Web globalisation - some lessons learnt

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