Rebuilding Our EDU Site, Part 9: Strategy vs. Culture
Or: How Key Changes on the Team Were Both Painful and Necessary
It’s been a while. A lot happened. There was an it-hit-the-fan moment that prompted team-level introspection, which led to re-aligning our team and efforts. It was challenging, but necessary. And it all started with…
New Faces
Our long-time vice president of technology retired Spring 2017. Many of us assumed that his second-in-command, whom he had been grooming to be his replacement, would succeed him. Instead, the position was filled by someone outside the College, someone whose large-organization, business background style contrasted sharply with MICA’s powered-by-relationships, get-it-done culture (gumption, as our vendor calls it).
Not long after her arrival, she brought in a project manager to serve through site launch. They had worked together before, and have a similar mindset, so, in a way, it felt like the project was being taken over.
Since then, I’ve come to appreciate their styles and have enjoyed their more opened-up, friendly, off-the-cuff personalities. I’ve learned from them, but at first, I saw them as a threat. What I learned soon after is that, like me, they’re direct and honest and say what needs to be said.
What they had to say was what I, the project’s core team, the College, and our partner needed to hear.
Old Questions, Now More Important
And it all started with a few questions that felt like an interrogation.
Where’s the project timeline? What about the business requirements? What is your training plan? Communications plan?
We had no idea how under resourced we were until then because we had been relying primarily on our vendor to guide the project. The project timeline was the vendor’s. The business requirements were the RFP written for us by another vendor. The training plan wasn’t a plan — we were just going to sit down with people one-on-one as needed as we always had. Communications plan? Everyone knew we were building a new website; they’d frequently let us know how much the current one didn’t work. When the new site launches, they’ll know we have a great new website!
Twenty-five percent into the project, we were on time and on budget. Right?
Our primary flaw was that we were under resourced internally and didn’t even know it. Each one of us was serving multiple roles on the project. Because no one had ever asked us for our own project documents before, we hadn’t invested much in them.
Moving Forward
Bringing on a dedicated project manager was probably the single most important thing we did to ensure the success of this project. I had been serving in this role, but I was only able to dedicate about 20% of my time to the task. Our project, which was huge in scope, needed someone whose sole responsibility was project management.
A good project manager is worth their weight in gold.
Ours says she did nothing, but really, she was involved in everything: ensuring timelines were met, risks were assessed, stakeholders were informed, business requirements were met, etc.
She showed us the truth about our project: that chaos was just beneath the surface and that to pull this off with limited resources, we needed to make sure we had all the work planned out and defined before moving forward.
Months after her arrival, with her guidance, knowledge, and support, we had our own project timeline, actual business requirements, and plans for everything. My own skills as a project manager (not a specific position I had ever held before) grew many times over.
Clarity
With our project plan, we were able to identify gaps and risks. This helped us to identify our need for someone to be dedicated to content migration. We contracted with a content strategist/producer certified in change management to lead our content migration team. Because we had spent so much time assessing risks and planning, we were able to bring her on board early enough to acquaint her with the tentative information architecture (IA) of the new website, proposed content strategy, and key stakeholders throughout campus.
Our new site was to be an innovative departure from traditional higher education websites, a stark contrast to our old site, and our content strategist’s experience managing change helped to socialize content owners to this change and win their support for when we’d need it later on when the actual content migration occurred.
Because of the time spent planning and forecasting, we were ready to take on the significant amount of work to come. Or at least we had a better idea of what to brace ourselves for.
Then What?
One word: design.
