Best practices for

successful digital

projects

Mikal Ann Mast, COMPAS

Finbar Mulholland, REDBOT

Tuesday 28 March 2017

Planning - Where it all begins

• Failing to plan is one of the most common reasons

why digital projects fail to achieve their objectives.

• Common results of failing to plan include:

• Increased scope

• Missed deadlines

• Over budget

• Under achieving end product

• Increased stress levels all round!

If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail

Making your project a success

• How can we ensure project success?

Some useful tips and suggestions...

Roles & responsibilities

• Define key roles and responsibilities for your team &

external suppliers

• Ensure everyone knows what they are expected to

contribute (and when)

• Common project roles:

• Decision maker(s)

• Project manager

• Copywriter or editor

• Developer

• Designer

Define success criteria

• In order to evaluate the success of any project, we

need to define metrics which we can measure

against once the project has been completed.

• What are you trying to achieve? If you can’t

communicate and share this vision it will be

difficult for others to get onboard.

Website Information Architecture (IA)

• In order to evaluate the success of any project, we need to

define metrics which we can measure against once the

project has been completed.

• What are you trying to achieve? If you can’t communicate

and share this vision it will be difficult for others to get

onboard.

Content planning

• Content is KING!

• In our experience the most common reason for missed

deadlines is poor content planning.

• Do not just copy and paste content from word

documents. It won’t work in the responsive world.

• Think about how people will engage with your content

(text, audio, imagery, video etc).

• It always take longer to prepare than you think!

Website functionality

• Define key website functionality.

• What do you want to happen when someone clicks a

button?

• How should content be ordered? Can a user filter content?

• Will video be streamed from a third-party (Vimeo/YouTube)

• Should that be an image carousel?

• Not defining this will be costly.

• Avoid… “but I thought it would work like this”

Specification - Pull it all together

• Pull all your research and preparation together into a

brief/specification.

• Example contents

• Project introduction and background

• Website aims, objectives and success criteria

• Audience and target market

• Website structure

• Content plan

• Key functionality

• Roles & responsibilities

• Timeline & budget

The design & development process

• Key stages:

• Discovery - getting to know you and your project

• Project plan - plan of action

• Wireframing - user journey and layout

• Visual concept - creating look and feel

• Development - html and cms

• Testing and deployment - test and make live

• Monitoring and evaluation - making constant improvements

Selecting a content management system

• CMS depends on complexity of the project.

• Our preferred choice of cms is:

• Wordpress (CMS) or

• Perch (Commercial)

• Bespoke

Lessons learnt

• Involve the services of an external agency as soon as

possible

• Be realistic with timelines

• Don’t hide the budget

• Don’t forget about the content!

• A digital project is never finished - plan for the future

Tools that can help

• Project management - teamworkpm, BasecampKeep conversations, files, tasks all in one place.

• Sitemaps & IA - Slickplan, Mind ManagerDesign and present your IA

• Documentation and collaboration - Google AppsCreate, share and collaborate for free

QUESTIONS?