Users before Data



03.30.20





In these challenging times I almost titled this post People before Dollars, but I’ll save my health and political views for long walks with my dog. Instead, I will share how several recent client experiences reinforced one of my core beliefs, that creating obvious, incremental, and measurable user value is where to begin most projects.

Digital Transformation programs are very popular today, especially since most of us are working from home. Typically these projects have the C-Suite's attention and a contemporary vibe that is sometimes lacking with IT activities. Within marketing and creative operations specifically, digital transformation projects often focus on aligning local execution to centralized strategies, providing visibility into de-centralized operations, and optimizing processes through standardization and automation.

In my experience with these types of transformation projects, the sponsor (i.e. the resource with a budget) begins with a clear business need along the lines of collecting and measuring operational data in order to make more timely and accurate decisions (both tactical and strategic). From the sponsors perspective the project appears straightforward as most martech vendors today provide slick dashboards, tailored reports, and clever KPIs that should more than deliver on the sponsors needs.

While this is true, my experience has shown that beginning a transformation project with the primary objective of gathering, measuring, and providing actionable operational insights is not enough to ensure success. That primary objective may provide success on paper (e.g. all the boxes have been checked), but it will fail operationally, and operational success with technology has always been my passion (thank you Frank Rizzo).

In addition to the gather/measure/deliver-insights objective, a key project objective should be to provide obvious, incremental, and measurable value to the operations users. I used those three terms purposefully, as each is crucial to driving user adoption and enthusiasm. Even if the project is simply digitizing an existing analog process (e.g. moving development and review of a creative brief into a workflow tool), my experience has shown that delivering user value leads to user adoption, and user adoption contributes significantly more to a transformation projects success than any technical capability.

Users will only change their behavior if they see clear value for themselves. While there are many more eloquent and verbose means to convey this, I prefer it blunt. As a professional in this area, focusing on user value as a means to drive user adoption seems obvious, but the project examples below may surprise you.

Managers can not drive user adoption. Recently I was speaking with a project lead about a creative operations workflow implementation she was leading with Kapost. The project was currently in a “restart" phase as the initial rollout had stalled. When I asked why the project had stalled, she explained that it was due in part to some large organizational changes. This is understandable, and the good news was that she had many observations and learnings from the initial rollout, and had keenly factored these into her current restart. The bad news was the next reason for the stalled rollout, managers not “holding users feet to the fire” had prevented adoption of the new technology and redefined marketing processes.

Upon hearing this I dug into the details of the current vs. planned workflow tasks, schedules, user actions and discovered that adopting the new Kapost workflow would deliver very little user value. Although the project would deliver all the cool “y’s” (e.g. visibility, consistency, and accountability) it was going to cost the users more time on a daily basis. Sometimes projects with these characteristics can succeed through sheer executive and organizational will, as is often the case with an ERP deployment, but this situation can be avoided.


For this specific example, after reviewing the proposed workflows more closely I discovered that the marketing users were being asked to manually key in brand and job-centric metadata that could easily be extracted from an existing system. So I worked with the project team to define a fairly simple data extraction and integration routine that would save the users and improve the consistency of the data, a win win.


Identify and address a lack of focus on user value early. In another example, I recently completed my role in an application development and operational transformation project for a client here in Chicago. Briefly, the project teams objective was to develop and implement an application for authoring, managing, and publishing the clients text-based IP. An existing EOL application was being used, but it had very little technical support, and dozens and dozens of user documented problems and inconsistencies with authoring and managing the data at a granular (or atomic) level. We had a strong team and a contemporary technology stack, sounds like a great project right?


One of the largest challenges our project team had was educating the existing end-users to consider, support, and even promote a change to the new application and workflow. Even though the users participated in story design for the new application, and had clearly documented (and were experiencing daily) the numerous problems and inconsistencies with the existing application – they did not see obvious, incremental, and measurable value for themselves as we progressed through the early stages of the project.


At particular stages of application development this can and should be expected, as it is hard for an end-user to visualize the value of a data-architect developing a data model and schema. But in this example the longer the end-users failed to envision value the more difficulty we had as a project team maintaining momentum. Eventually our project team was able to demonstrate clear value for the users, but we lost momentum and time when, as usual, both were in short supply. In hindsight, the project team should have invested additional resources to develop a strong change management plan for the user community.


So, how can you plan an implementation focused on user value? There are many answers to this question, and adopting an agile project methodology is perhaps the most powerful (and the topic of a follow-up post). However, a simple answer for projects already underway is to get out of the conference room or sponsors office and sit down with the users. Respect the users time as a virtue, be prepared to both lead and listen during the conversations, and remember that users know where value can be found. Once again I use the term found purposefully, as you should not expect the users to tell you how to deliver value, but where and why you should look for it.


Deliver the data and the value. So as a transformation project leader, the next time you believe a project has failed to identify obvious, incremental, and measurable value for its users – get out of the conference room and go find it. And be relentless, as each unit of value delivered to your users becomes your capital for your sponsor to drive further transformation.