Developing an effective web strategy

Dan Champion

Champion IS Limited

Introduction

  • While striving for perfection is often futile, we should all be striving for excellence
  • Drivers include increased web usage, increased customer expectations (internal and external)
  • High quality websites rarely, if ever, happen by accident
  • To achieve and maintain quality needs planning and a clear vision
  • Often we know where we are, and we want to get to, but not how - strategic planning can help fill the gap
  • In this session we'll look at what a strategy is, the characteristics of an effective strategy, what we mean by a web strategy, and some simple steps to develop one

Session Agenda

What is a strategy?

  • Strategy is a somewhat nebulous concept - visionary, conceptual, directional
  • Tactical and operational plans are about immediate issues with existing resources - practical, pragmatic, reactive
  • Policies provide operational frameworks to implement strategies
  • No magic bullet - effective strategic planning has to come from the organisation in question, cannot be imposed
  • Doesn't need to be formal, but does have to suit the organisation

Web strategies

  • Organisational strategy most important
  • Ensures we're keeping up with developments in the industry, and with demands from customers
  • But cannot be totally effective without the web being valued in the organisation
  • We're a very immature service, and still viewed as a novelty by some
  • Respond by making the web overtly critical to the organisation's effectiveness

Where do we go from here?

"We're lost, but we're making good time." Yogi Berra

  • Yogi Berra played baseball for the New York Yankees in the 1940s and 1950s
  • We're good at coutning visitors, but sometimes forget to stop to ask if we're actually delivering what those visitors require
  • A mantra for government projects everywhere?

Characteristics of successful strategies

  • Focussed - contain only a few main thrusts or concepts
  • Relational - cogniscant of and make reference to other important organisational strategies
  • Flexible - able to achieve objectives in the face of change
  • Consensual - actively supported by the whole organisation
  • Realistic - can be ambitious, but must be achieveable

Focussed - Start with a vision

  • The most important step to developing an effective strategy
  • Spend as much time as you can refining your objectives
  • SWOT analysis can be helpful

Strategic objectives

  • If you find your objectives mention specific timescales, actions or outputs, they could probably be abstracted further
  • But strategic isn't a binary state, it's a spectrum. Don't be afraid to be less strategic if it suits your position.

Mission statements - not all bad

Can help to focus and clarify direction:

  • Consider coming up with a mission statement.
  • Needn't be vomit-inducing.
  • "Promote Clackmannanshire" was CC's mission statement for the web until recently

Dilbert Mission Statement Generator

Dilbert's boss and his crap mission statement

Relational - not in a vacuum

  • Make strong connections between your strategy and other plans in the organisation and beyond
  • E.g. if your information strategy commits to a conistent taxonomy across systems, the web strategy must acknowledge and reflect this
  • Find them, establish their relationship with the web strategy, and account accordingly
  • Related systems can have a profound effect on the direction of your web strategy - see "realistic" below for more info

Flexible

  • Nothing is certain except change
  • Frame your objectives in such a way that they can negotiate changing environments
  • Considering contingency early on pays dividends.
  • i.e. sunglasses and an umbrella - expect the best but plan for the worst
  • It's a forward plan, so change and uncertainty are inevitable - it's how you adapt to those changes that will determine your success.

It's a plan, not a script

"Plans are worthless, planning is everything." Dwight D. Eisenhower

  • Reviewing your strategy is an essential discipline
  • A strategy degrades the moment you commit to it
  • Keep abreast of changes which effect your ability to achieve your strategic objectives, and adjust the strategy accordingly

Consensual

  • Your strategy will have dependencies within your organisation
  • You'll be relying on others for support, resources, etc
  • Need to build consensus - a shared vision - otherwise unlikely to succeed
  • Closely tied to web governance...

Web governance

Q: How do you govern your web developments?

  • Chosen model of governance should suit your organisation
  • Need to consider many factors - openness, accountability, willingness to participate, corporate spirit, capacity
  • Strategy must be cognisant of the governance model and its effectiveness (or lack of)
  • Democratic - participation by all stakeholders, ownership is explicitly shared
  • Consultative - seek input from all stakeholders, ownership is implicitly shared
  • Autocratic - imposed on the organisation, ownership rests with web management

Realistic

Must acknowledge:

  • Many factors to consider, internal and external, including environment, demand, political directives, customer expectations
  • If objectives are incompatible with or not supported by skills, resources etc, you must challenge the drivers
  • The most common point of failure for strategies

Risk

If you never try anything new you'll miss out on many of life's great disappointments

  • Yes, I stole this from despair.com
  • But in my defence I did buy a pack of demotivator notecards

Strategic Risk

  • Being realistic doesn't mean you can't take risks - just be aware of how much of a risk you're taking, what the consequences might be and what can be done to mitigate the risk
  • Don't ignore strategic risk
  • Identify and measure it
  • This allows you to mitigate it
  • Manage it according to your organisation's attitude to risk

Managing risk

Risk matrix Populated risk matrix Averse to high risk Averse to most risk Cavalier?

  • Be risk aware - consider risks and their impacts
  • "There is a risk that x will happen, which will result in y."
  • Use a simple risk matrix to evaluate the risks and your attitude to them

Example - BBC News

Animation showing evolution of BBC News website

  • BBC News site illsutrates organic growth
  • Changes are evolutionary rather than revolutionary
  • Appears to be following a clear strategy for development

Example - FCO

Animation showing evolution of FCO website

  • FCO site illsutrates revolutionary growth
  • While major sections have remained fairly constant, the site environment has gone through 2 major and one minor version changes
  • Suggests less clear initial strategy, although there are many more factors to consider than this superficial analysis
  • Like many government websites went throught many changes early on, now maturing
  • Contrast with successful commercial sites like Amazon, which have changed much less over the years - our branding is much weaker in government

Producing a strategy

  • Getting a first version is always the hardest part. Acknowledge that you'll not please everyone, and that you can't do everything.
  • Remember you're not the first organisation to develop a strategy - seek out exemplars from your and other sectors. HE is a particularly good source.
  • Use positive language throughout - concentrate on what you can deliver. Tackle what you can't deliver outside the strategy.

Benefits

  • Gives your organisation a shared vision for the web
  • Future demands can be measured against agreed objectives - how do they support those objectives?
  • Explicitly recognises constraints and limitations - provides a basis for expanding resources for web development
  • Provides a good base for development planning - the detailed "how" plans that ultimately help you achieve the strategic objectives

What next?

  • Once strategy is completed, what next?
  • Obviously it's not this clean - you don't put implementation or other planning on hold while you complete your strategy, but this cycle is still what you're aiming for
  • Use the strategy to produce a development plan
  • Question anything in your development plan that doesn't directly support a strategic objective - why are you doing it, or are the objectives not right?
  • Although we all naturally migrate to annual cycles, this pattern should happen constantly

Questions & discussion