 I'm Julie Anderson. I am a project manager with Sideways 8. We're a digital marketing firm in the Atlanta area, but we do work all over the country. And I've been there for about two years, so that's kind of a brief background. But I know a lot of times people just worry so much about starting a project and getting through a project. And one of the things that I found helped was making processes, which I love trying to say a million times. So that's why I wanted to do this talk. Let's see if I can get this thing working. We may or may not. There we go. So what we're going to cover is basically what is a process, why you need one, how you should develop one, next steps, and Thanksgiving. I'm a big analogy person. I've got to have an analogy. Thanksgiving is the one for this. So as project managers, and who in here is a project manager like that's your main role? And then if you're on your own, are you also managing your own projects as well? So you guys wear two hats. I try not to wear the other hat. But project managers always want to talk tools. Do you use JIRA or Trello? Teamwork? I don't know if anybody uses the new Monday one, or just scraps of paper. Somehow you have to keep track of your project, right? But the truth is that your process means more than the actual tool. And you need to determine what's going to work for you and your team before you actually choose a tool. So let's talk about what is a process. So I had to go to dictionary.com and look one up. It's a systematic series of actions directed to some end. So it's repeatable steps. A roadmap to create a site essentially. I will share my slides at the end as well as some templates. So you don't have to do all that if you don't want to. Yeah, I've got a link for that. So just repeatable steps, things that you can do over and over. But we tell our clients that every project is unique, right? And we don't work on an assembly line. So are these repeatable processes even necessary? Does this make sense? Yes and no. There's lots of similarities. So there are lots of similarities in that there are a lot of steps we should take. Or we do take, but we really should take in order for every project. To me, this is like Thanksgiving dinner. You may have different people, some different foods, but lots of similarities. So when you land a project after you celebrate, right? What's the first thing you do when the contract is signed? What's next? Skipping way ahead, what do you do to launch the site? You've got to have a process. All of these things are the same for each project. You need it written down and ready to go. Okay, so why do you have a process? Knowing where to start and how to finish, having a repeatable, customizable process will allow you to start quickly, not miss the important stuff, handle more projects at a time that's making more money, right? Evolve, find your mistakes and move on to not make them again. And then also go on vacation. I leave on Friday for a week. So as an aside, when I first started at Sideways 8, one particular coworker used the word process, process, process all the time. And it was driving us crazy. In fact, another coworker and I decided that we were going to start a drinking game, and every time Brett said process, we were going to take a shot. Ha ha ha, you know, great. Well, instead of becoming alcoholics and getting fired, we decided to actually codify what we were already doing, analyze it, and then grow from there. So it's been a year and a half process of building processes, and that's how I came to love processes. Okay. So how do you develop a process for your team? Okay? To me, you start with the big picture overview. And for any project, you've got onboarding, discovery, design, build, quality assurance, user acceptance testing, launching, and evaluating. I use this process for Thanksgiving dinner. I use it for home improvement projects. Drive my family crazy. But we have something going through all the way through. We know what the next steps are. Okay? I put evaluate last, but I honestly evaluate often through the project. Stop every couple of weeks and say, what went right, what went wrong? Write it down. Because if you've got a project, even if it's only a three month project, you're not going to remember something that went wrong at the beginning. You're blocking it out. You don't want to make that mistake on the next project. So write it down as you go along. Okay? So the first thing you do is onboarding. So this is like planning your Thanksgiving dinner. Who are you going to invite? Who do you want to serve? Things like that. Okay? So for us, what accounting software do you use? That's the first thing we do is get the clients in the accounting software. Because, you know, when it's time for them to pay you, you want to be ready. For them to pay you, yes. So then you assemble your team and make sure they're all on the same page. We have an internal meeting with our staff to know, you know, if you're going to be my designer, and this is a really small project, you need to know this is only going to be five or ten hours. If it's going to be huge, and I'm going to need you 40 hours a week for the next three weeks, I need you to be able to sign off on that. So everybody has to totally understand the project. Really review the proposal. Okay? We, you know, the salespeople, I have a salesperson. They send out the proposal. I look at it before it goes out. But then I go back over it with a fine-tooth comb and make sure that we have touched everything. I would say even if you are the one who wrote the proposal, go back over it. List it out. What have you promised to do? Okay? At this point I set up my milestones and tasks based on the proposal. This may change. As you go through discovery, you may find other things that you need, but make sure you set up the tests and milestones just kind of preliminarily. The launch date is pretty far out. You're not really going to be sure of that milestone and when that is, but set it up and explain to the client that it's tentative. Don't let them start, you know, buying airtime based on your launch date. We set up a communication plan as well. I like to have all the information in one place. The one time I didn't have the phone number of our client like two days before we were supposed to launch and I couldn't get a hold of her. I sent her emails, she didn't respond. We had to delay launch because I could not get a hold of her. I write, because we do all of our check-ins via a conference call. So I just didn't have it. So I write it all down. I also make sure they have it. I call it the communications cheat sheet. They have everyone who's on their team. They have a link to the projects. Everything's right there. And again, I have a template for that that I'll share at the end. Start determining who you will need to be consulted for approval. This is something that I stress over and over. It's nothing like finding out that a board of directors needs is going to all chime in right before launch. Had that happen. All right. So, see if I can work this thing. There we go. The other thing you want to do is start a racy chart. So racy stands for responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed. And we've really just started using this, and I love this. The first one you make, your head's going to spin, but then you start handing it out and people love it. Responsible is the person who's actually going to do the work, not the project manager. Okay. So who is the designer? Who is the content strategist? Make sure that they know what they're going to stand for, what they're going to be doing. Accountable is most, usually the project manager. I've got to make sure that work is getting done. Consulted is anybody you're going to talk to to make sure that they are, their input is taken into consideration. So, and then informed is somebody who just wants to know what's going on, but we don't need their opinion. So here's an example, and like I said the first time you make one, your head will spin, and I do give you a template for this as well, by the way. So when we begin the sitemap, we have a content coach, which is the greatest invention ever. She walks the client through the, how the sitemap should be set up. So she does that, but we also talk to the digital, the designer and developer on the team. We talk to the digital marketing strategist. And of course the client is consulted. So those people are consulted, content coach is responsible, and the project manager is accountable. You should always have somebody who is accountable. Sometimes especially on your, if you have a small team, the accountable responsible person is probably going to be you. That's why I use roles instead of people at the top. So if you are the designer or developer, designer or developer, the project manager, you'll be responsible in one area and accountable in the other. So like I said, I have a great little template for this, and you're more than welcome to try it out, but you just put your tasks down the left-hand side, and I like to do the big breaks like the milestones in the middle. Sure. Yeah, and then this was, there was a whole bunch on the client side. So yes, there should be a responsible and accountable. Consulted and informed is kind of, you know, optional. But yeah, responsible and accountable in every row. Like the list of the functionality, I don't think I had an accountable for that and I should. That's really me, I do both those things. So you could split the box. I would, you could almost split the task, like who's going to be responsible for writing it and who's responsible for, I don't know. I haven't really done it. I should accept that I would do, you know, I've really, honestly I have not done that, but I've made sure there's at least one responsible, and I think because it's me, I know if I'm responsible, I'm also accountable because I'm in charge of the project. Okay, yes. Approver, okay. Well, and I think you could also do develop, like we have develop style guide, approve style guide, and then they would be responsible. So you just add another task as well, but that's a good idea. Okay, okay. So for discovery is on the next step on every project. This, going back to my Thanksgiving analogy, is developing the shopping list to make sure you know who has allergies, what dishes people need to have associated with Thanksgiving. I mean, you know, we all know we have to have mashed potatoes. My children believe that even at 21 and 23 that they have to have some sort of a whipped cream jello salad thing. So, you know, it's not Thanksgiving if that's not on the table. That's got to be on the list, right? Okay, so back to digital projects. I have a list of questions that I run through with my team on my own, just making sure we've covered everything before anybody starts designing a building, okay? So we go through this huge list. If we are not sure, if we think the client has told us or think they may have told sales, we reiterate it back to the client. There have been times when we thought the salesperson told us that the client wanted A, they actually wanted B. We needed to clarify that in discovery. So we just say, yeah, you know, Brett told us this. Brett, you know, and then they go, oh yes, that's right, and it's all fine, but. So this is just a little bit of the list of the questions, again, that I share with you guys that you'll want to build on, things that make more sense for your own team. But what key messages will be communicated? What's the one thing we want people to do, feel? So asking the client about that at the beginning and really getting that down, there's a lot of functionality questions as well, okay? So we make sure that we go through that before we really start talking to the client, and then when we get on to the discovery call with the client, we're not wasting their time, everybody knows what they need to ask, and we're good to go. We've kind of broken up my roles too, so that helps too. So if you've got something more than just a basic brochure website and you've got some functionality going on, I bring my developers in to gather the requirements. I think I know everything, I can ask you all the questions. These guys have built stuff that make my head spin, so they know the questions to ask. But even if it's a simple site, I have found that we need to ask about contact forms. We generally just build a contact form where if you're filling out a form on the site, you get a thanks, you know, there's just a note on the site. Well, we had one client, we were launching and he realized that it didn't send an email. So we had to stop and do that. So if you ask, what do you need from your contact form? Who's it going to go to? What kind of reaction do you want from your client? So just get really specific. Les will come up and invite you later on. We finish with a signed statement of work. When we first started, our proposals were considered our statements of work. We go through discovery and a lot of things would change, and then we wouldn't have it written. So we do the proposal and then we do the statement of work. In that, again, I specify who's going to approve each milestone. Lesson learned. Specify the rounds of revisions. All right. I did have a client make a very good point to me once about rounds of revisions. Rounds of revisions are not you made a mistake and you need to fix it. You as the person who's developed, they want to change something. And we had made mistakes. I'm like, oh, that was a round of revisions. He's like, no, it wasn't. You didn't follow the design. Yeah, you're right. But specify how many rounds of revisions because I also had a guy wanted me to change the picture about 25 times. So on to design and my Thanksgiving. I got it, you know. Make sure for me, design would be all of your recipes are printed out because, you know, you can't you got to be able to hand them out the day you're cooking. Everything's ready to go. Everybody's approved all the silly little nuances are nailed down. You've chose the colors of your of your tablecloth. You picked out the China. All this kinds of things for us in our everyday building projects because we now with WordPress, we do most of our designing in the browser. We don't do as much with the PSDS anymore. But I still want to give the client something to look at. What kind of general idea are they going to have on the page? So we don't do the full blown PSDS, but we'll do a wireframe or what we call a text wireframe. To me, this is the time when you start talking about the functionality that's going to be on the page. You're going to, you know, this is a picture and it's got donate and it flips over and it tells you something about the donations. This is when you tell them that you're not going to do a slider because they're silly. You know, they're gone. Don't do them. We've also started doing mini brand guides. If your client has come to you with a big brand guide, I mean some of the big guys come with these huge 30 page brand guides and you go, oh my god, we've thought of all this. We just do a two pager for our smaller clients and they love them. We just put down the fonts that we're going to use, kind of use some of the content that we're planning on using and see what it's going to look like. We give them the color schemes if they don't have one already and then we kind of pick out some images, some stock photos that we feel represent what they want to have the look and feel and we just give them, it's a two pager, they, a lot of them use it for other media, other things that they use. So other promotions they're doing. So that's really been great. It helps us hand things off within the project for other people working on it, and it also helps the client. All right. So build. Now we're cooking our dinner, right? The first thing we do is set up a staging site. We add all the plugins at this point because that gives you more time to find out what plugins are going to fight with what other plugins. Okay? Because it's nothing like adding a translation plugin at the end and finding out that it's going to jump all over the place on, with Beaver Builder or whatever else you're using. Okay? We build some and we show the client. Some people start building and they don't want to show anything and they want to finish it. Clients understand this is a process. Okay? So we do the home page, we get them to sign off on the header, the footer, in the home page before we move on. Make sure I show it to them in different screen sizes as soon as we are ready to do that. Because they might think the order should be different on the phone. So just go ahead and build it some. Show it to them. If you get approval on the phone call, make sure you write a note afterwards that says, just to confirm you said the header looked great. You know, glad you liked it. We're moving on. It just keeps it clear. Then you build some more. Okay? Continually check your site map and make sure all of the pages are getting done. We had one where we thought we were almost done and we realized there were 10 more sub pages. Like, oops, no, the launch is going to move back a little bit. And then we can weekly updates. We do them on the phone. We do a conference call. We'll show things. We do weekly updates throughout the project. But we also do no status reports. Okay? So I started off with the project vision just so you know, we know the client knows. We know what they want done. We talk about the project health. What's currently good, average or way behind. What we're, you know, kind of where we are in the project. It's a quick overview. What week of this? This one was week two of 11. And we were 15% in. Those should coincide. If you're at week eight and you're 15% in, you and the client need to have a talk. But they'll see it right there. What we've completed this week, that's usually several bullets, but it wouldn't fit on the, if we're in the middle of a project, several bullets, but that wouldn't fit on the slide. What we plan to, what we plan to complete this week, if nothing else, that holds us accountable. You know, we've got our internal project plan and whatever, but we're telling the client, we're going to get you these three things by the end of next week. Issues and roadblocks. What's the main thing that we always get blocked on with projects? What holds your project up? Is it you? Content. Still need content for this page and this page. Bright orange, because that's our company color, I've actually sometimes used a client's color if it's something that they're due, that we need from them. Just another couple of upcoming tasks and milestones, and then I'm trying to avoid talking about tools, link to our tool, our project management tool so they can be reminded of the full milestones and where we stand. And giving them links to it. Toward the end, I also give them links to the staging site on the bottom of that. If you're doing an hourly project, I do this instead of underneath the health, we do this little block. And I just show budget hours, actual hours. So if you've got a monthly retainer or something for somebody, this is what, and then I just put down what we've already accomplished for the month and what we plan to accomplish for the month. Internal QA. Who has a checklist for internal QA? Yeah, I do, you would. I've actually provided you one in the little templates, something for you to start with. This is not something that you need to build your own, but start with something. So me, internal QA can be like in some ways when you go shopping and you've got a checklist or you've got a shopping list and you run through, it must be hungry or something, but you run through the store, pulling the things that you need, and then you look at your list and go, oh man, I forgot to get the spaghetti on IL-5 and you go back and get it. We all know we're going to look at the header, we're going to look at the footer, we're going to look at some of the things, oh shoot, I forgot to check Internet Explorer. Which, if you have corporate clients, you still need to check in Internet Explorer because they're still stuck in Internet Explorer. I customize it by the client, like I said, if it's corporate and I know that they use Internet Explorer internally, I better check it on that before I send it to them. And then project specific ones, I don't necessarily do a user story because unless it's a huge project, hey we need to make sure we double check that this plugin is working this way, just kind of add to it within our team, we use teamwork, within our project management tool. I'll just add another task in there just to make sure I remember. Make sure you're updating it as technology changes. And then remember what's burned you in the past. Just stop before you send it out, before you sign off on it, would you be embarrassed if the client saw? We had some temporary picture in one time and I went to send it and went, oh no, we need to take that out before me. It was just something goofy team thing and like now we need to put at least some sort of stock photography in. When you send it to the client, give them specifics. So right now we're working on a project where there is an e-commerce part and so I'm going to make sure they have credit card numbers. They're not going to think to do that and they shouldn't be putting in their real ones because you don't have SSL set up, right? So give them specifics and you could go as far as user stories if you've got a big enough project but even just tell them pretend you're a client checking out here. Pretend you're a client scheduling something and just ask them to think that way. Also we're in the business, we know to check on every different screen. They don't. They don't think that way. They'll pull it up on the first device when they get your email that says go in there they're going to pull it up on the first device and then they're probably not going to check it on anything else and I'm not, I mean it's, we're in the business. We should know that. Remind them. And this goes back to the revisions rounds of revisions. We don't want a boxing match with our clients but you might as well like hold up the sign and say this is round one. Hey, we're ready for your first round of revisions. Let us know what you need. Okay, we've addressed that. Ready for your second round. And then they, it's very clear. In all honesty I had a client tell me I had no idea I was, I had over extended and so that was my miscommunication. I didn't want to be so specific and that wasn't fair to him. Alright. So launch sorry. Okay. So launch back to my Thanksgiving analogy is putting everything on the table right? So you've got to go back and look at your menu. Make sure you didn't leave the broccoli in the microwave been there. So even though you have done this a million times you need that checklist again like the shopping list in the store. Go back and you'll find something that you forgot. You do not want to be caught with the check box for discouraged search engines three months from now. That's not good. But that's something you would do on autopilot but make sure you've done it. And then again change it as you learn from your mistakes. Okay. Evaluate. Like I said I do this throughout so you know we had some issue with design the other day. I went down right in immediately and set up and wrote something down because I know I'm not going to this this project that we're working on right now it's if it's done in six months I'll be amazed so I'm not going to remember that right? So if you're really brave ask the client they want to tell you what ask him what do you feel like we did well what do you think we could improve in they want to hear that I mean wouldn't that make use look better? You know you're trying to get better. Ask them. Ask your team. What do they like? What did they like about the project? What did they not like about the project? We have a lessons learned meeting at the end of every project. What we're supposed to. We plan that. It's in our process. If you've got a large team and you want to do it anonymously as a survey that might help it might be more forthcoming. Look for ways to change and improve. That's really what it comes down to. One of the things I forgot to mention about the team some of the best advice I've gotten is from some of our contractors because they are they see other things and saw how other things have been done so it's really been helpful to ask them. This is the story time part some of the lessons we've learned thoroughly bet any other party involved. We've waited months for logos. We have waited months for marketing messaging materials. We had one guy tell us that he could do anything with the stream that was supposed to incorporate into our site and that ended up really being a problem. It delayed the project by almost five months. So really know who you're working with. I would suggest if you have some other external that somebody else you're depending on build them into your racy chart and you need them in that. Because your client your client needs to know because they're the ones probably paying the other company they need to know where it's coming from otherwise they just feel like they're being tossed between two people and you don't want them to be that way. Get everything in writing love when you have this really nice point of contact and they say oh it's no problem we don't have to do A let's do B. B sounds good and then you do B and he says heck no we're doing it doing A and that was what was writing so guess what we had to do A and B. So get everything in writing and make sure you know who should be approving that. One of the nicer things we've learned is that we allow clients in to make some changes before we hand it off. So while we're still building the sub pages they can go in and do make changes to some of the upper level pages. One it makes them feel more comfortable when you hand this side off and one of the reasons we use a content management system is so that we can hand it off to the client. We want them to feel comfortable when they when you hand them the keys. We do install a plugin called stream so which does let us know if they start deleting pages and you know we have to restore them or if they've made major problems but it does allow them to feel more comfortable before we get before we hand it off. So that's our process. Where do you start? I would say start with what you have. You know it's not perfect but you know you have some ideas of what you do on a daily basis. A weekly basis. Write it down. You know it's not going to be perfect. That's why you have the evaluation part. Start with the overall broad plan the one that I use for everything onboarding, discovery, design, build quality assurance user acceptance testing, launching and evaluating. Get specific. Include template links in your process. So like the one we use for the project update in my process it says set this up and it links straight over to that template. So if we make changes to the template it's easy to get to it's all right there. As you build your process get input from your coworkers find online resources and I provide some links to these guys but I use girls guide to PM she does more than just digital marketing but she's got all kinds of great suggestions and templates. The digital project manager this guy has saved my life I probably would be in a hole by now I actually took a class from him last fall and he does a podcast which I listen to on the way down here and he's got all kinds of great resources highly select that suggests his work. Track your mistakes and again I'm going to give you a template to do that. Keep going and keep updating and if all else fails remember why you have a process in the first place you want to be able to hand things off so that as your team grows you know you've got another project manager this is awesome or if you are you can hire a project manager this is how I want it done but if nothing else just so you can go on vacation. Hold on I thought my link was on here okay well I'll have to give you the link it's a bitly link slash sideways 8 process and I can show you some of what I put up there if I can let's see yeah okay that's not you got it? okay so that's where I put the slides and then I put this template up there for you obviously you'll want to change out to your colors my handwriting is really bad but I'll that's not oh you did it oh thank you sideways 8 process mm-hmm that should do it but yeah I've got and links to the digital project manager and all of that so he's got a Slack channel it's a really good community talks on there all the time