One of the biggest differences when you manage new companies is that you have often have to help them with their branding.

Fitting into the process

• Obviously, it needs to happen before any specific design work or deliverables can be created.
• The branding exercise is a concrete project consisting of planning, design and delivery.
• Functional planning of the rest of the digital projects can proceed after the branding project’s been initiated.

Do’s

• If budget permits – employ specialist logo and branding designer and copy-writer
• Most designers, specifically interaction designers, prefer that a specialist do the work
• If the budget forces you to use internal team members – have a meeting with the brand business owners, copywriter and the designer to discuss the requirements and constraints.

The brief

The company should have a meeting talking about the brand requirements. The project owner should have a meeting with the brand design team.

The design team will need a brief with:

• Company overview: What the company do/ sell
• Brand personality: A brief description on what feelings the brand should convey

Process

Conceptual design

The branding process involves a few meetings where all relevant business owners (e.g. marketing manager, CEO, CTO, COO, website manager), the project manager, brand design team, internal designers and copywriters.

After the brand design team received the brief they will do conceptual design.

Deliverables

• 3 conceptual logo designs
• with colour variations
• design story including the inspiration (what inspired them), identity (what it conveys) and the style
• possible taglines
• Showing how the logo looks in-situ with conceptual designs for two or all of the following:
• Business card
• Letterhead
• Website homepage look and feel

Design tuning

Involves exploring further design variations of the logos that the business owner liked and/or further conceptual design.

The final brand deliverables are:

• Logo – EPS (original layered file), tiff, hi-resolution jpg, low-resolution jpg
• Business cards for the main team memebers
• Letterhead – there may be multiples if there are international offices
• Tag lines
• Colour schemes
• Brief brand description

I know using the word problem is almost considered a dirty word in many management circles. I thought I’d make an interjection while talking about project managing new companies with my ideas these two words.

Problems. I use it when I know we need to find a solution.

Challenge. It’s going to be difficult but with hard work and a bit of ingenuity we’ll succeed.

An example: We want to do social media marketing for the company. The problem is that we do not have someone to do this work. The website and marketing managers are both too busy.

Hmmm… ok, why don’t we try and find a solution. We know that the marketing manager needs to recruit someone to help her. In the meantime I can set up a Twitter account and we can ask the website manager to update it one week and the marketing manager the other. While we talk about how we can manage the workload we will also discuss our strategy. It will be a challenge, since we’re all really busy.

I know I’m pedantic but that’s part of the job description. Hopefully I’ve clearly explained why I like using problem and challenge.

New companies with investment money

Project environment

These projects tend to be technology intensive where a large part of the company’s revenue stream is generated online.

Pressure

In addition to having a quick time to market there is a lot of pressure on the management team to proof the business concept to the investors. As the project manager you have to know when investment meetings are scheduled to ensure that the project progress is aligned with expectations of the investors and the internal business owner(s) doing the presentations.

Operational issues

• The company is still growing and therefore often completely understaffed. That means pressure on everyone.
• In preparation you should keep:
• A list of freelance designers, copy-writers, front-end developers and developers – in case you need some help
• Establish who is responsible for quality assurance – with any luck there will be a dedicated person – but assume that you will do most of the QA before the project goes live.
• Define gaps in the organisational structure and question assumptions.

An example. What’s the responsibility delineation for the website?

Business owners:

• Marketing manager – responsible for the definition, management, driving, success metrics and analysis of campaigns.
• Website manager – responsible for creating, maintaining content and the overall strategy of the website.
• Interaction designer – responsible for the user experience, design and look and feel.
• Project manager – responsible for planning, timelines, scheduling resources and managing digital projects.

So how does it work when you run the marketing campaign on the homepage of your site? Who gets to make the decisions?

• Overall the marketing manager should have the final decision in this case but the interaction designer and website manager must be able to change elements if it does not conform to the brand styleguide.
• As the project manager you should make sure that everyone agrees on how they work together and it may fall to you to put this in a formal document. Start-up companies generally don’t have human resource managers but hopefully the operations manager would have defined it for you.

Processes and procedures

• Come to terms with the fact that there won’t be any and that you probably won’t have time to generate the documentation on how it should work – especially in the first year of the company starting up. But that does not mean that you cannot prepare for it.
• Hopefully you would have a set of general documentation ready to present it to the company and fill in the gaps.
• Talk to the development manager and lead designer, get them to formalise and document the process they use within their teams.
• Then get them to document how they want the project managers to interact with their teams
• How they want development and design to interact
• The development manager should map out the go-live procedure, programming environments (development, UAT, production etc)

Phew! That was a quick brain-dump on my experiences with start-up companies. I hope you found at least some of the information useful.

The small business

Digital project management for new companies can be difficult but they’re a LOT of fun.

With new companies you have a branding sub-project to complete before working on the digital deliverables.

Type of organisation

In my experience there are two type of organisations you deal with in this case:
Small or sole business owner
Start-up business with a group of investors

Common problems
Although the process of setting up online solutions for them are similar you have to deal with these common problems:

• Small budget compared to project scope
• Time to market is quick
• Organisational structure isn’t defined or finalised
• Operational issues

The client

There is a lot of pressure on the client and as the project manager you have to help them alleviate stress. Generally they are paying for the work with their own money and they’ll end up doing the work on the websites, social media and other marketing.

You can help them:

• By starting the first meeting with a quick presentation on how online development works. This is a good time to explain the project life cycle, why things are done in a certain order and how planning and development works. Include a page where you show client involvement in the project life cycle.
• Ideally you would leave a print-out of a presentation so that they can refer to it later.
• Pay special attention to their role in the process – points where their decisions are required and the affect on the project timeline if they delay with feedback.

Other issues

• Design: Emphasise how many conceptual design and design iterations they pay for.
• Explain the change control system.
• Sign-off: explain why, when and the importance of them signing off deliverables in the project life cycle
• Timeline: explain how delay in sign-off will affect the timeline. Pay special attention to resource availability if you work for a small company. You may need to explain why their project is delayed by a month because they missed a deadline and the allocated resources had to complete other work.
• Costings: Be very explicit with your assumptions and deliverables
• Hosting: The operational management is often forgotten in costing documentation, make sure you explain recurring costs to their business
• CMS: If the website solution involves a content management system.
• Budget time to train them in it
• Emphasise that it’s their responsibility to write content and create visual elements they want to include in it. If your company has an in-house designer and copywriter – it may be a good idea to convince them to purchase a support contract – even if it’s just for a couple of months to help them get started.

In my next post I’ll talk about the problems and challenges when you do work for a new company with a group of investors.

With the importance of social media I thought it would be good to write a post on how one approaches strategy when you plan online projects. In this little case study I used my own Twitter account as the example.

Requirements

In this case the company requirements and my personal requirements are the same, as my jewellery company is also my name.

Distribute content I produce on protonode, my jewellery website and stringing-beads to Twitter:

• Distribute information on my jewellery
• Redistribute good information on digital project management, running a small business and beautiful objects
• Stay in touch with my friends consisting
• Connect with web professional, crafting and design communities.
• I only want one Twitter account
• I don’t want to spend more than half an hour a day on social media (excluding analysis)
• I generally access Twitter through my PC

User objectives

As we’ve seen when we looked at How Twitter functions, users and business owners are very closely linked. In general:

• People don’t want to be marketed at
• Want to find information they find interesting
• Want to be interacted with

Success metrics

When I decided to change my jewellery brand name I also had to stop using the Twitter account account associated with it.

• I had about 750 followers in my Tangentine account and would like my new account to have the same within 4 months
• I want 20% of my blog post readers to originate from social media sources; 10% from Twitter, within a 8 month period
• I want to be able to do quarterly competitions where you can win a piece of jewellery; at least 100 people should enter each competition and 75% of entries should originate from social media – the first campaign will probably not conform to these criteria as it needs to happen in the next month and a half.
• I want to reach 2500 followers within a year.

Follower demographic:

• Interest: 30% web and design professionals, 60% followers interested in craft related information, 10% friends.
• Location: At least 10% should be South African

Explanatory notes:

• Amount of followers may be considered low, but I believe in organic growth
• Follower demographic criteria are tests for content quality and that I follow the right people
• The location demographic is important to me, because I moved back to South Africa and need to understand the local internet environment better. I want to market my jewellery locally and location is another success metric for local marketing efforts.

Following/ followers:

Science and technology, science fiction, crafts, macro photography, gaming, web design and development.

Communities/ Groups

• The interaction aspect involves these groups and should grow to networks I mention in my success metric list.
• Astro&Neutrino: A group of artists interested in science
• Etsy community: Friends and acquaintances from my Etsy network
• Expat community: A group of friends who all have small craft businesses and have been, currently are or will be expatriates.
• Work mate community: People living all over the world that I’ve worked with

Open Issues:

I’ve used Google Analytics as a superficial means to analyse traffic from social media sources in the past but need more sophisticated tracking.