As your team grows and customer needs change, it’s important for leaders to revisit company cultural values and gauge whether they still reflect your mission.
When HelloWorld first began as ePrize in 1999, it was a Detroit startup with an entrepreneurial vision.
No digital job advert is complete without mention of collaborative working; a skills shortage means businesses are finally fixing their broken windows.
Collaboration isn’t easy to engender. Let’s face it, people are nine-tenths of the problem. The other 10% is technology, something many tech startups and big beasts are tackling.
Here are three collaboration tools that are aiming to corner the market.
How your website, app or software is produced will have a significant impact over how quickly it’s built and its quality.
The technicalities of development methodologies can be intimidating, and appear irrelevant to marketers. But, which approach is used is a critical decision.
It can’t be left to your production team, whether in-house or outsourced.
The team at Hive have an interesting story to tell.
Iterating a new product in a nascent part of an old industry, doing this within an enormous organisation like British Gas, while maintaining an independent, startup culture.
There’s a lesson in there for anybody.
Here’s what I learnt about Hive by listening to Tom Guy, product and commercial director, at #canvasconf, organised by 383.
Unfortunately, too many marketers have confused ad-hoc social media promotions with genuine agile marketing.
While the original concept of ‘agile’ as a way of working was first popularised in the world of software development, it wasn’t until recently when applied to the realm of social media that we’ve started to talk about ‘agile marketing’.
With freelance work slated to outpace full-time jobs by 2020, and with more than 53m Americans working on a freelance basis as of 2014, the opportunity is ripe for those interested in paving their own way.
There are two types of project failure. You need to manage them differently.
Projects fail. Lots of them. We don’t really know how many, as the statistics vary widely. And most of the statistics are pretty dubious.
They’re gathered using questionable sampling methods. They define failure ambiguously.
And their authors generally have a vested interest in talking up failure rates. They sell solutions to avoid project failure. If there weren’t many failures, they wouldn’t have a job. (I call it the project failure industry. hey need to create the perception of failure).
Nonetheless, I think it’s fair to say that lots of projects do fail.
Time tracking is a fact of agency life. You do some work, you record your time. This is logical because you’re charging by the hour: tot up the hours done at the end of the month and you can send an invoice.
But time tracking is something that in-house marketers seem to have never got on with. Surely the only point of doing it is for management to monitor how long your tea breaks take?
If they introduce time tracking, what will the next step be? Rationing of biscuits? A maximum number of loo breaks?
This idea misses something very important: for some activities tracking time is the only way of measuring and improving return on investment.
And at the end of the day, that’s what your boss (and his boss) care about.
The best time to review a project is probably months ago, when all seemed well.
It doesn’t look good. The project has missed a major milestone. The team is working seven-day weeks. The project manager is off with stress-related illness. Quality has gone out the window.
And as for our customer, not at all happy.
We need to find out what’s really going on. It’s time to schedule a project review.
Are you doing what’s best, or simply seeking the protection of the herd?
It’s an enticing idea: ‘Best practice’. It suggests a clearly defined path to success; a recipe for perfectly honed websites, trouble-free projects, delighted users; a silver bullet.
But what is ‘best practice’?
I don’t mean best practice for UX design, or best practice for SEO, or best practice for project execution. But the concept of ‘best practice’ itself.
Where do best practices come from? How do we recognise them? How do we adopt them?
If your organisation is going to do any sort of substantive innovation, it needs to take on risk. That needs a different style of project management.
Why do you do projects?
For most organisations, the answer is usually something to do with change. “We need to add new features to our product. We need to improve the user experience in our online shop. We need to upgrade the technology running our site”.
That’s kind of odd, when you think about it.
While some may cringe at the word, we all know we need to be more agile.
Econsultancy recently hosted a roundtable event on Digital Transformation.
The following were five strategies put forward by attendees for becoming a more agile marketing organisation…