was comfortable with to get collaborative workspaces set up internally to support the project. Documenting the project and making sure everyone is at the same point of understanding is vital and collaborative workspaces are an excellent way to do this.  In retrospect I should have put a monthly web based hosted service on a credit card to get things moving earlier than waiting for an on premise install. I was conscious of having to re-create stuff further down the line but the speed with which you can pull together something like a SharePoint workspace means that re-creating rather than waiting would have been preferable.

Company politics are important. Much as company politics can be an unwelcome distraction at times I’ll always remember some wise words from another NTL director earlier in my career where turf wars over leadership of the web space were endemic. Basically, company politics are important because if you understand how and why the company works then you’ll get the job done easier. It’s about knowing when you can push something and when you need to find another way to the goal.

The millennial generation get the web. The superstars of the project so far are the younger generation who are in the first or second roles and have an immediate affinity with web tools and little or no fear in using them. I’ve read articles in recent years about upcoming generational shifts in the workplace and am seeing it first hand here. This makes me confident that we can push web knowledge deeper into the business and beyond the core web team.

Demonstrating flexibility and adaptability is key. Marketing folks can’t help themselves sometimes and get absolutely fixated about what something looks like over and above all other considerations. I’ve been there myself but many years of working on web projects has beaten it out of me. Don’t get me wrong, what a website looks like is very important on a number of different levels but in many cases it is the easiest aspect of a project to change in subsequent Iterations. However, although the separation of content from presentation has been a fundamental step forward it’s not always the easiest of concepts to explain. Given that colour is core to this organisation’s brand but also has strong cultural overtones, we have built some flexibility into the system to enable the global framework colour to be changed where relevant. This is a great way of showing that one click can change the whole look of a site and where more convincing has been required I’ve found using this blog and the WordPress template gallery a godsend in explaining and demonstrating the concept.

Don’t believe the hype. Really should have known better on this one. During the course of our last Iteration, the CMS vendor has launched a new set of functionality which firstly fitted very well with feedback we had been receiving from users about new or improved things they wanted in the system and secondly reinforced the decisions to use this particular system. I first learnt about these new developments at a London event back in October last year and then saw them in detail at another event in March this year. Suffice it to say I then made the rather dangerous assumption that these new capabilities were ready to roll and based some subsequent plans on them. We are now where we needed to be but it has been a painful few weeks getting there and it would have been much more sensible of me to have factored in at least another month as a cushion between expectation and reality.

We’ve got an exciting few months ahead on the next phase of developments and plenty more learning and lessons to come. I’d be keen to share experiences with others who have been through or are going through similar globalisation projects.

Note:- These are personal views and opinions and not necessarily shared by my employer

Having been in the midst of the both the dotcom boom and bust, I get a sense that technology companies will generally fair better than most during this current downturn. And with the likes of Google prepared to invest some of its many billions to keep the venture capital flowing then hopefully the pace of innovation seen in recent years will keep momentum too.

The dotcom boom saw technology companies grow at staggering rates due, in a large part, to ‘irrational exuberance’ that fuelled an unrealistic bubble. There were undoubtedly inflated expectations of what the web and its associated developments could deliver in the short-term. However, there was a lot of substance in many of the ideas at that time but some serious over-estimations of how quickly they could be realised.

Technology companies felt an enormous amount of pain in the bust period, which started in earnest in 2001, and many were still hurting 4 years on. The company I was working for during most of this period shed a staggering 120,000 jobs in wave after wave of redundancies. Ironically that worked in favour of the Enterprise Content Management deployment I was involved in at the time as consolidation of the company’s thousands of web and intranet sites was well overdue and couldn’t be argued with in those economic circumstances – So there are often upsides even in the worst of circumstances.

The benefit and potential of web technologies has very much been proven in the years following the bust and right now I’m certainly seeing signs of organisations being more prepared to spend in this area to get more efficient and competitive. A number of digital agencies I’ve been speaking with recently are reporting a rush to digital and business growing rather than contracting.

Looking further afield, the launch of Windows 7  will be interesting. Like many, I saw very little point in upgrading to Vista and have not used a business or home machine with Vista installed on it since its release at the beginning of 2007. So how is Microsoft going to make its latest OS more attractive, particularly at a time when both organisations and consumers are cutting spending?  One of the more recent announcements that seems to have attracted interest is that Windows 7 will enable you to remove Internet Explorer. I guess that just shows the strength of feeling about Microsoft monopolising the desktop environment and eagerness to have more choice. To be honest I haven’t even given IE8 a single thought with regard to my home pcs.

With the steady development of web based applications, like Zoho, and companies like Dell offering low cost pcs with Ubuntu  (the Open Source operating system) it’s looking easier and easier to live without Microsoft. Although when I look at the level of indoctrination of younger generations Microsoft has achieved with its shrewd product positioning in education then it looks like its domination of the desktop is assured for a number of years to come.

Having worked for a hosted services company, I am a ‘Software as a Service’  (SaaS) advocate and it’s clear that observers and commentators are heralding new waves of interest in cloud computing, web 2.0 and virtualisation as organisation come under greater pressure to cut costs.

Personally I still believe the biggest barrier to broader adoption of SaaS is the idea of someone else having responsibility for your data. However, when you look at the poor security and privacy processes and lack of business continuity planning in many organisations, both large and small, they’d be doing themselves a favour in adopting SaaS. Sometimes though, SaaS providers do themselves no favours in perpetuating unsubstantiated claims as illustrated here in the 80% myth.