Don’t ever tell me it’s easy …
… unless you know how to do it yourself, and you’re willing to go do it.
The comment, “oh that’s easy,” has been a point of frustration for me since I started my career. I’ve heard it stated emphatically about features and tasks related to software development, web design, and web marketing projects.
What the client or manager usually means is: “The way I see it in my head, it’ll be easy for the user to use, so it must be easy to develop or execute.” What the project manager or software engineer typically says to themselves is, “it’s so easy, but you couldn’t pull it off in a million years - *cough*.”
I had a conversation with a friend yesterday that prompted me to start doing some research about the size and skill-set of web marketing teams. She started by telling me, “I’ve been told I’m responsible for the SEO, PPC, and Web Analytics Reporting for 15 dynamic (constantly changing) websites.”
To which I replied, “how big is your team?”
… “No team - just me.”
Then it went from bad to worse. She went on to describe the interactions she has with her higher-ups that include the frequent, “Why aren’t we already doing that? [insert idea they just read about in the WSJ] - It’s easy.”
In both in-house and client-consultant relationships, these types of interactions lead to frustration on both sides. Clients and managers will rattle off demand after demand in each meeting, and employees and consultants will try to deal with an ever-growing list of half-baked demands that will never get met.
At Awecomm, we have procedures that handle this type of interaction. Our project managers control the pipeline of current projects both internal and client-related, and provide time estimates for new task and project requests. If something needs to be escalated, something else has to get bumped. It’s a pretty transparent process, and it works really well.
If you (the Awecomm manager or salesperson) don’t like the time estimate that was generated by the team (the PM, developers, designers, and marketers) … well then you should try to go do it yourself! (READ: We trust our team) .
Don’t think for a second that I’m writing this out of some sort of bitterness for clients. I LOVE my clients. They push us to try new things and execute fast, and we push them to try new things and interact with us quickly. But without the proper framework to manage tasks and projects, things get wacky.
So where does this leave us?
I’m looking to put together some data about what in-house web marketing teams look like. How many websites is the team responsible for? How many people are on the team? What is the responsibility of the team (SEO, PPC, Reporting, Development, Design)? What is the nature of the websites (static, frequent updates, constantly updated, user-generated)?
I’m hoping that the research will lead us to some understanding of the bandwidth required (the hours-of-labor kind, not the bits-and bytes-kind) as it relates to keeping a site healthy and optimized.
So if you work for an in-house web marketing team, or your company has an in-house team, leave a comment and let tell me about the size of the team (you can be anonymous if you want). I’ll put a formal survey together shortly, and link it here as well so we can come up with some slightly more “scientific” results.
If this is something you can relate to, help out by spreading the link! I’ll post the findings here in a follow-up post and hopefully we can all benefit from them.
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