The Iterative Planning Model

Jack Welch described his strategy planning as picking a direction and implementing like hell. It’s a funny and memorable way of stating the process. When developing a new site or media initiative, an entirely new one with no existing content, I work on two things:

1. Defining the project’s spine, the reason we’re doing this, our ultimate goal.
2. Drawing a line in the sand in terms of what is an agreed-upon first phase.

By defining the spine, we force clarity on to the project and it suddenly becomes easier to focus our efforts. This is the framework for the rest of the life of the project, so it needs to be flexible and easy to get off the ground. This also helps the team develop specific milestones, which means we can specify a path forward and give the project some momentum.

Use that momentum to get to the agreed-upon first phase and launch. Especially with brand new initiatives, the ideas are so nebulous and there are no specific results to point at yet that things can easily become derailed.

The real benefit of the iterative planning process is that is allows for small failures by compartmentalizing them. A failure at one point is not the death of the project, just the end of moving in that direction. The final result is a stronger product.

The example I read recently was of a worker in a bureaucratic system versus a freelance consultant. The bureaucrat has a steady, reliable paycheck that never changes beyond some moderate increases to adjust for cost of living. The consultant, meanwhile, lives in a world of payday feast or famine. As long as the ends of the spectrum are reasonably controlled, the famines won’t kill him and the feasts won’t drive him insane.

In the event of a downturn, who is more likely to thrive? The consultant. He’s more accustomed to adversity and has been able to develop a better model for dealing with it. The bureaucrat, meanwhile, is blindsided by the loss of his one source of income. He has far less experience figuring out how to get out of the hole he now finds himself in.

The iterative planning model works like the consultant, by incorporating some small, sustainable shocks that can be overcome in order to build a stronger whole.

The tent metaphor

In Coca Cola’s 2020 social media strategy (videos below), there is an offhand comment about a tent strategy comprised of “tent poles” and “tent pegs”. They do not elaborate, but here’s what I think it means:

A tent pole is a guiding principle (the spine) of a project or initiative. Defining those gives us the direction in which to move and the yardstick against which to measure progress.

The tent pegs are the slow variable policies Joshua Ramos discusses in his excellent The Age of the Unthinkable. They are the “get out and speak to the people” portion of General Petreaus’ CION strategy. These are those bedrock fundamentals that we need to be so disciplined about keeping in place, because they are the very thing that will keep the whole tent from blowing away. They’re hard, because they’re easy to forget or to at least procrastinate. Little things like being brave enough to intelligently risk small failures, facing minor confrontations head on and handling them and all the other small factors that can decay a project from the insides.

Finally, we are left with the tent itself, a sturdy ecosystem in which our ideas can thrive and flourish or simply be tested. The poles and pegs are what keep this going.

The Coca Cola 2020 videos are a good watch.

Part One

Part Two

Right away, it is apparent that this book is a different kind of career guide. It frankly tells you that building a successful career will be hard, requiring a lot of work and what you will hope are intelligent risks. That said, the first thing that struck me about this book was how well laid out it is. It’s crisp, clean and makes sense. This clarity of thought is further reflected in the great writing all the way through the book.

Using the success strategies of entrepreneurs they have watched (and been themselves) in Silicon Valley The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha guides the reader down the path of a better career.

Here are three things I really liked about the book.

Flexible Persistence

They call this “ABZ Planning”, but I prefer the term Flexible Persistence. Easier to remember and enact.

What they advocate here is to start out with a solid plan in mind, but remind you that some of the greatest opportunities are things that will deviate from that plan – be the a new career opportunity or unexpected customer feedback – and that we cannot stick too rigidly to our plan. We have to be ready to adapt and, as they put it, pivot.

You have to be ready to stray from the plan when it is appropriate. I do not recall seeing this in any other “career” book, and I really liked it.

Focus on the Steak, Not the Sizzle

Immediately after college, I was very focused on using my design skills. To be fair, I’d just spent all that time in class working on them. It took me a few years and projects with varying degrees of success to realize that function was more important than form. Reid and Casnocha address this as it relates to one’s personal development, but the example they use is from Reid’s experience with Apple’s product division:

“…product management — mattered more than any user experience or design. You can develop great and important user interfaces…but if customers don’t need or want the product, they won’t buy.”

The authors use a wide range of examples from their pasts to make their points and this one struck a chord with me. Being a designer in a technical field, I’ve really had to work to keep my focus on delivering something a user will want, instead of something that looks good, does cool things and passes the design review team. It’s so easy to get caught up with the bells and whistles.

Ask Better Questions to Get Better Answers

I cannot recall having seen a better compilation of advice on how to ask better questions to elicit more effective answers. First meetings with clients for anything connected to the online world are often 80% determining what it is that they want to do. Determining their goals – and exposing weaknesses and potential problems – is a huge part of any project, so the authors’ focus on how to ask more incisive questions was incredibly welcome.

They put these forward as a better way to gather information from your network, which is also greatly helpful, just not the first way I thought I could apply it. Here’s what they suggest:

1. It’s a conversation, not an interrogation. Don’t just ask question after question, that shuts the other person down. Instead, go in to the meeting with the goal of finding out certain things. In my own experience, this has brought up a great deal of relevant information. Things that do not always seem relevant may be, or they may point at something else worth noting.
2. Start with a wide focus and then narrow it. Especially for nebulous issues, your goal is to figure out, “What is a good question to ask?” You do that by getting a firm handle on the situation and then drilling down.
3. Frame and prime. Not getting the information you need? Ask open-ended questions like, “What are the biggest issues you face in communicating with your customers?” Alternatively, suggest possible answers to give a better idea of what you have in mind. “Company X faced a similar situation and had great results by doing this…”
4. Follow up and probe. Really listen to the answers. Why was something risky? What does “not a lot” mean? Answers are often qualified or red flags appear as you listen. Dig until a deeper answer takes shape.

Groundswell by Forrester Research’s Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff is an evergreen book on planning social media engagements for companies of any size. What is a Groundswell?

“A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than traditional institutions like corporations.”

They do a great job of focusing on customer relationships instead of technology, and that’s where they really get it right. While there are some dated references – the book was written in 2007 – the content really stands up because they focus on planning at a strategic level, not on how a specific technology or service can best be used.

While I usually do book summaries by outlining three big ideas that really stand out to me, the structure of this book leads me to use their basic strategy as an outline from which I can hang the pieces I really found important.

POST Strategy

The book is about customer-based strategy, which they define using the POST acronym. (Please note, I don’t feel like I am giving away the book’s biggest selling point here since they freely offer it on their blog: http://forrester.typepad.com/groundswell/2007/12/the-post-method.html)

P is People. It’s easy to get caught up in making sure that your organization is represented on all of the social media technologies, but that is short-sighted. Instead, focus on your customers. What would they want to use? You have to meet them on their turf if you expect to get a legitimate conversation going.

The authors briefly outline creating a “social technographics profile” and hint that paying the Forrester team to develop one for you is the way to go. To be fair, they do a very good job at outlining the many types of users. That seems unnecessary for most uses. Ask yourself two questions instead:

• Who is my target audience?
• How are they most likely to use social media?

There will likely be more than one type of user here, but what you are really looking to do is indentify the people you are targeting and then figuring out where they are likely to be online. In their people-centric approach, they point out: “Your brand is what the customers say it is.”

O is objectives. This is where the book is strongest in my opinion because their advice is simple. Pick a small goal that you can build upon and get going! Make sure it’s something that you can measure, even if your statistics are a little creative, like “ideas for improvements suggested by users every month”.

S is Strategy. In order to make sure you meet your objectives in both the long- and short-term, they wisely recommend stepping back and asking yourself what it is you hope to get from social media and how you can get it. They advocate small goals that are flexible and can be built upon. Further, they make the great point of monitoring progress so that you can make use of the aforementioned flexibility.

Things will go wrong. There will be negative feedback. How will you deal with it?

Later in the book, they add that you will also need to get project buy-in at this point. There may be strong resistance to this new change, so they offer suggestions on how to deal with it. I found their suggestions a bit light, and would instead recommend Marshall Goldsmith’s seven phases of a project from What Got You Here Won’t Get You There:

The Seven Phases of a Project

1. Assessing the situation
2. Isolating the problem
3. Formulating
4. Woo up – To get your superiors to approve
5. Woo laterally – To get your peers to agree
6. Woo down – To get your direct reports to accept
7. Implementation

Failure often occurs by skipping steps 4, 5 and 6. Look to pre-wire your efforts by getting early buy in from marketing, the C-suite and the other parties likely to be affected.

Li and Bernoff make the excellent recommendation of getting someone in a position of power — not someone with the available time — to run the initiative. This will ensure that it is taken seriously and will help smooth some of the friction that will come when an internal change is spurred from customer feedback.

Additionally, they again provide a nice little framework of testing, measuring the results and responding appropriately.

T is Technology. Importantly, this piece is last. This would seem counterintuitive to many planning a foray into social media, but it’s not the technology that’s important. It’s the relationship with your customers and how you will build it.

In Clermont, our social media guideline is to continue the conversation online that our elected officials began offline. We use social media to do two things:

1. Broaden our reach, putting our local cable access shows on YouTube for example.
2. Getting news to citizens the way they want to receive it by doing things like alerting them to news items on our websites via a link from our Twitter account.

Groundswell is a very solid and actionable book. I liked that it could very quickly be skimmed to pull out the meat and that they offered a good deal of case studies showing how companies and customers met and built relationships online.

At this point, you might be asking why we were still running WSS 3.0. Simple, it met user needs and worked well. While full-blown SharePoint offers a lot of rich features, the bulk of our demand was for a robust document library and workspace and project sites. The free version of SharePoint accomplishes all of that. I could not justify the cost.

What I will be recommending is the in-place upgrade of SharePoint Foundation 2010. There are alternatives and I encourage you to read up on them, but what I needed was a smooth migration of my existing document libraries, sites and user rights. The in-place upgrade accomplishes all of this with the only downside being that the production site has to be down during the upgrade. The entire upgrade itself can easily be done in an hour, so schedule two to be safe.

The Tough Part – Getting everything to a 2008, 64-bit server

My instance of WSS 3.0 was using a Server 2008, 64-bit server as the application server, but a Server 2003 server with SQL 2005. In order for a smooth in-place upgrade, you will want your WSS 3.0 instance running on all 2008, 64-bit machines.

This means testing. If you are already on a fully 2008, 64-bit environment, go ahead and skip this part.

What you will need:

1. A workable installation of WSS 3.0, but they are out there on the Internet. I was able to find it on MSDN. This was the trickiest part! Small version differences will mean that your back up will not restore to this version.
2. Download Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010, also from MSDN.
3. 2008, 64-bit servers to test with. Do your best to duplicate your production environment.
4. A copy of a recent back up of SharePoint.

If you are not backing up your current SharePoint instance, stop here. Get your production environment backing up immediately. This is not only good practice, but you will need the backups to complete this migration.

Moving on, I created a duplicate of my application server (I cannot recommend virtual servers enough!) and then used the new database server. I installed WSS 3.0 and restored from my back up, which I have detailed here. This gave me an exact replica of the environment I would be using.

Measure Twice, Cut Once

Here’s what we will be doing, first in the test environment and then production:

1. Verifying that we have a valid backup of our data
2. Uninstalling our current version of SharePoint
3. Re-installing WSS 3.0, but this time to the all 2008 environment
4. Restore your data from your back up
5. Installing the SharePoint Foundation 2010 prerequisites. This will add components that would have been installed had you upgraded to SharePoint 2007.
6. Run the SharePoint Foundation 2010 in-place upgrade

I ran through this process several times. I wanted to be comfortable with the process and to beat it up a bit to see what shook loose. Happily, it’s a pretty straightforward process. Move to your production environment when you are ready.

Post-installation instructions

I ran into two issues after my installation: search did not immediately work and I needed to create a backup job.

Assign the site to an indexer to get search to work
This blog post explains it very well.

Use Powershell to back up the farm
Create a job using Powershell to back up your data. Details on creating the backup are on Technet and from there, you schedule your Powershell code to run by creating a job.

Create a “dummy address” for your campaign

Notice that you can be pretty specific when creating the new URL.

1. Use the Google URL Builder – http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578
2. Fill in each of the required (*) fields, for a unique web address
3. Click “Generate URL”
4. This gives you something like
   “http://www.YourWebSite.com/?utm_source=QR&utm_medium=MarchNewsletter&utm_campaign=NewCampaign”
   (Notice that your “source” is a QR code, “medium” is the March newsletter and the “campaign” is “NewCampaign”)
5. Highlight and copy your new link

Create Your QR Code

1. Shorten the link using either http://goo.gl/ or https://bitly.com/
2. Copy your new, shortened link
3. Use http://createqrcode.appspot.com/ or your favorite QR code generator to create your code.

Monitor in Your Web Tracking Software

I’m a big fan of Google Analytics, but whatever tool you use, look into your page visits to see which pages got the most hits and which did not. From there, it’s a matter of tweaking your marketing campaign.