 Good morning. How are you all? I'd like to thank you all for coming. This is so happy together project management managers and content strategists are. I'd like to thank DrupalCon for selecting me to come share my experiences with you. We're going to do some housekeeping and then look at content related risks before diving into a detail look at some steps that you can take on the projects that you might be working on right now. Wherever it is that you guys are working to sort of mitigate those risks that content creates when you're when you're designing and building and rolling out content management systems. I am a huge fan of Drupal. I work with it quite often. This is not going to be much like Karen mentioned this morning. This isn't just about Drupal. This is about content strategy and project management and how they work together. I am a project manager and I absolutely love content strategy and content strategists and so hopefully that will come across. Before we do get started, I want to quickly mention that there's a there's an update on what's going on in the the coding room next door. The FEMA folks are organizing some Drupal developers and Hopefully this works. We have a URL. It's help4ok.org I talked to one of the project leads. The biggest thing that they can use right now is something that anybody can do. You don't have to be a coder or a developer. It's to promote it to talk about it and so you should feel free to do that often. I think it's pretty incredible that something you know disastrous what could happen and this community is just like right there and jumps on it. That speaks Very loudly about the Drupal community. So help4ok.org. Check it out. Share it with your friends and colleagues and stuff. My name is Jake. There are resources for this for this session at our website cmsmyth.com slash drupalcon2013. The hashtags are drupalcon and so happy. And you can you can connect with me on twitter at jake demari and cmsmyth. The blog is the cmsmyth and I definitely encourage you to connect with me. I really do enjoy sharing thoughts and ideas about our industry and about the work that we do and so please do connect with me. Before we get going any further I would like to know get a sense of who's in the audience so I can try to gauge things appropriately. So real quick by show of hands how many project managers do we have in the room right now? Okay. Do we have any content strategists? I love you guys. What about developers? Okay designers. All right. That's about what I had figured. Any digital strategists? Awesome. So a really big question. How many people here think content strategy is vitally important to the work that they're doing now and believes it's going to help them build world-class digital experiences? Awesome. My job is done. We're all there. We can go now. So this is a company I work for during the day. It's called eyesight design. We have an office here in portland and the office where I work is in Boston. We are very interested and excited about building world-class digital experiences not just websites. We're going to talk more about that this morning and how content strategy rolls up to this idea of a digital experience. I'm also a contributor to the CMS myth. This is my passion. I love talking about content strategy and content management systems and the work that we do and the CMS myth is really interesting. We're not like a group of CMS analysts. We don't typically talk about any one platform although this particular article that's up here on our homepage that day was about WordPress. We don't have like a favorite platform where technology ignores it but what we do have is a strong perspective that technology is nothing without humanity and that you are the content management system or you're certainly an integral part of that. And so before I get started on my session we wanted to give away some swag and what I have here is this t-shirt and it says I am the CMS on it. I'm also wearing one myself. And what we're going to do is for all of you that have your phones handy and your computers handy if you're on Twitter or if you have Tweetdeck or HootSuite open, I would like you to prepare to type something into Twitter and then the first five people to get this message out on Twitter will concede John after the session, my colleague down there, and we'll get you one of these t-shirts. So here's the message. We're so happy with content strategy at DrupalCon PDX. And John you're not eligible to win. Glad I have my water nearby. I don't want to have a Marco Rubio moment during this session. So some quick level setting. As I mentioned I'm primarily a project manager. I'm not a content strategist and this is the sessions about my experiences. I'm on the agency side so I use the word client often. I'll try to use the word stakeholder because I know there's probably some folks here that work for the organizations that I typically think of as clients. But what I'm about to talk about, like Karen mentioned this morning and what Drew just talked about yesterday, this is applicable to anybody. It doesn't matter if you're a project manager or a content strategist. The chances are that you're dealing with these issues and what I hope to share is that content strategy is like design, right? And in the early days we didn't really take design very seriously. I remember when I got started it wasn't the most important thing because we were all struggling with the technology and over time design became more important and usability became more important. I hope that you all are starting to understand at this stage in the development of communicating online content strategy is becoming very important. It's something that's going to happen on your projects. The question is do you want it to happen intentionally or do you want it to be like that decision that gets made by the engineer at the last second before a site goes live? I'm not going to evangelize too much. I want to be, you know, this is going to be more practical and hopefully some of the things that Karen talked about this morning we're going to break them down and show you specifically how to do these things on your projects. But that being said, just in case there are any folks in the room who miss Karen's talk and haven't been keeping up with the content strategy movement, I do want to quickly share the idea that it is a really big deal right now. And my own personal acknowledgement of this fact has followed a similar trajectory to our industry from initial awareness to the present. But for me there was a watershed moment last year when I saw this tweet from the Mars Curiosity rover. If it's tough to read it says I'm safely on the surface of Mars Gale crater I am in you hashtag MSL. Some of you might be thinking so what right like the person responsible for tweeting updates about the recent landing that happened that day on Mars was probably just a little bit excited and they got away from themselves and they they changed the voice the editorial voice of what they were supposed to be tweeting which you know five years ago it might have made more sense that if there was a rover on another planet that it would probably just be spitting out hard data. But in fact if you were to go to go to the Curiosity's Twitter feed you'll see that that assumption is incorrect. In fact it's almost immediately evident that the Mars Curiosity rover Twitter feed has a distinct editorial style it's meant to be fun and approachable. On a strategic level I speculate someone made a very specific choice that this feed should inspire wonder and gain the interest of normal everyday citizens who vote for the politicians that make decisions about how to fund scientific exploration and that this hunk of battery-powered robot drilling holes in a frozen ball of dirt 50 million miles away from earth should have a content strategy fills me with a sense of wonder at the importance of what we do. Human beings like stories and they transfer from person to person like energy far easier than cold hard data. Someone made a decision that the Mars rover should have a personality that through the exercise of that very intentional content strategy the Mars rover should be a star and this all rolls up to you know one small part of NASA's overall digital experience which has changed very dramatically over the last couple of years. So I would like to say thank you to Karen McGrane and Jeff Eaton and Margo Bloomsdine and the rest of the evangelists that have been working so hard to get this idea out to us who are practitioners day to day. It's my genuine belief that content strategy helps me and the teams I work with provide better digital experiences and this is about digital experiences. That being said the promise of better digital experiences is is really great now but it's also my belief that content strategy makes my life as a project manager a heck of a lot easier and so I'll demonstrate why with remainder of this presentation. We're going to change gears and talk and get a little bit more practical and we're going to talk about seven content related risks that may take your project off the rails and then dig into ways that you can mitigate these risks. In order to understand how content strategy makes the life of a project manager easier why I and all project managers should really love content strategy it's necessary to better understand the mind of an average project manager. What are our fears and motivations? What are the kinds of things that we think about while we're working? Hopefully this is what you're thinking about when you work. I'd like to dive a little bit deeper into each of these areas one at a time. So scope right this is how we measure projects and it's very important I think we all know that. Building websites is interesting it's not like building a house I can't measure the scope and square footage I can't you know enumerate the types of flooring material that I'm going to use or what fixtures I'm going to use in the kitchen. We have to come up with sort of unique ways to measure the scope of something that's it's it doesn't exist it's vapor until we create it right it's just an idea and so scope obviously something that project managers think about a lot schedule what can I say there's the milestones and sort of the the deliverables on a project but then there's also the the challenge that all the project managers in the room know about of getting people's getting people together and getting their calendars coordinated so that's you know scope and schedule and and also budget these are kind of the block and tackling of project management there's there the things that we learn how to deal with first and there's not a lot of interest there and probably not certainly not what we're going to talk about today stakeholder expectations poppies and rainbows we don't have to talk too much about that the one I want to talk a lot about is managing risk when I put risk in the google image search this is what I got I'm guessing that in Europe there's a significant risk that giant birds are going to poop out cars but so I in addition to building digital experiences I study martial arts specifically Brazilian jujitsu and the first thing that we learn when we're learning to to fight in this style and I think in many martial arts is that it is necessary for you to face your problems right most people when they get into a physical altercation their instinct is to turn away and and run and when you're a competitive martial art you can't turn away and run if you expect to win very often you need to face your problems and for me this was something that resonated because it was one of the first things I learned as a project manager is that it was necessary for me to think through how things were going to turn out on the projects that I was working on and face those problems in jujitsu there are many problems we must face but the biggest one that we talk about a lot is that we may get submitted by our opponent who is trying to choke us unconscious and we call that very literally being choked out we use that term a lot you don't want to be choked out when you're fighting in jujitsu in project management we call the the the the act of facing our problems risk management and so what I like to do in the spirit of mixed metaphors is talk about the seven ways the content can choke out your project the first one let me get a sip of water is failure to appreciate the depth and breadth of a project so we talked earlier about scope and one of the things that I want to sort of get across is that scope schedule client expectations budget those things roll up to risk and it's it's risk that if we're spending time thinking about risk then we're thinking about all these things content equals scope this is the zakin bridge in boston it's part of the famous big dig or central lottery project planning started for it in 1982 and it was the most expensive highway project in the history of mankind to this day it was originally scheduled to be completed 1988 or 1998 an estimated amount of 2.8 billion dollars 2.8 billion with a b eventually was completed in 2007 at a number of 14.6 billion dollars I did the math and if you calculate the inflation that's a cost over one of 190 percent which is pretty significant and I know that most project managers in the room can probably say with a high degree of certainty that if we consistently delivered projects there were 190 percent over budget that we would not be project managers for very long there are other problems associated with with projects getting out of bounds and sort of the scope creep and scope issues and they have to do with wearing out the teams that we work with and that team fatigue is a very serious problem that we all have to take into consideration and so we're going to talk a little bit later about how content relates to scope and what are the tools we can use to mitigate that risk that content is going to choke out your project with scope so the second one I'd like to talk about is failure to recognize the critical importance of content failure to recognize the critical importance of content it seems silly to have to say this but it is all about the content the reason why users make a decision to go to website a versus website b is because of the content that's contained there it doesn't matter how usable your experience is it in fact I can I could we don't have time for it but we could rattle off lists of hundreds or thousands of websites that have content experiences that are absolutely horrific in there and some of the most trafficked websites in the world it's because they have content that users are looking for so this is the home page of the CMS myth arguably there are still things left here that I would say are content but it's a sort of debatable topic I think the things that I've stripped away it's fairly obvious that it's the copy it's the images and it's the sort of meta information about them without that what do we have we have nothing so everything we do is about content it's about creating cont containers for this content and so I think it's really important to recognize a failure to recognize that critical importance of content is a big risk number three failure to plan for creating and or revising content so I am actually about two weeks away from deploying a site for for a major university and this is a really exciting project it's been going on for 18 months and during this entire process of designing a new web experience for them a responsive front-end experience on a new content management system and reshuffling their information architecture and and and all the stuff that we think about all the time we think about my client in the meantime is deciding content that they don't want anymore figuring out what content they need to rewrite and writing new content and that is a phenomenal amount of work and it's all happening in parallel with what my team is doing which is designing and building and working out you know marketing optimization and all that kind of stuff and there's a point and I happen to be in the middle of it right now and I probably have 5000 emails where the content that my client was generating is merging with this web experience that my team is building and and I can tell you that when that is done that is what the client or your stakeholders if you work at this you know if you're on an internal team are going to be most concerned about and it's where a lot of things are going to surface a lot of problems are going to surface and so we're going to talk more when I get into the sort of the solutions about what you can do to mitigate the risks that you know failure to recognize how difficult it is to create content and to revise content can be failure to understand the challenges of designing with dummy content uh so I see this one a lot laura mipsum I'm going to read this is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry it has been the industry standard dummy text ever since the 1500s right we're in the 21st century we're building digital experiences that need to be available across multiple form factors and still to this very day on projects that I am personally working on I catch designers using laura mipsum as the primary source of content while they're designing this is a big problem right it's okay to use laura mipsum if it's all you have and you need something to fill the space but it's not okay if you don't have access to some of the real content that's going to be used in the experiences that you're building we need to understand the context of the content that we're designing we need to understand the length of real lists the length of titles the length of navigation items and the list goes on sorry I'm struggling with allergies and so it's not really appropriate uh to use laura mipsum for the only as the only source of content while you're designing web experiences number five failure to properly plan for content migration failure to properly plan for content migration there's a guy uh in boston who created an entire career around uh content migration for drupal um he works for aquianow um it's a big deal right getting content from the sources that subject matter experts or copywriters are writing into um or from old content management systems into the new systems that you're designing and building is very complicated I love this image um it's very sort of optimistic and aspirational I can kind of imagine myself as the project manager in that ultralight guiding my my flock of geese or cranes or whatever those those birds are from from point a to point b and we can kind of imagine that this is like what a content migration experience might be like under ideal circumstances um but I'm imagining that this might feel more realistic to to anyone in the room content migration is hard it's difficult uh and it's a huge client risk we talked earlier about um you know clients having a lot of anxiety about the fact that they're writing or revising content at the same time that you're developing the the container for it excuse me um this is another one of those things that is going to keep your stakeholders up at night and if you want to be a real sort of Jedi um you can make it easier for them so we'll talk about how um the time it takes to move content into a website is a very uh a big deal and it requires careful planning number six failure to plan for the disruptive effects of owning a new content management system um so I'm from Boston I mentioned earlier and uh I could tell you that uh in Boston we love to go to Fenway Park for Red Sox games and uh the weather patterns in Boston being is as they are during the summer it's quite frequent that storms will roll in from the west right around the time the sun is going down which is right around the time that you finally got to your seat you've got your your core's light and your uh and your popcorn and you're ready to see the game get started and this happens and I mean this is something that all human beings can identify with like we do not like delays um and and if you're if you're not planning for the disruptive effects of owning a new content management system and I don't care if that means your client's going from WordPress to Drupal or if they're going from an old installation of Drupal to a new one uh this is disruptive this is going to cause problems and it's going to keep people awake at night um I sometimes being a project manager it's like being a therapist right when you get to that stage with your clients where you have a great relationship like learn to help the content writers and the people that are interacting with the system understand that you're in their corner you've got their back and that you're there to help them when when they take ownership of this new CMS and we're gonna we're gonna talk a little bit more later about how you can do that nobody likes game off failure to understand the gravity of business requirements so at eyesight and at at the CMS myth we we use this this diagram often when we're talking to folks about digital strategy we call it the seven gates for digital change and what I like about it how I thought it was relevant to to this session today is that it sort of puts things in their proper place right content optimization technology which Drupal would fall into that circle culture and governance vision etc these are all just small parts of the overriding sort of goals that businesses have um and and what what I've learned over time is that in order to go from you know being a project manager that does one-off projects and then those clients go away and I don't ever talk to them again to being a project manager who's becoming a consultant for my clients and it's having long-term relationships with them a big difference was understanding that businesses have goals and that's really what I'm there right I'm there to help them solve the problems that are standing between them and achieving their goals so what can we do to mitigate these risks of content choking out our projects um well the first thing you could do is hire a content strategist right that that would be easy um I've noticed there are a lot of women in content strategy I don't know why there is there's also a lot of women in project management I'm the only male project manager at my office um and to help make the case for uh the importance of simply adding this team member I want to take a quick very quick sort of walk through my own experiences um growing up within this industry um Karen mentioned this earlier this is the original webpage put up by CERN um in April 30th 1992 um obviously it's not a very sophisticated website as revolutionary as this was when we look back on it now it seems kind of silly and and simple um and it is compared to today um this is not a picture of me but back then I was a webmaster I had a I was the webmaster for a brick and mortar company and this was the kind of this was the person that would be responsible for managing managing and maintaining a website like this you had a message that you wanted to get out on the website you would get bring it to your webmaster he would put it up on the page and that was how it worked right simple we weren't thinking about design we didn't have to wrestle with images we had no video there were no mobile devices so on and so forth um fast forward to year 2000 this is the apple homepage um as you can see design obviously playing a much bigger role we still hear this today clients come to us they say I want my design to be like apple clean lots of white space you know fortunately nobody asks for the jelly buttons anymore they've been sufficiently put to bed as you can see there are some other important details here one of them is images right another one is video the quick time I don't anyone remembers back in 2000 quick time people were starting to actually watch videos online and it was really exciting and interesting and it was something new that we had to we had to wrestle with so around that time I became a web developer and I was paired with a web designer at the at the at it was actually a traditional advertising agency that was starting to offer digital services to their clients and myself and this designer would basically get work sort of business requirements from an account executive and we would run off and try to make it work and bring something back to them and they would say no that's all wrong and we would do something else and bring it back to them and they'd say no that's all wrong and then finally the account executive to say that's it and then they would bring it to the client and we would start all over again the client would say no that's wrong and we would go back and forth and it wasn't very profitable but we knew we all had to be doing it because it was the direction that everything was going 2005 this was actually this was a webby award winner pretty typical web experience what's really important here that I want to point out is that we've got this we've got this rate finder application this policy login application a lot more content we've got video integrated with the experience we also have this the very beginning idea of like giving the website an experience or a voice that matched the organizational brand with the the lizard the Geico lizard saying vote for me and also by this time for for organized the kind of organizations that I was working with static content is dead we're all on content management systems now we're starting to dabble with personalized localized content delivery and things are getting a lot more complicated we're also beginning to wrestle with the very first wave of smart mobile devices around this time like the palm trail and the original blackberries so a few years earlier Jacob Nielson and Jeffrey Zeldman had worn out the conference circuit and by 2005 all anyone could talk about was usability and so we sort of added to this team of necessary folks and information architect which soon became known as user experience architect I'm going to speed things up a little bit with teams getting bigger we also needed the addition of project managers and so we've got the Jedi King of Middle Earth there that's the project manager you know I added that in it's kind of obviously to be a little bit funny but I want to point out once again that this is about my experiences in 2005 you may have been a one person team or you may today be a one person team that's that's building absolutely brilliant digital experiences designing doing content strategy and building especially in the Drupal community we find that to be true there's some very talented folks you may also have been working for a company like Ico that had hundreds if not thousands of people maintaining their website but these are kind of the essential roles that you would expect to see so present day digital experience team we don't really have just developers anymore we have engineers and front end developers and experienced designers and architects and project managers and digital strategists and marketing and optimization specialists and content strategists it goes on and on and on the web is getting incredibly more complex and to define success today your your experience is not your website your content needs to be targeted portable mobile social responsive local global relevant I don't know if anybody was here for rally's talk last night but there was a few more terms that could be added to this point is that we're not just thinking about screens anymore like Karen talked about this morning and at the same time let's not forget the significance and influence of search results which has been growing steadily right alongside the complexity the complexity of digital experiences for this entire time content teams now and have for many years need to think about how content is consumed by algorithms not just human beings and and and so another place where content strategy obviously plays a major role so what can you do if you don't have access to a digital strategist which is a very real possibility especially for folks who are working on smaller teams then it's necessary to make sure that in your project lifecycle you're including the right activities and milestones and deliverables so we're gonna we're gonna take a look at a few of those right now the first one that I like to talk about is a content audit right this is a this is a specific step that you can take on projects that you're currently involved with a content audit is a detailed content inventory and associated analysis the best time to do it is during scoping or discovery and this talks about we you know we talked earlier about scope related risks associated with with a project scoping is you know it would be the best time to do a content audit before you ever sign agreements with anyone or before you set expectations about what you can deliver it's a good idea to know how much content you're talking about right the reason why we do this is to reduce the cone of uncertainty all right if if I say I'm gonna you know if you come to me and say I want a website and I say okay I'm gonna give you a website and we don't have any conversation about how big it is there's a pretty good chance that I'm setting one or both of us up for failure and so the way that we do a content audit this is project management porn right here I love spreadsheets and this is a very detailed spreadsheet it's got like seven or eight tabs down the bottom of there and they all have tons of deep content this output is created by an automated tool which I have up on the resources page for this session it's called Xenu link sleuth we just call it the Xenu report if you're not familiar with it I it is indispensable I highly recommend it Xenu link sleuth goes out to a URL that you provided and it gathers an incredible volume of information about that that website however you're not done there in order to be to do a good content audit you should you should not just run automated software but you should then take that that data that you get that you receive from Xenu and you should analyze it and when you analyze it it should be a group conversation you definitely should include user experience architects designers marketing and optimization folks and business stakeholders in the analysis of that that data you should look for you know pockets of abandoned content and you should compare the content that you get from Xenu against analytics what and so the reason why I would do that right is that it's always amazing when clients or stakeholders they have these pages and they think they're so important right they're like this page is so vital it's so necessary I do a lot of work with higher education and a lot of times there's like these there's sort of a decision about what content is important based on politics which is important and it's not something that should be ignored but the reality is that we're building user experiences and some pages of content like they don't ever get visited and so not that they shouldn't be there but there should be some attention paid to how much resources you pour into things and it should be based on facts so highly recommend doing an automated report getting an audit and then analyzing that information comparing against real data talked early about the fact that you should try to do this during scoping if you don't do it during scoping discovery but this should be done if you have if you're on a project right now and you're like getting ready to do content integration and this hasn't been done yet it is still a good time to do it so this is one of my favorites we're going to talk about message architecture and a message architecture essentially when it's delivered is it's a hierarchy of communication goals earlier I talked about the the curiosity rover which something which is to me is really interesting because i'm like a real science nerd and it's it's sort of inspires wonder but the thing that was really interesting from a content strategy perspective about the curiosity rover is that it had this voice that was very approachable and friendly and all that stuff and where that guidance comes from for copywriters is from a message architecture it should be done during discovery or design but it can be done at any time and the reason why we do it is to learn more about the brands that we are representing and collaborating with there's a couple of different ways to do a message architecture i'm going to go ahead and say that both of these come from margot bloom signs book there's a link to it up on the resources page i highly recommend that it's called content strategy at work and and what i'm going to i'm going to sort of describe briefly how you do both of the varieties of cards are message architecture activity as described in margot's book the first one is the card sort and what we do during a card sort is we have this this big deck of index cards we do it during a discovery session or a strategy session and what we do is we spread out all those index cards on a table and we invite our our stakeholders into the room and there's three special cards and they say who we are who we'd like to be and who we're not and what we do is we ask them to sort all of the cards into those three columns and then when we're done with that we ask them to sort of clean it up and what i've noticed is that what happens to stakeholders they'll have these three columns and then there's just this big blob of cards underneath it and they're like this kind of feels like who we are but maybe it's who we'd like to be and so we ask them to sort of clean that up and then remove the who are not column right it's not that it's unimportant but it's not it's not uh pertinent at this point so we sort all the cards into three columns remove who are not then we confirm the remaining two columns who we are and who we'd like to be and then we remove who we are right and then prioritize what remains and record and i'm going to come back to what we do with this next in a minute but then i want to talk about what the other activity you can do um and by the way you could do this or the other one which is the Venn diagram approach or you could do both right we recently did it for the cms myth and we did both and it was interesting to see how things worked out in the Venn diagram approach this is a little bit different we don't give them index cards with words written on them with adjectives written on them we give them two circles on the on the whiteboard one says brand attributes and the other one says audience needs and we ask them to either use markers to write whatever words come to mind up in those circles or in this case i use sticky notes um this is supposed to be a quicker sort of less uh difficult way to do things um what we ask them to do is place emotive words in the brand attribute circle first and then place emotive words in the audience needs circle um and then explore the overlap and and record the overlap hopefully that's the sweet spot when uh after so now we're moving on to the next step as the project manager or the content strategist or the moderator what you would do with this recording is take those prioritize communication goals and put them into a message architecture which is a deliverable that you could share with your stakeholders in the case of the cms myth we discovered that the way that we want to be perceived by our audience is contrarian we're provocative but we're also optimistic we want to be empowering and provide tools and inspire action um we like to be innovative um it was really interesting there was a lot of conversation about what's the difference between leading edge and bleeding edge and cutting edge which i mean it seems like a naval gazing but really it was an interesting conversation and helped us understand as a group of content writers you know who we are um and that we want to be egalitarian and build community the other part of this is the the design implications and the copy implications so one of the things i really love about a message architecture is that this doesn't it's isn't just about content this is about design and it's it's an exercise that's going to help your designers out a lot so for us the design implications were that it was okay to use the popular memes for imagery you shouldn't use stock photo of people in offices everybody hates that what kinds of fonts we could use etc etc so message architecture isn't just about content strategy it's something that it's this is information that's very valuable to designers and i i highly recommend it also have some copy implications a couple of pro tips when you do a message architecture set up the room in advance like i said earlier this is something you would do during a strategy session or a discovery session highly recommend doing it in the morning when everyone's well caffeinated get the chairs out of the way this is something that's meant to be active and people should be up and moving around provide snacks and refreshment write the ground rules on the whiteboard in the case of the last time i did this the ground rules were that this is about the brand and that's actually a really important distinction you don't want people to slip into the idea that they're writing who we are as operational goals they're really writing about who they are in terms of brand attributes how the how the their audience has perceived them that was the second rule perception equals reality it was really about how the how we want the audience to perceive us and and that it was a safe environment if you're working with stakeholders that have sort of different positions within the organizational hierarchy it's a good idea to let people know when you're doing these kinds of exercises that you're trying to discover where the conflict is and and that's actually a rule that could apply to any exercise that you do with with your various stakeholders conflict is okay if it's done in a healthy way so the next thing we'll talk about is migration planning earlier we we had the slide with the birds and the ultralight plane and how you know sometimes it can lead to a train wreck when you don't plan properly for migration this is documents that detail the effort associated with content integration the right time to do it is during design or development the reason why we do it is because migration is hard so some more spreadsheet here for you I want to talk about this talk about the columns a little bit I know they're very difficult to see the first one is it's called page number and this is a system that we use at eyesight essentially what we like to do is come up with a unique identifier for every page that we're going to be dealing with and by the way the last spreadsheet I talked about was a content audit that was the way things are this is a content migration plan this is the way things are going to be so that's a very important distinction the the content audit informs what's up here but this is this is definitely a different a different deliverable the second column is the page name pretty self-explanatory the fourth column is the content source so what we're doing there is we're letting the copy or the content specialists that are eventually going to be responsible for entering this perhaps manually keying it into the system we're figuring out in advance where the copy is going to be where the content is going to be and providing them with information about that so in matrix organizations where you know your content integration person may be rolling into the team well after design and development a lot of these decisions have been made this is a really valuable tool to give them this kind of information owner the fifth column is owner so who is the person that makes the decision about whether or not an individual piece of content is ready to be published I can't stress enough how important that is it's probably going to be an executive stakeholder or your project manager on the client side or whoever it is somebody is responsible and is the person who has the authority to decide when a piece of copy is ready to be published and so you want to know who that is the sixth column there I think one two three four five six is template type and Drupal we call this content type Karen talked earlier about this this battle between blobs and chunks or you know we a lot of us refer to it as structured content it's not really a that the idea of structured content and content type particularly for people in the Drupal community is not a new idea right we've been dealing with this for a long time and when a content person that's going to be integrating or putting this content into the system comes along it's a great idea to let them know what content type each of these rows is by the way in case it's not immediately evident each row is a node in the system or the experience that we're creating I'm not going to go through all the rest of them there's a lot of they essentially events structured content that could be different from project to project whether you know in your case meta information might be very important it may be necessary to create a column for every image that's going to be within a structured content type or video files or whatever it is a lot of that is custom generated however what's off the screen I do want to talk about I couldn't fit it in there is workflow right so we all know that when we deliver this new content management system there's going to be some kind of workflow associated with receiving content putting it into the system deciding whether or not it's ready to be published and this is part of the the risk of not understanding the difficulty of creating content so I found it's very useful to start to enforce the concept of workflow early and often before you ever turn the CMS over to your to your content people get them used to the idea that there's a workflow so try to find out early what that workflow is going to be put it into the content migration plan and try to try to make use of it Karen talked about this again earlier structured content versus blobs if yours the folks that you're working with that are generating the copy don't have a system if they come to you and they say hey listen we're going to be writing copy while you're building this site where do you want us to write it I get this question all the time do you want us to write it in word do you want us to like what do you want us to do ideally if you can rapidly prototype a Drupal system that has the structure content that's great but if you can't and they have to write in word or for whatever reason they want to write in word or whatever you know the the word processor of their choices it's a really great idea to create a template for them to follow this is just an example it could be anything it's obviously going to be custom for your specific needs all these fields should be associated with the attributes of a structured content type so migration planning pro tips start early and update often like I said earlier be informed by genuine workflow let's take holders know that this is a living document it doesn't get finished and so that also touches on another concept that it's not really super pertinent to the idea of content strategy and project management but something I'd like to talk about it's an adjacency when you are sharing deliverables with folks it's a good idea to use some mechanism or some approach that allows you to have version control so everybody knows what the most recent document is you could use anything you want I happen to like base camp some people use SharePoint whatever it is make sure that when you're sharing deliverables with people that everyone knows what's the most recent version this spreadsheet right here it's going to change often particularly once the migration starts because one of those columns says is this done and people are checking it off and so you want to make sure that everyone that's working on this has the most recent information have a sign off column talked about that so you know some way to indicate that a piece of content has moved from point A to point B is a really great idea CMS governance documents this is documentation of the rules and vital information associated with the CMS you're turning over great time the right time to do this is development no earlier how are you going to tell people what the rules are if the system hasn't been built yet the purpose of doing this is self-preservation if you're a project manager and you have any expectation of ever getting away from the constant phone calls after you've delivered a system to someone it's a good idea to have a document that outlines things like hosting information who to call for support who to call for content management etc etc etc that is by the way the owner's manual CMS governance is the owner's manual the next thing we'll talk about is user documentation this is a how-to manual right time to do it again it's during development the reason for doing this is self-preservation but it's also for what if anybody's ever heard of Seth Gottlieb he's a he's a blogger in our industry talks about portfolio rot in addition to just handing over a document like a pdf document says this is how you put a news item into your CMS it's a really good idea to give your stakeholders tools so if your designer had a photoshop file that they use to create the treatments of images that show up in those big beautiful hero banners that show up on the home page carousel turn that over to your client give them the tools that they need in order to be successful and they they will love you for it so that's it the seven ways content can choke out your project failure to understand scope failure to respect the content failure to plan for content creation failure to design with real copy failure to plan for content migration plan for your new CMS and failure to understand business needs six things you can do to mitigate these risks hire a content strategist conduct a content audit create a message architecture do migration planning write documentation and who won those t-shirts excellent come see john if you're looking for your t-shirt and what do you think go to this website and evaluate and does anyone have any questions so the organizers asked me to be sure that if you have a question that you go to the microphone because the session is being recorded i hope that doesn't discourage anyone from from asking a question so while people are coming up for questions just in case you didn't see the tweets the winners are and these are twitter handles not names quiller c duo consulting o brian editorial world of t and cne y 26 which i don't know how to pronounce so see hi there hello so as much as we as project managers love a good content audit spreadsheet and a good content migration spreadsheet clients hate them how in your experience have you been able to get better adoption using those types of very necessary tools that's a great question so um what i try to do uh is explain the long term value of them um and that doesn't always work believe me i know um i have one client right now that they just they don't think that they've come to us for any assistance with anything that doesn't have to do with designing images or designing interface and building the site um but most of the time particularly now when we if i stop and take the time to sit down during the the project manager kickoff and explain why we're doing these things as opposed to saying we're going to do them i find that the adoption rate is better hi there um i'm interested in the problem that you mentioned with using lorem ipsum as part of the design um certainly i can understand that it's a little misleading for people because a lot of what you put in for for dummy content winds up not really accurately representing what's finally going to be on the website so that makes sense but the counterbalance of course is that when you show people a design which contains um content that doesn't make any or that makes too much sense to them then the content becomes the focus rather than the design and the same goes for information architecture and so yeah so how do you balance those problems that that's a fantastic question and it is definitely something that with every single project i wrestle with um two two sides to the answer one of them is that i i firmly believe that the risk of not using real content for design at this stage in the sort of the development of of building world-class digital experiences far outweighs the the sort of headaches that that you inevitably deal with the second part is again uh it's it's over communicating so every time um we go in to present designs to one of our clients before i say to andrew's the creative director i work with all the time take it away um i give a preamble and i talk about exactly what you just said we're showing you copy that is your copy please do not get hung up on the period being one extra space please don't get hung up on the spelling please please please i promise you that's all stuff we're going to deal with what we're trying to do now is events the user experience from a design perspective and um even though i say that and even though the clients look at me and nod their head and say i fully understand uh it it does still lead to problems it's just a matter of constantly reinforcing so the the short answer is over communication thank you in the messaging exercise that you did the card sort and the then is there a recommendation that you have for virtual teams doing that when you're not in person is there a tool that you could use for that that's another good question so uh without being too cheeky i'm going to say definitely check out margo's book because she mentions it and i just can't remember exactly what her um her solution was there i do remember her saying if this is something that you can do in person obviously you're going to get the best experience your clients are going to have the best experience that being said um uh there's a couple of different tools we use for virtualization eyesight design is a virtualized company we have offices in boston and portland our clients are all over the world and and we use um adobe connect for desktop sharing and uh we're also starting to play with google hangouts um so thanks thank you hey you kind of glossed over the the seven gates for digital change can you go into that a little bit more each of those yeah absolutely let me back up here so oh and by the way the all the slides will be up on the resources page um let's see seven gates for digital change so again the idea here is that we are creating digital experiences um for our stakeholders our clients um and you know one of the things that it's important for me as a project manager to keep in mind for engineers to keep in mind for designers and content copywriters is that we're all small parts of a bigger picture that rolls up uh to to appropriate digital experience and so um what we try to do more and more often these days is uh go in before so ideally clients come to us and they're they haven't already decided what their solution is they come to us and they say i've got a problem all right i have goals or aspirations i don't know how to get there and so we will start with a strategy engagement that hopefully informs uh the eventual design team on what they need to do and we go through that strategy engagement we try to unearth what's going on behind all of the circles here so i think john do you happen to know what time we have to be out of this room okay i just have one question i'm a project manager and i love my content strategist team and i really resonate with what you're saying when as pms we definitely play therapist i think that is 70 percent of my job is being a therapist um for the client but can you talk about any tips or tricks that you have when we have to play therapist for our content strategists um because sometimes there's that bridge that divide that happens between trying to help them also understand the intricacies and issues that we're dealing with with our clients as a therapist sorry yeah no that's a great question therapist for the content strategist um i haven't i'll be honest and saying i haven't had to play that role yet and i think um one of the things that's interesting about content strategists is that they are taking a more holistic look at the entire experience um that being said there are there are content strategists who are user experience architects right um and their user experience architects first and they tend to take a usability first approach to the problem which is fine it's an important uh angle um but sometimes all of us as human beings we we have it we can sometimes have a tendency to look at things from a full sort of a focused perspective and not see what's going on around here and so um quite often when there's conflict on a project regardless of where it's coming from um it has it always has to do with some problem in communication some some lack of communication or some miscommunication at some point and so whether it's content strategist whoever it is on the team that's having difficulties um i find that uh if i can remember not to first like freeze up and then go to my supervisor who happens to be john and complain about the problem but if i can try to find a way first to communicate with the folks and try to get everyone together and talking better it always leads to better outcomes so anything else i'm not quite sure how to phrase this question but i was wondering if you had any general thoughts on project scale we deal with a lot of small clients and we have that problem where the our contact is wearing a number of different hats and even though we try to convey the importance of content they're still coming down to the deadline and they still haven't started working on their content and um yeah just kind of general thoughts on um dealing dealing with that there's any tools that kind of might make that easier for them like um that one of the thoughts the back of my mind is maybe we're not approaching them with the best possible method that's a really good question and it's actually something that's really for me was a personal difficulty that i went through i went from being the quote-unquote web master or web developer for a brick and mortar company in the 90s to working in an agency environment where suddenly it was i was the team the web team and now i was working with web teams and at first that was difficult i had a tendency to want to do everything and i had this attitude of like you don't need to do that step you don't need to do that that's not necessary look i'll show you how to get this done right and uh you know i got my nose bloodied a few times before i realized that there was a better way um and a big piece of that uh coming to terms for me was the knowledge that um every step in the process of getting from an idea that lives in some person's brain to in our case an experience that lives up on a web screen or on a mobile device or through google glasses is a necessary step in the process and so the only choice we have really is whether or not we're going to take each one of these steps um in terms of dealing with smaller teams the really important key to understand for for me was that these steps don't have like i wouldn't use the same size step uh at harvard university as i will use for the cambridge community foundation i'm still going to do a content on it but it's not going to be a month long process for the cambridge community foundation like it was for harvard university right it's going to be an abbreviated version of it but i'm still going to do it all right and so uh i guess what i would say is that take a look at ways to make sure you go through each step um but see how you can scale them up or down so that it's not too painful for folks i hope that helps anyone else awesome thank you again so much this has been a really wonderful experience