 I'm DTL. Thanks for coming and participating in the session. I realise that it sounds like kind of an odd name for a talk. I'm sure as we get into it you'll hopefully get a handle on what I'm talking about. If you want to tweet me any questions, if you want to follow up anything afterwards, my Twitter handle is the web princess. So as my website is the web princess pretty much anywhere you look for the web princess, you'll find Disney princesses in me. I'm not really a princess. So this is what we're going to talk about over the next 20 minutes. Adding value. And as the talk progresses you'll get a little bit of an understanding of where this idea of adding value came from. I'm a project manager. I work with large scale clients building big software projects and manage teams that cover a great geographical distance. So adding value is something that's become very, very important in what we're doing. Slide number one. So you will get through these first slides really easily. No, we won't. I need the presentation to actually show my notes. Alrighty. Okay, so let's go back up. Okay. So take a moment before we start to think about the following. What are the things in your life that you value the most? I'm guessing that for most of us those things aren't necessarily the things that we paid a lot of cash for. They will be the pictures on the fridge that our kid drew. There are things that we've made or built with our own hands. The things that we've worked for, the family relationships, the friendships in their life. These are the things that are most important, right? So let me put a different spin on that. And let me ask you this question. When have you felt that you and what you offer were valued by someone or furthermore by a client or by a company? How did that feel? One of the things that helped prompt this talk is finding myself in a situation where I... There was an obvious competition between me and the company that I represent and another company offering pretty much exactly the same thing. And I had to start to quantify exactly what it was about us and me that made a distinction for the client so that they would be prepared to pay our prices for the work that we did as opposed perhaps to somebody else who might charge them less. And this was actually a really difficult thing to do and I think we'll probably all find that as we sit here in this room a group of us, no doubt many of whom are competing in a very similar marketplace it's actually quite difficult to decide or to articulate what it is about you that sets you apart from the person next to you who's doing exactly the same thing. So in the next 20 minutes we're going to try and unpack how we convey our value to our clients but also what we can do to make our value more demonstrable to clients. The most obvious demonstration of value in a business relationship is when you can demonstrate to a client or to a manager, I will save you money and you can do that fairly easily by pricing yourself at lower than your competitors. Now in my opinion that's the lowest common denominator anyone can adjust their prices and as each successive person adjusts their prices down it's a race to the bottom. And at the end of the day if your client is only interested in saving money you'll be completely expendable as soon as someone else comes along who will price themselves at lower than you. So we're going to go right past this as an option. There are better ways to demonstrate our value. I asked some of my peers what they do to demonstrate their value to the clients and I'm having problems with presenter here. For some it's about proving their expertise, for others it's about the relationship that they build and maintain with their client but for all of them the biggest demonstration of value is what they uniquely bring to their particular project. So this is my revelation about value. There are no doubt other value statements that you can make that you could go and research if you wanted to look more and more about what you can actually do to demonstrate your value to somebody but we've only got 20 minutes. So we're going to dwell on this one. Adding value isn't about telling people about your services it's about listening to them and offering what they need. And I'm just going to preface this first section that we're going to talk about is adding value and client relations. Before you can even go adding value in this you actually have to believe in your own value. You can make all of these statements about the value that you have but unless you actually believe in yourself that this is the value that you offer. This is problematic to try and deliver. I could probably do another whole talk on that so we'll think about that at another point but hopefully by the time you get to the end of this you'll actually have some tools to help give you confidence to actually deliver some of this. You do have things, you uniquely have things that set you apart from your competitors and what you offer will add value to your client. And so for the next, for this first section of the talk we're going to talk about adding that value and client relations. The first thing you can do is actually listen to them. How many times have you, just as a show of hands how many of you are actually freelancers building client sites doing client work? How many of you, thank you. So how many times have you taken a client meeting and spent the whole conversation thinking about or thinking ahead to how you're going to make their website what plugins you're going to use, how you'll set up the custom content and generally losing yourself in what you'll be doing rather than actually hearing what the client needs. So it's time to stop taking meetings like that and actually instead listen to what your client or your potential client is telling you about what they need. Listen for things as they're talking that they may not have considered. Remember you're the expert in this situation. You understand what you're offering and the client is trying to articulate to you what it is that they need. They may have an idea of the results they want to get. They may not necessarily know the steps to get those results but have a listen and understand really clearly before you even start to try and decide what you're going to build. Have a listen to understand what it is that the client's trying to articulate to you and what it is they actually want to get out of this. So the first demonstration of value you can give them is an understanding that it's all about them and what you're trying to do is to build and serve them and their clients. It's not all about you. I heard anybody's feelings there. A little bit careful. So it's also possible you're going to hate me by the time this is over because the recurring thread throughout this whole conversation is actually about putting other people's needs ahead of your own and pretty much everything in you at some point is going to say but what about me? We'll come to that, I promise. For now, trust me that if you make your clients success as your priority and help your clients serve their customers it will reap benefits for you in the long term and I'm actually living proof of that and we'll talk a little bit about that at the end. I want to say because I know that some of my clients are in the room there's a difference between servicing your clients and serving them. I want to be really clear that serving a client doesn't actually always mean doing exactly what they say. I'm going to lose my job soon. But an actual fact because I'm not trying to turn you into a doormat I know it's really, really easy when you've got clients that are paying you money, they're putting a lot of pressure on you but at the end of the day you have to be able to have some strong conversations. You have to be confident enough that what you're doing is the right thing and the right thing for them and be able to articulate that and stand up and be able to put boundaries and when somebody says we need to do this it's okay to have the conversation that says so have you thought about and be able to turn some of those conversations around. I'm not saying that the client is wrong I'm not saying also that the client is always right but you do have to be able to be internally strong enough to actually do not just what they want but what's best. Of course to be able to do that you have to be able to have an understanding of what is best. So you need to be well researched and strong in your understanding of what it is that the client needs and confident enough in your relationship with them to be able to articulate some of those things. One of the challenges around that is that you have to have the client's trust before you can get into those situations and some of those hard conversations and building up trust in a lot of cases comes down to really clear and honest communication. So all of these things things like I can't even remember what the previous slide was serving happens out of a place of relationship with your client you talk and you listen. So I'm fairly new at project management actually I've been doing it permanently I guess for at least the last 12 months but as a contractor for 18 months before that. One of the enduring characteristics of a lot of the projects I've actually happened to end up on have been that they've all been difficult. I'm not quite sure what it is about me that attracts the difficult projects. We've had crazy tight deadlines we've had huge software spaghetti messes that we've had to come in and fix we've had demanding and difficult clients and we've had to build their trust because their trust had been eroded by an unreliable dev in a previous experience and I'm pretty sure a lot of us will have come across situations like that where we're coming in to fix up a mess and we have to build up this trust with our new client. At the end of the day I found that with all of them in a resistant way it's been possible for our team to get back into that place of trust is to be open and honest in our communication with them. It means being responsive when somebody asks for something it may be a question of hey Dee can you do this for us? I can get back to them fairly quickly and say yes I can but I can do that on Tuesday it's better than waiting until Tuesday to say yes I'll do it for you now if the client has an understanding that you've heard them and that you have their issue in control and then you deliver on Tuesday you have a much better platform of trust going so that the next time they say to you hey Dee can you do a thing if for whatever reason I haven't been able to get back to them in the usual speedy time I've got a lot of trust in the bank already so I was going to say get away with it it's probably not quite the right word when this client is in the room it's a lot of expectations and one of the big things that we've been able to that I'm happy one of the things that I consider a huge part of my job is expectation management and making sure that not only my team who are working for me but the people that I'm working for understand where we're at and one of the things that I'm quite proud of is that we take that very seriously that kind of communication which is what our tool is to build that trust so it doesn't actually mean being on call 24-7 but it does mean being responsive and being proactive so in a lot of cases too one of the things that we'll do is be fairly forward facing around keeping the client in the loop of what's happening even if it's information they haven't asked for if we're being really active in our communication with them it helps us in the long run so it's really very high level of view around client relations what about adding value in the actual physical management and ongoing day-to-day aspects of the project so you've landed the gig what are some of the ways that you can add value or demonstrate your extra value in the process of putting together and developing the website so in this section I'll lead you through some of the ways I use in day-to-day management of projects that help define the direction that we take especially in the early days of a project the first key is planning now I appreciate that if you're a solo operator some of the keys here may sound like overkill but hear me out taking some time at the beginning of the process to document all the plans all the parts that you're planning to build will help the project and also help speed you up when you get into future projects so let's talk about creating a backlog a backlog is actually really straightforward it's just a list of all the things that you want to do that you need to do in order to be able to deliver this project it may be that a lot of the bigger tasks are broken down into smaller chunks that you can work on bit by bit and for us, in most of the projects that we work on, they're fairly large-scale long-running projects, the one that I'm on at the moment or one of the ones that I'm on at the moment has been going since October of last year and we've launched Phase 1 but Phase 2 is not going to launch until February of next year so these are long-running projects that obviously have huge amounts of features that we're building and a really, really, really long backlog of work that we're going to do the backlog list isn't static it changes and it grows as the project does so we may start with all of the big chunks and all of the features identified about what we're going to do we may not have sat down and figured out all of the tasks that the developers are going to have to do to build it but the elements of a site may be something small like just a series of pages for a business card site, they may be an e-commerce site they may be a whole bunch of custom content that you need to build to deliver all in all, the backlog is a living document and just as the project flexes, the backlog flexes with the needs of the client and how we prioritize that is where we first add some of that value and this is where actually add value first came from I'm familiar with agile project management I realise there's probably not a great many of us that are project managers here the framework around project management that we use is called SCRUM one of the tenants of SCRUM has been really transparent and open with our clients is where a lot of this communication type stuff that I've already talked about has come from but one of the things in SCRUM is having this backlog and having the priority around it and how we choose the parts that we work on first will often be a case of looking at them and seeing which is going to add the most value to the client first so it could be that the project that you're working on for a client you may be adding content to it bit by bit you might have done all the planning you could figure out all of the things that you're going to do and for most of us, I think with small businesses you'll just sit down and you'll build the thing and then you'll deliver it all completed at the end and the client will get to see it at the end and you can host it and people will be able to visit the website so one of my challenges is if you want to differentiate yourself from somebody who's doing things like that what if you are having an ongoing conversation with the client as you're building and I'm quite happy for you to kind of counter me on this when we're doing Q&A but what if you were looking at this list of things that you were bidding for the client and one of the things that you were doing was what if in order to actually get some really early value the first thing you do is throw up a landing page and optimize it for SEO put in a contact form so that you can start gathering their emails and you're actually starting to deliver for the client before they even see the website but you're giving them an opportunity to start building their network you're giving them a place to send people to say hey, we've got a website coming soon here's a little bit about what we're going to do and getting people involved getting the client involved first and giving them something that's actually going to add value to their business before you've even started building the site as a huge win in terms of your relationship and it starts to set you up as this expert in your field and it gives the starts to create this differential between you and somebody else who may be quite capable of offering the same thing maybe in actual fact this is a brand new e-commerce business that they're starting to think about but they're not 100% sure of yet I'm going to say this out loud and I'll probably get booed from the audience because I'm actually going to say the word Shopify and say what if adding value to their business is setting up a really quick store on Shopify that's got three products that gives them an opportunity to start getting some money and before you actually dive into the huge expense and challenge of building a WooCommerce store you can probably set up a WooCommerce store that quickly too in a lot of cases that may well be a way that you can add value it's partnering with the client it's conversing with them it's actually seeing what's going to help them really early on rather than just assuming because they've come to you and said we want a website that that's exactly what they need so we have our backlog we have a list of things to do we're scouring the list and making sure that the things that we pick out to do first are actually going to help the client one of the other practical applications of large scale project management is to build iterative and you're going to trip over this one iteratively so instead of this whole business of starting finishing, handing it off it's conversing with the client throughout the whole process hey we've built this part we've got the about page up, we've got the contact page up the first part that you could actually build to even publicise may just be a phone number and a Google map so that people can actually come into their bricks and mortar store and always be this case of starting and finishing and then handing off again we can add value to the client by keeping in constant communication around what they're doing so if you're working through a good backlog prioritising the features of the client as you go you should be able to demonstrate each feature as it's built it can be really encouraging for a client to see the progress as it happens and not just right at the end and help them to be able to judge how this product, how this website is actually going to serve them and you may even find as you build this and if you're keeping in contact, if you're building iteratively and building it feature by feature it may even happen that you'll get to a point where the client goes actually we can stop there, we're getting our massive amount of return on just this part so this other feature that they may have requested they may not need and having that kind of flexibility and being able to work in that kind of flexible way can be really really valuable now I understand that that can be a challenge particularly if you're a freelancer and you're looking at a particular paycheck at the end of the month but I think the benefit in a lot of these cases actually turns around into a longer ongoing partnership than just one paycheck but again happy to be argued with in the Q&A if you want so again this is very high level I'm really happy to dive in deeper if you have any questions but the other area that we can really add value is actually in our community and this is a part of WordPress that's really close to my heart I've been deeply involved in the WordPress community pretty much since I started but I'm curious if this is I'm curious how many of you this is your first contact with the WordPress community in general or in Singapore so you're great now I want to ask all of you how you found out about WordCamp but I don't have time so if this is not your first contact with the WordPress community how many of you attend a WordPress meetup either in Singapore or wherever you're from how many of you people didn't know that there was a WordPress meetup once a month here in Singapore now that you know how many of you are going to go so is there anybody here that organises a meetup I know Jamie does I do so here's another question how many of you have come across the WordPress Slack how many of you don't know what a Slack is does anybody not know about Slack okay Slack is a messaging tool if you've been around for a while you might remember things like IRC that shows how old I am I'm really sorry you're all too young Slack is a messaging tool it's a place where it's like forums essentially but it's in its own app and I'll show you how to get connected to the Singapore Slack there's also a WordPress International Slack where you can log in set up your user and you can have ongoing repeated conversations with other people about WordPress or about business or about development or about anything so anyway I'm getting ahead of myself I'll show you this live for that in a sec so if you don't mind me indulging me for just a second I want to tell you a little bit of a story my first contact with WordPress community was at a WordCamp like this in Melbourne in 2011 and I I found it because I stumbled across an ad this was long before things like meetups showed up inside the dashboard of your WordPress site I Googled WordPress conferences for some reason and found that one was happening very soon and so I travelled to it and all of a sudden I had this understanding of all of these people that were doing the same kind of thing and I talked my language that understood what I was talking about when I said I was building a site or I was doing this because I can't tell my family about this stuff they have no idea so at that point I decided to kind of dive right in and so I went back to I was living in Sydney I went back from Melbourne to Sydney and started helping out organise the WordPress meetup I went from organising that meetup to splitting that into a second meetup of two meetups in Sydney, in fact there's three now where people get together and learn and discuss and talk and share ideas about using WordPress and building with WordPress I went on to organise a WordPress meetup a WordPress WordCamp like this I did two in a row, the last one was five years ago this is how hard it is my business really suffered because I did two WordCamps back to back that was a terrible idea anyway the long story short is a huge amount of my business and the connections that I've made and the fact that I'm doing what I'm doing now for a company like the company I work for is hands down because I've got involved and served and worked in the WordPress community what does that look like well first of all it's show up, it's go to a meetup it's connect with people participate in the meetup, talk ask questions, offer your meetup organisers ideas for talks offer to do a talk meet people there, connect with them and start connecting and talking to them you can add enormous amount of value to the WordPress community just by showing up it doesn't have to be fancy if there is no WordPress meetup in your community start one or get on to Slack and start meeting other people in your area maybe you're interested in blogging with WordPress maybe a niche kind of type would be really valuable for people in your little corner of WordPress it doesn't have to be all about development it doesn't have to be all about SEO it could be just a case of how do I best use WordPress to manage my blog or I'm a blogger I want to connect with other bloggers we have just started or restarted the women's meetup at WordPress Melbourne and we get together for two and a half hours on a Thursday once every two months for lunch it's a WordPress meetup I don't have to organise a talk I don't have to do anything else I don't have to pay for it actually I do have to pay for it I pay for my lunch I don't have to pay for everybody so I don't have to find sponsors but it's a meetup and so there's so much scope for so many different kinds of meetups and you can add value to the community by doing something like that and it's a meetup they start recognising you as an expert even if you don't feel like an expert somebody was telling me this morning about faking it till you make it and I am living proof that don't tell my clients sitting over there but I fake it till I make it every day at work and it seems to be that we're making it so once you've got to that point where you're understanding your and the WordPress community and you're participating and getting involved maybe you can step up and start adding more value by actually contributing maybe it's doing a WordPress talk about how you discovered WordPress maybe you're a represent a company that could help support a meetup by providing a venue maybe you want to sponsor by paying for the pizza for a month and get a little bit of recognition for your support by doing that there's so many different ways that people get involved everyone tends to assume that contributing is just a case of creating a talk there's so many more ways to actually add value to the WordPress community and to your local community than just doing talks maybe you could keep the meetup page up to date maybe you're really great at content writing and you could write blogs that are going to help promote your group there are so many different ways to communicate what you're doing and to help participate in that so I thoroughly recommend if you are available to make some time to help build your community talk to your WordPress meetup organizer and see what you can do see what they need serve and you may find that you get served as well finally if you're the kind of person for whom leadership comes naturally or actually even if it doesn't there's scope for anyone to get involved in leading meetups and other parts of the WordPress project particularly if you come to it with an attitude of service talk to the leaders of your community and offer your help maybe you can become a leader and help spread the load of organizing a meetup maybe you can organize a specialist group within your meetup like our WordPress for Women maybe you could do a meetup you could do a workshop do an occasional one-off workshop maybe you could do a kid's workshop to help encourage younger people to get involved in WordPress there's so much scope there's genuinely no limit to what you can do and what we can do if we have enough enthusiastic participants I'm pretty confident that if the guys decide or the team wants to organize another word camp next year they'll be looking for more help and if you're interested in events and doing that kind of stuff there's definitely scope for helping there as well just don't say that to them perhaps today they might not be ready to do it again and give them a few weeks to get over it so having talked about ways that you can help the WordPress community here's where to find them for those of you for whom this is new information first you can go to meetup.com and look for WordPress meetups and most of the time I think you can specify the area that you're looking so if you're in Singapore you can find your meetup there and they will tell you details of when they're connecting and getting together if you don't have a meetup group then you are one of the ways to get involved or one of the ways to actually start looking at how to set one up is to go to make.wordpress.org there's a whole organization they're dedicated to actually supporting people organizing meetups so if you want to create a meetup somewhere where there doesn't already exist one that wasn't the right English I can't remember what I did anyway go to make.wordpress.org set yourself apply to set your meetup up WordPress foundation actually pay for the meetup fees so you can set up a meetup without actually having to pay the quarterly fees for that which is really helpful and there's a huge number of people my, me, John who are in the forums and chatting all the time and helping people support new WordPress meetups and even WordCamps and Slack so I mentioned Slack before this messaging tool it's actually an app that you can install on your phone and on your laptop and you can have I should have taken photos of it but you can have conversations with other people both in Singapore or wherever you live and around the world and this is where you find out about it make.wordpress.org that tells you about Slack and how to get connected to the wider WordPress foundation Slack there's the Singapore Slack and there's a list there and that other link and I'll make these available online so that you can find other local Slack and conclusion my adding value in the WordPress community has paid big dividends for my career and adding value to my clients has done the same so while you may have heard me say through all these previous sections that I'm all about serving that you need to serve your clients absolutely believe that if you serve you yourself will also be served however, while meeting needs of others even as you find that your needs are met to it's important for us to have an attitude that the benefits are a by-product of our service rather than the reason for our service people can spot someone who's been self-serving and so if we serve selflessly we win more people to ourselves and if we are obviously doing what we're doing for our own benefit don't be that person thanks I haven't checked do we have time for questions we have five minutes just be enough awesome I love that there is a great I answered all the questions before they even asked Heidi with regard to giving regular updates about progress to the client have you encountered something where the client request for revisions to the unfinished product up to a point where it reflects from the call progress of the building itself and how do you manage that so the question is how do you manage where if you're showing the client as you go the client actually wanting to revise while you're on the go yes I have for the most part it's all about the communication I unless I can see that the revision that they're asking for is very specifically needed then I will perhaps do it because we're running and because of the scale of the projects that we're doing we use scrum and what that generally means is that we will set the work that we're doing for a sprint and that is the work that we'll do in that sprint so we have very clear boundaries before we even have that conversation so we can say to them you do appreciate that what you want here is out of scope we are finishing the sprint at this point we can introduce more work there let's talk about that then so in a lot of cases it's boundary setting and we have or because of this way that we structure the project we have those boundaries built in that's the ideal it's very difficult to do that when you're on your own so it is a thin line but it is a very much for me generally a case of being able to set that boundary and say yes I can do this this is what the impact is going to be do you want me to proceed understanding that that's what the impact is going to be is usually a really good way of introducing that conversation I do appreciate that it's a little bit of a tricky it's tricky because I'm suggesting all of these things and it actually introduces a fair amount of complexity it's a lot easier to take the client's money go build the thing and then talk to them at the end the problem that you have there is that they don't have that opportunity for that communication so it's a fine balance between finding yourself under pressure but also being able to push back so you have to be strong enough internally to be able to push back if you need to I think is probably the most expedient answer I have a question regarding a client sometimes the client if the client don't know what they want how to communicate with them oh you see this is where it starts to get into a sales conversation and I'm not a sales person so so pretty much my go to question around that is what is the problem that you're trying to solve so the client may come to you and say I want you to build me this thing here this is what the thing needs to look like however if you have an understanding of what the problem that they're trying to solve is may actually be that the way to solve that problem is different than what they're telling you that they want so if you understand the problem and can build according to the problem and solve the problem you're winning them without actually doing exactly necessarily what it is that they say that they want so that's my first thing is understand the problem so it may be that a lot of conversation and stuff has to happen to get to that point so understand the problem and give them a solution to the problem without necessarily so that's how you help them get to that point of knowing what they want really because it's actually at the end of the day it's not even necessarily about design that becomes part of it but at the end of the day clients have needs their customers have needs if we have an understanding of what their customers need we can help them solve their problems and that will help uncover what it is that they need I don't know if that helped, did that help? Yes, thanks and the other thing is sometimes when you join some community when the number of people when the people size is small usually the conversation quality is really good you enjoy it but when the number of people increase over a certain amount of people then it seems like the conversation is not that focus so how to make the balance at the same time when you engage more people you also ensure the quality is not compromised That's a difficult thing because we've certainly seen this happen as communities grow you get the same questions over and over again and you're like I answered this question last week and now somebody news come along and they're asking the same question again I don't necessarily have an answer other than to try and recreate smaller groups within the bigger group so you actually start finding the niches that you're more interested in and certainly in something like Slack where you've got a whole lot of different rooms you can get involved in finding the smaller groups is actually helpful it's a big room where everybody's talking and rehashing the same thing over and over again and particularly with meetups what we're seeing happen is that we're getting a whole bunch of since WordPress started showing people's meetups in the dashboard we're getting more and more people coming through which is great but we're getting the same kind of questions over and over again and so planning groups or events around catering the needs of those start reintroducing this idea of more groups that target particular niches or particular areas here's a user group we're all going to talk about how to build a WordPress site from the ground up how to build a local machine for beginning developers so you actually have to start reintroducing this idea of smaller groups within the bigger group to help counteract that busyness and that noise I think no problem thank you let's give a big hand to detail thank you thanks for having me if you have further questions you can look for her during tea break or the after party so right now we're going to move