Market GoGo

Marketing Project Management

Brand Audit | Web Marketing | Project Management | Getting Started | About Us

Getting ready to roll on a Marketing, Web or Contact Centre Project?

So, you have a vision for what you want your marketing, web, or contact centre to be. But, how do you get there?

Project Planning Phases

In general the classic "waterfall" method of development still holds as the best and "most likely to be successful" method of completing a complex project. One look and you can see why it's called the waterall project model. Each "bump" on the waterfall represents a critical phase to a successful project, and each phase must be addressed during the project, and it is best if that is done in a in the time-proven order as shown in the diagram below. You will also see a bit of a tease about the V-Model in that diagram, which will be discussed shortly (there's some foreshadowing ... please, read on).

Waterfall project management model - each bump in the waterfall represents a different piece of the project.

Inside each "fall" (or phase) on the waterfall a variety of processes and methods are implemented. For example a business case is a relatively standard cost-benefit analysis that can be done a whole bunch of different ways. Requirements can be defined many ways including a bullet list of business rules or a use case.

Additionally you will may stumble into some "religious wars" that have more hair on them than a Mac vs. PC smackdown. For instance, your IT Developmen team may introduce you to terms like RAD, Radical, Agile, Extreme, and so on. Then, they may argue that the "picture" of your project isn't a waterfall. My advice ... don't fight it, , but undertand in your own mind that when you boil it all back, you still will find the classic waterfall method. So - be sure that you can still see each of these items in your project plan.

V-Model

Take the classic waterfall and bend it half-way down. What do you get? You get the V-Model.

V-Model for Project Managent - Horizontally aligning responsibility for each phase's success. For instance, the at the start of the project the Marketing Team owns the Vision, Concept and Business Case. At the end of the project, the Marketing Team owns the Results (hopefully Success). Similarly, the IT Team owns the Design, Build, and most of the Testing.

What makes the V-model better than the waterfall? If you look across it horizontally, you will find layers of responsibility. Responsibility and Accountability for:

Concept, Business Case, and Benefits usually belong to a Senior Executive,
Requirements and User Acceptance Test usually belong to a Manager, a business team, and one or more Business Analysts, and
Design, Build, and a wide variety of complex testing usually belong to a wide variety of IT Specialists

Even Better... The V-Model for a Marketing Project

A typical project plan describes the Product Enhancement or IT functions. They ignore the very important Marketing specific project tasks. What does a Marketing Project look like? Kind of like this ...

V-Model Project Methodology for Marketing Projects

(With apologies in advance for the quality of this image)

In this diagram, the Orange Tasks represent phases that are specific to the Marketing (Advertising & Communications) and Training teams. These include:

Building a Communication Plan (both internal for your employees, and external for your customers),
Writing up Creative Briefs,
Creating the Communication Artefacts (including advertising, training materials, and so on),
Testing the Communication,
Buying space for the Advertising, and
Launching the Communications.

Assembling a Project Plan

Turning your vision into reality will only happen if you start out with a well articulated project charter, a credible work plan, and a reasonable project budget. Together these three documents form the project backbone that will ultimately make the project journey successful.

Project Charter - Describes what the project vision is, how the project will be performed, who is involved in the project and in what roles, what the risks are and how they will be mitigated, and other similar factors.
Project Plan - The GANTT chart which shows what will be done, task dependancies, who does what, how long each task will reasonably take, and even how much the project resources will cost.
Project Budget - The budget describes the financial implications of the project including software, hardware, expertise, training, system maintenance and system growth over several years.

Contact Market GoGo for help with your Marketing Project.

Contact us NOW to start improving your marketing.