The latest changes removed all the blog posts from the main site – specifically because I rarely write on this site. It’s not because I don’t want too, but because either the stuff I’d like to share won’t help my business or hurt my future job prospects. In fact, the last few posts have been set to private.

It’s frustrating because I have a lot to say on a number of subjects including politics and some of my current work but won’t take the chance of getting burned. My hope is that I’ll be able to start sharing more about my current work sometime this summer or autumn. I don’t want to be the “cryptic poster” but there’s a lot of stuff happening right now that only five or six people know about but — I hope — will turn out to be very cool.

For now, it’s revision time …

I guess an engagement, move and new project can make the time fly by and I expect 2016 to be no different. While I won’t be moving, the wedding, another job search and the completion of the first part of my new project will certainly be a lot of fun.

The owner came in last night and it was really good. It’s a great product and should do very well.

The work has been good for me because it gets me back into consulting and marketing strategy plus there’s a few of the topics that are easier to teach via example such as persona development, social media monitoring and the planning process in general.

Over the last few days it occurred to me that time is starting to run out on doing this project. My goal is to give the presentation and develop the plan before the students do theirs so they have at least one example to use as they develop their plans.

Large projects that have multiple work products (these are papers or analyses that aren’t handed over but are used for the final deliverable, which in this case is a presentation and marketing plan) really require a project plan. It’s not just the procrastination that’ll get you but the fact some of the work just requires some time to develop.

When doing your planning – start thinking about what parts are required for the final work. In this case, that’s easy since the marketing plan template is in the class book. From there, think about what will be needed to fill out this plan. You’ll noticed I recommend create the template first at almost every stage of this work. It’s the easiest and fast way to avoid confusion and find clarity.

I often start by creating a mind map with all the things I think I need to do. This includes the headers on the template and subsections where and when appropriate.

Mind map for current client

Mind maps can be as detailed or high-level as you like. It really doesn’t matter as long as the outlining helps you take a very big idea and start breaking it into pieces. It is easiest to estimate if you think about all the activities that you may need to do up front rather than later. Do you need to monitor keywords and gather the results or do some secondary research? Will you need client meetings and then organize those notes? Anything and everything that you’ll need to do should be listed since later you’ll a) need to do these things and b) you’ll need to have some estimate on the timing.

We’re taking a big idea like a marketing plan and breaking it into smaller and smaller chunks. Eat the ye’ old elephant in bites. By the way, you don’t have to use a mind mapping software – outlining tools (Word has one as does OneNote) or a piece of paper will suffice.

Once you have the components of the project, then start thinking about when you’ll need to have them completed, as well as, how long you think it’ll take to complete each area. There are two big terms here: duration and effort. Duration is the amount time that will go by from the start to your deadline. The duration of our semester is 15 weeks. Effort is the amount work time that is needed to complete each and every activity. The business case study make take 4 hrs of effort, while the quizzes may take 1 hr of reading and then 2o minutes to take each quiz. The total effort would be 1 hr and 20 minutes. As a hit, think of round numbers – I never estimate lower than four hours for big items. It’s easier and if you think it’ll take two then four means your estimates will be more accurate.

The other thing to contemplate is dependency. Do I need to have the personas before I do the strategy? If the answer is yes then plan to complete the personas work product before the strategy. Some of these things will overlap but make certain the horses are in front of the cart here.

Once you have tasks (I called these components earlier) and some idea of the activities needed to complete the task, the dependencies and effort / duration then lay them out against your deadlines. I’d start from the end and work backward. This is commonly called a work back schedule. It’s a simple process – it’ll take us a week for the presentation and our presentation date is on May 20th, then we need to be ready to start on the presentation by May 13th.

I move from a mind map to Excel for this little exercise since Excel can create a nice little Gantt chart:

Once the work-back schedule is in place, also can be called a t-minus schedule since it’ll help you with the count-down timing, then move to your project planning software. This technically can be done in Excel but I find it a lot easier to use a tool like TeamWork PM or Trello. I’m using TeamWork on this one since the project is pretty complex.

TeamWork or any online project management tool will allow for team collaboration, timing and even reminders. Once I have the tasks and timings I then use each one of the task areas to create a “Milestone”. Milestones are major accomplishments within a project – a major milestone in my life was graduating high school. Graduating high school was special but it certainly wasn’t the end of the road – no?

I write milestones as a deliverable. Project plan completed or Personas approved by client. There’s some debate here but it’s all about helping your group reach the end result so whatever helps you think about these – use them.

The milestones go in and then I create task lists for each work product or area of analysis. These are buckets for tasks – Personas then break down the task list into actionable items.

In the example below the Task List is Strategy, Monitoring and Tactical plan and the action items are below it. I should be able to finish off the work with the action items listed. TeamWork and the other online collaboration tools allow commenting and assigning these items to team members, as well as tracking progress.

Task list and items, Milestone is the diamond

You’ll want to add start times to each action items and then really focus on the plan while you’re doing the work. A lot of people write the plans but fail to actually follow it. A recommendation is to make reviewing the plan the start of each meeting.

The final item for sharing is the high-level Gantt chart I’ve created for this work. It’s a PDF and you can download it here.

Good luck with the work and please let me know if any of the above points are unclear.

Finding the Right Anything for the Job

I’ve been thinking a lot about needed skills a lot recently thanks to a project I’m pretty involved with seems to be staffed with people with all the wrong skills. They’re very skilled in their areas of expertise but for some unexplainable reason the team needs basketball players and we have a bunch of very good football players. The fact they’re good in a sport is helpful but not ideal.

The challenge is that instead of us getting together, working out some small skill gaps, there’s a faction of the team who needs not only to be taught about the game of basketball but also something akin to – this is a basketball. Do not chew on ball, nor tackle others with the ball. It’s unhelpful. And, making things worse is that nearly all the oversight on the project aren’t really into sports but have been put on the team because they’re major contributors to the Arts and Sciences.

When in discussions on building a team or staffing, I’ll inevitably pull out my favorite quote from Disney, which is “you can’t train what you didn’t hire.” A simple phrase that pushes groups to really understand the skill sets and personality types needed before looking for the right people. Are you looking for an outgoing Type A for a front desk? Well, don’t hire a type B introvert. Need a number cruncher? Don’t hire an artist. Got some writing work? etc, etc.

Funny, until recently I never really understood the concept. In fact, it’s helping clarify a number of things for me concerning staffing at INKtopia / TechWhirl. We’re looking to add a few part-time folks over the next six months to help us with a few of our INKtopia Consulting projects.  We would have been careful to hire before my current experience, but now our prep work pre-recruiting will be doubly important.

My view of busy is certainly different than yours so I swore it off as a phrase. Sure, it comes out but rarely.

With all of that being said, the amount of work that TechWhirl and I are facing in the next sixty to ninety days is fairly daunting. For me there’s the job hunt, helping finish off a long over-due side project (not my fault they vanished for six months and then showed back up) and managing all the things that two houses on the side of a mountain require.

For TechWhirl – we’re coordinating an awards program, preparing to launch our consulting business, managing two webinars, publishing a couple really nice thought-leadership articles, covering two events and managing the current consulting projects we’ve already secured.

There’s so many different projects that to write the above paragraphs I had to open up our project management tool to make certain covered all the high-level stuff. While this work load would probably shut down a lot of companies or people, it’s not too bad for us thanks to some robust planning.

We’re not busy, but we certainly are fully utilized. The trick has been being very diligent in planning and then working the plans. We / I use a variety of tools to get the job done.

Planning / Brainstorming – MindManager from Mindjet

I use MindManager because it’s the tool I’m most comfortable with and it is very good at getting ideas out and organized. It’s project planning tools are mediocre at best but for taking ideas and organizing it’s very good.

There are freebies out there, but I’ve never used them. It’s probably worth trying them out before forking over the money for MM.

Enterprise Project Management – GanttProject

This is a new step, but it’s working pretty well. GanttProject is an open source version of MS Project. We use it to list all the projects we have going and their work tracks.

Project Management – Team Work PM [TWPM]

Think BaseCamp but useful. We put every project and main tasks into this tool. They’re continually improving the site with better project management capabilities like effort tracking and Gantt Charts for time management.

The weakest part of TWPM is their enterprise / all projects reporting, thus the need for GanttProject.

Weekly Planning – MindManager

We have a list of the projects from GanttProject & then looking over TWPM, we then decide the priorities for the week. It’s a derivative of agile project management’s daily stand-ups and it’s worked very well for us.

This approach allows us to take the big picture and make certain the little picture (daily work) still make sense. It also helps us capacity plan. I loathe the idea of working late (because I get up very early) but if it’s a day or week that I need to be up, then so be it. This little tool helps us know it’s coming.

Daily Work – Things App / Todoist

I am an avid believer in the Getting Things Done methodology. It’s a hardwired thing for me.

I use Things for Mac because it was the best tool out there three years ago when I moved to OSX from Windows. Today, I would probably move to Todoist if I had a newer iPhone and iPad, but they don’t support iOS 6.

This level of planning has to do with what I do each day. TeamWork will say “send email to judges” so that becomes a project in Things and then I think of the things I absolutely need to do to make that happen – brainstorm note, find emails, write note, send note after editing.

It sounds pedantic and it is, but it’s a lot easier to motivate myself to find email addresses than something more complex. It’s the biggest lesson from GTD.

I’m sure some of you reading this think this is a lot of work, and to be honest you are correct. But, with these tools for my company and myself it allows me to get a ton of things done and still sleep at night.

A lot of people wonder how two people get so much done. I’ll suggest it’s because of our wonderful very special writers and the activities I mentioned above.

I manage TechWhirls @techcommjobs Twitter account. In theory it’s our Twitter pipeline for jobs posted on jobs.techwhirl.com, but since we can’t seem to give away this space, it’s basically a curated list of good articles. Each day, I review a list of possible articles sent to me by Google Alerts and choose ones that are somewhat unique and well written.

One topic that I see weekly is talking about having an online brand in the age of social media. It’s one of those buzz-y things that “thought-leaders” desperate to show they’re in touch with cutting edge things say at conferences, but what I’m unsure if this is in the hey use Vine for all your documentation (by far the dumbest thing I’ve heard recommended or discussed) or smart phones are going to revolutionize things so get your websites ready bucket (useful).

From my own experience recruiting, I know that if I see posts that are overly political, behavior that suggests the person isn’t focused (daily updates from the local pub) or obsessions that suggest the person will be irritating in the work place it’s a major red flag. So, as a guess posting dumb things is a problem, but what about thoughtful things? I have had less experience seeing this happen.

Brands are funny because they often happen when people are doing things rather than “trying” to do things. Apple didn’t decide to have a high-end brand, they just made high-end things and people started associating those characteristics with their name. The same thing for McDonald’s (children, decent cheap food), Disney (children, good values, great experiences) and Walmart (large variety, cheap prices).

We each have brands at work too. Who in your office is the whiner? The show-off? The smartest person in the room but is decent? Is a giant D-Bag? Who would you want to be on your project or would quit if they were staffed with you?

I’ve always thought the way to a good reputation isn’t to say things but to do them. I’m proud TechWhirl is getting a reputation for innovative ideas, hard work and dependability. We’ve never said we do these things, but have through hard work and some creative thinking done them.

Thinking about it as I’ve written this, I do think sharing things that one is passionate about is a good way to build an online brand. But, for the love of Mountaineer Football, do it because it’s your passion — not because you just want to build a brand. Brands mean nothing if there’s no substance behind them.

I loathe doing it on a weekly basis, not because it’s not a worthy activity but it’s a farking time-sink. Thanks to Storify’s terrible embed functionality I have to create the Storify version and then do some small writeup on TechWhirl. The hardest part is trying to think of some theme each week. Now-a-days I use whatever is happening in my life as the little theme.

TWTW does force me to follow what is happening in my own industry, which is good. My background isn’t in tech comm and my daily job isn’t focused on the mechanics of the authoring tools, but the overall trajectory of TechWhirl. Luckily Connie is far more connected to this side of the business so she focuses on ensuring that we’re publishing content that’s relevant and interesting for our readers.

While I find the detailed details of Tech Comm less interesting than reading shampoo directions, I do find the larger role this version of communications plays in a business really interesting. Actually, I find the fact that a majority of companies, and by that I mean managers, completely overlook the value in helping their customers property understand the product they’ve purchased fascinating.

How did a majority of managers and leaders miss the fact that the experience their customers have with the product will determine resale and influence brand? I’ve mentioned this idea to a few of my branding friends and it was as if I’d given them a sheet of clear aluminum.

Now that my life is starting to get sorted out, I plan on writing more on the role of technical communications in the role of business and customer experience management. It’s an area that really does need explained better to help marketing and branding departments better understand it and prioritize it in their businesses.

Marriages are wonderful; divorces are awful.

I would highly recommend not getting married until after you’re 30 so you really understand who you are and what you want rather than taking a guess in your 20s. I may spend some time writing about the logistics of getting divorced including how farking worthless 99% of online reviews are (lawyers have embraced online reputation management) and some interesting gotchas in the asset negotiation part of the process. Oh, and don’t cheap out on a lawyer – go top shelf from the start.

I’m now back in WV wondering what is next for my life. It feels like I’m at one of these crossroads in which I can choose to finally give up on big dreams and settle or I need to get my sh*t together and start moving toward something useful and sustainable.

I’m leaning toward getting my sh*t together, but the draw of giving up is pretty big right now. I know it’s the burnout, illness (three big ones in seven months including fighting through the remnants of one right now) and fatigue that’s got me thinking about finding a company that produces TPS reports, but the feeling is very real, right now.

I’m spending today recovering and planning for this week and the future. The future is bright and there’s a number of things in my life that are going great, but the I can’t help but occasionally wonder, what the heck happened to the last 38 years?

My plan is to share more on this blog and try to walk the fine line of sharing while not hurting my job hunt. The saddest thing is some of my best content would immediately keep me from getting employed by other companies. For now at least, I need to walk that line.

For today, I think I’ll go through all the TechWhirl To-Dos and Job Search To-Dos and decide which ones are the most important. It’s time to start small – what will I accomplish today?

I used the instant messaging service Frontier provides because I thought it would help things be clearer, and to be fair, it was okay the first time I chatted with them. The representative on the first support chat was very good and helped do everything except add the “e” to the end of my name. I’m quite fond of that “e” but will wait another day to get it added to my last name. But, she rolled through the changes and presto I can login to the account.

From there, I notice that I’ve been signed up for paperless bills. This is a good option since my little email account follows me everywhere. The gotcha was that the first two notes from team FC (does the F really stand for Frontier?) got caught in Gmail’s SPAM filter. I checked online help with no luck and there’s nothing in the online bill pay section so fresh off my good interaction the first time I dive back into the IM chat, but this time …

It’s best to just read the chat first:

Frontier Chat:

Welcome! I’m an automated chat consultant from Frontier. I will assign you to a live consultant if needed.

You:

email address for online bills, avoid SPAM

Frontier Chat:

In order to assist you better today I will need to connect you with a live consultant. Please wait while I find someone to help you.

Rep whose name has been removed has entered.

Frontier Chat:

Hello Al

You:

Hi [name removed] – what is the email address Frontier uses to send online bills

You:

the two emails I received for the online enrollment got caught in SPAM

Frontier Chat:

Some computers automatically send them to spam because you have never added us to the acceptance list . the info you requested would be in those 2 emails

You:

oh, so it sends as Info@

You:

the notes didn’t contain anything to put Frontier on the White list

You:

or how

Frontier Chat:

You would need to open the emails first. I’m not sure how your computer program is set up to add Frontier as to the inbox list

You:

I have opened the notes and they don’t contain any guidance

You:

I know how to do it, I just need the email address that is used by Frontier

You:

which is why I asked

You:

I use Gmail and I just need to add that email address to my address book once that happens, everything is good

You:

please confirm the email address used by FC for bills

Frontier Chat:

I do apologize there are several different emails form Frontier depending on what is being sent . To chat with internet help desk, click this link- http://frontier.com/customerservice/2 Then, click the box in the middle of the page. It is a white and brown box. That is internet help desk :) OR You can contact them at 1.800.239.4430 if you prefer to speak on the phone!

You:

are you Customer Service for residential telephone?

Frontier Chat:

Yes Al I am

You:

does Frontier offer to send bills for residential telephone via email? rather than paper

You:

let’s skip ahead

You:

yes, Frontier does and has signed me up for that

You:

I do not have Internet with Frontier

Frontier Chat:

Yes , once you sign up for the online account

You:

I have residential telephone service and I’m asking the residential telephone rep the email that they use

You:

I have an online account which is why I know all of these things

You:

what I don’t know is the address used by residential telephone’s billing system to send to my gmail account

You:

which is why I’m attempting to get this information from you since it doesn’t come up when I searched help

You:

it wasn’t sent to me

You:

it is a state secret

Frontier Chat:

Al, I can not tell you the exact email address that the notices will be sent from. Your billing cycle date is the 22nd. When you receive that statement . You can then add that email address to the favorites list . Is there anything else that I can assist you with today ?

You:

for the record, you didn’t assist me on this inquiry

You:

and no, there isn’t

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For the record, this wasn’t the representative’s fault. She was only providing the information that she had available. This was a failure of the systems to deliver the right information to her at the right time. Long run, this is the failure of every CXO on mahogany row more worried about their corporate retreat or trying to empire build with proposals to buy Time Warner Cable; it’s also the failure of design in which tech pubs and customer service area almost certainly in different silos.

All of this and I still don’t know the email address, but I know the date so I set a reminder one week before it’s due to check. So, how’s that customer experience?

Many people, me included, think it’s really a different way to say “Brand” but without the agency speak. Of course, many of us have thought that a great brand was a synonym for reputation, which is generated by the creativity of the company’s products (iPod vs Zune), dependability of the company’s work (Tiffany’s vs. Bob’s Discount Den for jewelry) and the capabilities of the employees (Apple customer support vs Verizon not knowing where WV was located).

You’ll notice that most of the things I shared about reputation really come during and after the sale of a product. Yes, good advertising is helpful but if Microsoft’s ads prove anything, it’s that being able to find a future top 10 pop-charts hit and producing a great product aren’t the same. In fact, I’d suggest that about 80% of a customer’s interactions with a company come after the sale (I’m using the 80/20 rule here and will update the post with links when I find them), which provides excellent opportunities to ruin the good vibes that clever marketing and a good sales process bring.

The current approach and discussions on CXM revolve around ensuring that people, processes and especially technologies are all aligned to make certain that interactions with customers are both “on brand” but also help them out as much as possible. This is normally the sweet-spot of small companies since they’ll only have a few employees (often with ownership supervision), processes that are almost always broken but volume low enough to allow for human correction (marketing, sales and support are often the same person, so they are the knowledge management system) and technologies they use are good enough to handle small quantities of customers (Word Doc copied to the website, accounting systems on paper that are referenced to know the last time a customer was billed).

However, now-a-days technology is allowing SME and large companies to train, monitor and support all areas of the customer journey. Other than that finicky people problem of having terrible employees from the top down and absolutely horrific management / training / hiring practices, it is possible to have computer systems create wonderful operational capabilities.

Technical communications comes into its own with the abilities of great information technologies such as content management systems (not web, corporate) and knowledge management systems. The technical communicators in any company are, or at least should, be the communicators of the company’s products capabilities and chief educators on products and services. They spend their entire working lives striving to better understand the products and then writing about them so that the users of those products can understand how to get the most out of the products.

How do I get it working in the beginning? How do I use it now that it is running? How do I fix it? And, how do I get the most out of it?

These are all questions the Tech Pubs folks are handing each day, or you know, ensuring that the customer experience post-sale is great. These good works aren’t new, they’re just too often overlooked by most companies and until recently were far harder to share across work functions (by most recently, I mean the last 15 years but everyone has a 3-ring binder with specs in it somewhere).

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the interaction of CXM and Technical Communications not because the value proposition is hard to understand, but more along the lines of the challenges companies face in really leveraging the assets they’ve had all along.

Some problems as I see them:

People

Leaders and managers seem to lean toward a sales first culture rather than a Lifetime Value of the Customer culture for reasons that make absolutely no sense to me. I can say with authority as TechWhirl’s main biz dev person that it’s a heck of a lot easier to work with my current customers and help them find new ways to work with us than trying to score new people.

I can dive into details but let’s be clear – silos are not the fault of Senior Mid-Managers – it’s not even the fault of out of date computer systems; it’s the fault of Executive Leadership who allows divisions and infighting to occur. The fact that most Customer Service groups rarely play well with Tech Pubs groups is non-sensical to me but happens everyday. It’s bad Executive Leadership and bad mental models on the right way to bring companies together that are the ultimate cause of these problems.

Technologies

A majority of companies have not invested in the right technologies to ensure that the right information get to the right places at the right time. This is partly the fault of vision being ahead of the developers since a great content management system should allow all business communications starting with marketing/sales to sit beside technical communication, which then flows to customer facing employees. The customer facing employees should be able to document their work, easily retrieve information and then push that work back down the channel.

In fact, customer facing technologies and people should be able to provide great ideas to the product development teams since they’re constantly getting product feedback. They should also be able to suggest clearer ways to solve a problem, or raise the red-flag on serious problems with a current design.

Processes

Work flow and processes, along with company governance need to continue to evolve to ensure that people are working as efficiently as possible, while doing high-quality work. This area plays closely with the technologies since as a new system comes up to speed these things will have to be updated.

Companies who really care about their customers should over invest in training, over invest in employee development and over invest in hiring the right people, with the right skills and most importantly the right temperament. Oh, and they should over invest in ensuring that the wrong hires find their way to the door. They’ll need to pay a premium and aim to have lifetime employees who value lifetime customers.

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I’m writing this on my blog rather than going through the full article process on TechWhirl because this article isn’t sourced as well as it should be and it’s my opinion on how great companies should operate. I do plan on diving into a lot of these areas because I think the easiest way to explain technical communication to the world is to explain that it’s dedicated to creating great customer experiences. The tools and technologies in the content management area are perfect for solving some of these areas and the inevitable approach will be seeing companies organize around sales / marketing & customer experience management, which all roll up to company communications.

For the record, the ideas that post here are my own and I know that they’re not fully fleshed out. The post sort of came together without much planning so I know there’s bunch of areas in CXM and there’s more areas that can be discussed on good operational structure.