Digital Projects
– all you need to know –

The purpose of a digital project

The purpose, i.e. the aim or goal of a digital project should align with the broader purpose of your organisation. There’s nothing worse—in this context—to perform actions aimlessly, to wander around every day without any kind of goal or purpose.

This lack of sense will demotivate you and your co-workers, making you feel you’re doing pointless activities, or doing nothing at all. The result will be worse performance, apathy, and those red numbers.

So, not just for the sake of your organisation’s bottom line, but for your own sake, you should identify or originate a sound purpose for your project. It might be helpful to ask yourself the following questions:

• What are we trying to achieve with our organisation?
• What am I trying to achieve within my organisation?
• Why are we doing it?
• How will we go about in general to achieve our goals?
• How will we go about achieving a specific goal?
• What are we doing now, and can anything be done better?
• What specific aim will this particular project have?

Having a purpose is essential. Not just for your organisation, but first and foremost for yourself—so you can know what you want, why you want it, what you should do, and how you should do it. It makes you that much happier, goal-driven, ambitious, and efficient.

Start with identifying or building a purpose—without it you are lost.

Pitching a digital project

Regardless of the size and scope of the digital project, you need to plan ahead and at least pitch the digital project in one way or another. The best way to do this is to build a business case, understand your stakeholders, and to get a proof of concept up and running.

Build a business case

A business case is a short, essential, and purposeful document showcasing how your proposed project can support your business needs. The business case should include advantages and disadvantages, and capture both quantifiable and non-quantifiable characteristics of the project.

An essential structure of a business case can look like this:

Executive summary

Provide an essential overview of the issues you want to address, what goal you want to reach, what benefits your organisation can expect, and what specific actions will be performed.

Situation

Describe your current context, what challenges and opportunities it creates, and what impact this has on your organisation.

Benefits and limitations

Present both financial and non-financial benefits of the proposal for your organisation, as well as any potential and actual limitations.

Proposed solutions

Identify potential solutions—e.g. CMSs or digital experience platforms—to your challenges, and provide substantial details for your stakeholders with a range of possible options.

Impacts

List what stakeholders and processes will be impacted by the solution, as well as detailing side-effects.

Outline plan

Document the implementation approach, timeline, and required resources—all in logical stages.

Market assessment

Consider political, economic, sociological, technological, and legal factors in your industry, in order to demonstrate a thorough understanding of your key market.

Governance

Clarify project ownership, project leadership and management, as well as budget, oversight process, and reporting.

Financial analysis

Outline the forecasted costs and benefits, both total and spend profile over time—together with ROI and NPV.

Risks assessment

A more in-depth consideration of risks and limitations, where you can summarise all significant risks and opportunities, and how they will be managed.

Understand your stakeholders

Your stakeholders can be anyone from the C suite and legal department to business units and marketing. Here are four common stakeholder groups in relation to digital projects, and what problems they may be thinking about.

Business owner

The management of your organisation can take on various forms, but common to them all is a requirement to see business benefits with your digital project. Your business owner wants a scalable project—it needs to be flexible enough to change in accordance with the industry trends. Your project also needs to be predictable—meaning you have thoroughly investigated both potential advantages and disadvantages. Finally, the business owner is always assessing the project’s time to market—how long it takes from being a theory or under production to an actual, working product.

IT

The IT department, including the CIO and the developers, would most often prefer access to resources and/or vendors on the chosen technology. IT also likes to know the total cost of ownership, the scalability of the product, as well as its resilience, operations requirements, and security.

Editors

Web or content editors have other requirements than IT, naturally. Editors in general want flexibility, usability, access control, workflow support, and analytics integrations in their digital solutions of choice.

Marketing

Marketing can be yet another group whose requirements you have to bear in mind when building a business case for your digital project. They often would like to see features like campaign support, segmentation support, analytics, and CRM integration in the digital solution.

Bonus: Enable a quick PoC

If your leadership, seniors, stakeholders, or all of them appear to be lukewarm toward a proposed solution, you should try to instigate a proof of concept (PoC) in order to quickly show potential value. A PoC demonstrates an idea’s feasibility or practical potential, is usually small, and may not be complete.

Most vendors on your shortlist will be happy to oblige to deliver a PoC. With a PoC you can collaborate closely with the vendor and an eventual solution partner, and build a custom solution for your exact needs.

In this way, a PoC is more valuable than a demo. You can really get into the nitty gritty details on the implementation process, the collaboration with the different actors, and how well the product can actually solve your tasks. This should give your stakeholders a strong basis for greenlighting or turning down your project proposal.

Finding the right people

An important part of the project preparation and ongoing maintenance is to find and keep the right people to do the right tasks at any given time.

Internal vs. external

Depending on the size and scope of your project, you most likely need to involve other people. In a very small and limited project it may suffice to involve only yourself and a few other co-workers, but in large-scale projects, you may need to hire additional resources, outsource some functions, or even cooperate with external companies like agencies and systems integrators.

Of course, you will know your own situation best. But some questions may be helpful:

• Do we have the necessary skills in-house?
• Do we need to hire talents or should we collaborate with an agency?
• What is the cost-benefit relation between hiring and outsourcing?
• For how long do we need the specified skill set?
• Is the project ongoing or a single event?

Team skills

Regardless of whether you will include in-house co-workers, outsource, or hire/collaborate with one or more solutions partners or agencies, you still need certain skills in regard to your digital project.

The most common skills you need for a digital project are:

Project management

A project manager will oversee the entire project. They’re responsible for deadlines, KPIs, and reporting, as well as arranging follow-ups with each project member.

Solution architecture

With overall responsibility for an eventual digital solution you’re implementing, this team member will need specific digital skills, a knowledge of UX, and the experience to consult on final solutions and business strategy.

UX design

UX designers have to create product and service design that takes into consideration both the brand profile and the user experience. They should also be able to deliver HTML and CSS to the developers.

Web development

Web developers are able to implement designs using templating and popular UI frameworks, so it’s important that they’re trained and certified on a given solution.

Back-end development

Back-end development involves more heavy lifting, including the ability to integrate the work the front-end developers do into the back-end system. A developer will need to be trained and certified on your eventual new solution.

Vendor expertise

To ensure your project runs as smoothly as possible, vendor expertise can be helpful. A vendor will advise on best practice to speed up the project and improve the experience of the people working on the solution on a day-to-day basis.

Note that it’s not always possible to get the help of a vendor as they have limited resources, but grab one if you can.

Continuous deployment

Developers don’t just need to write code – they need to deploy it on a server too. Look for developers with skills in continuous deployment, including automated testing for code.

Content production / web editing

If the digital project requires it, you will need team members with the ability to produce the actual content for your customers and users. This includes copywriters, web editors, and graphic designers. As well as being able to create content, they should all be trained in your given solution.

Accessibility / SEO

To make sure your solution is experienced by as many people as possible, accessibility and SEO may be an important consideration. Look for an expert who’s well-versed in the WCAG standard, as well as SEO best practices.

Testing

Testing expertise will help make sure the final solution is secure, accessible, and fulfils all of its functional requirements, as well as being free of any bugs before launch.

Operations

Even if your digital project is finished, you’ll need someone to operate and maintain the servers and offerings. This could be your IT department, your solution partners, or the vendor if they offer such services.

Doing the work

After doing so much preparation, it’s finally time to do the actual work! And believe it or not—this is the most important step in a digital project. Here you will do all the heavy lifting: you will build that new website, develop a new app, implement the new intranet, or get that new service up and running.

So, let’s roll up the sleeves and get down to business.

Project phases

Any given digital project may be divided into phases, and the content of these may vary wildly according to what you’re trying to achieve, the scope of your project, the nature of your industry, and so on. However, here are three common phases and what you can expect from them.

Early project phase

This early phase usually includes planning meetings, get-to-know-each-other sessions, technology setup, training, and the initiation of coding, writing, and other productive endeavours.

During project

This is the main phase, where the basics have been set up, where your co-workers develop, write, test, or analyse the various tasks given to them, while managers continuously monitor and control results. This phase can take everything from a few days to several months, or even years.

Late project phase

Towards the end of the digital project, there are more results and finished products—thus leading to more reviews, testing, quality assessments, and re-iterations. Here you and your team wrap it all up, making ready to launch, publish, or deliver the end product.

Approaches to digital projects

While all digital projects must have an Aristotelian structure of a beginning, a middle, and an end, the approach to how work is done within this framework can take many different forms. Enterprise Architect Mohamed Sami lists the following types:

Waterfall model

The waterfall model is a breakdown of project activities into linear sequential phases, where each phase depends on the deliverables of the previous one and corresponds to a specialisation of tasks.

V-shaped model

As an extension of the waterfall model, the V-shaped model bends the process steps upwards after the coding phase, to form a V shape. The model demonstrates the relationships between each phase of the development life cycle and its associated phase of testing. The horizontal axis represents time or project completeness (left-to-right), while the vertical axis represents the level of abstraction (top-to-down).

Prototyping model

A prototype typically simulates only a few aspects of the final product and may be completely different from it, but the project team can get valuable feedback from users early in the project. There are several variants, including throwaway, evolutionary, incremental, and extreme.

Spiral method (SDM)

The spiral model is risk-driven and based on the unique risk patterns of a given project. It guides a team to adopt elements of one or more process models, such as incremental, waterfall, or evolutionary prototyping.

Iterative and incremental method

Iterative and incremental development is any combination of both iterative design or iterative method and incremental build model for development. Built to overcome the weaknesses of the waterfall model, the iterative and incremental method starts with planning, and continues with repeated, iterative cycles—before ending with deployment.

Agile

Agile is a widespread and popular approach to digital project management, and as a result, many teams around the globe employ the Agile approach when initiating a digital project.

Agile can be defined as a set of values and principles where work processes, methods, collaboration, and delivery are continuously improved and adapted to any changing context. The main point with Agile is to do small steps and deploy continuously, as opposed to the standard waterfall method, mentioned above.

Agile is all about empowering individuals, building functional products, emphasising collaboration, and responding to changing circumstances. This is contrasted to focusing on processes and tools, providing comprehensive documentation, negotiating contracts endlessly, and sticking to the plan no matter what.

However, Agile is not a methodology, but a rule set meant to guide you in choosing the right methods and procedures for your team. These can include, but are not limited to:

• Scrum: Sprint-based approach where a small team meets regularly with e.g. stand-ups to discuss current tasks and obstacles
• Kanban: Visual representations of tasks, moving through predetermined stages to track progress and identify obstacles
• Adaptive project framework (APF): Work is done and evaluated in stages
• Extreme project management (XPM): Plan, budget, and final delivery can be altered to fit changing requirements at any time

Whatever approach you choose for your digital project management, be sure to assess carefully and involve your co-workers to learn about their preferences. Nothing is set in stone, and you might end up combining principles from different approaches, if that suits your purposes.

Acquire early gains

Making your digital project successful depends on many factors, and acquiring early gains can be one of them. This is vital for mainly three reasons:

1. Morale is important to keep people motivated to excel at their work, and something which boosts morale exquisitely is an early gain in your digital project. If you for instance launch a successful campaign at the beginning of your project tenure, you enable pride in your co-workers and organisation
2. Not only will an early gain kickstart your project and garner optimism, it will also spawn long term effects. A success story is something people will talk about in years to come—as well as being a handfast example you can refer to on conferences, talks, and networking events
3. An early gain may serve to convince your leadership and stakeholders of the feasibility of the digital project, thus letting them greenlight the continuation of the enterprise or access to more resources

Project management

Managing a digital project and leading a digital team can be both challenging and rewarding. While you certainly will have done several of the following actions in advance of your project, it can be useful to revisit them during the various project phases in order to assess whether you need to make required changes. And if you haven’t already done these actions, now is a good opportunity!

Focus on innovation

Innovation is to discover new solutions to your problems and tasks—solving them in smarter and more efficient ways than before. Innovation stimulates creativity, production, experimentation, and collaboration, and is therefore a trait sought after in digital leaders.

Communicate clear goals

As the project moves along, it is a good time to assess your KPIs and goals. Are they clear enough for your team and stakeholders? What are their expectations? Once you’ve got realistic, actionable and measurable KPIs, communicate them to your team regularly. Review your results, make appropriate actions, and iterate them in the next appropriate period.

Get to know your team

This an action you obviously should have done already, but it doesn’t hurt to get to know your co-workers even better as the project develops. What people say and what people do can be completely different things, so arrange informal meetings with your co-workers to discuss their expectations before the project, their results so far, and what they expect further down the road. Compare required skills with actual results, and suggest a further course of action—like e.g. attending a course.

Assess your digital tools

This point should have been thoroughly covered in the planning process, but yet again—theory and practice don’t always line up. Are your digital tools up for the challenge or do they need replacement? Assess each tool in order, and review whether they fulfil your tasks or deviate from the projected results.

Implement ContentOps

If your digital project involves content of any kind, content operations may be an interesting option for you. It is a set of principles for treating content seriously like software development, for creating consistent, scalable, cross-channel quality content—uniting people, processes, and technology. To get ContentOps up and running, you therefore need to start with people—i.e. your digital team.

Continuous improvement

The option to continuously improve your digital project may depend on the type of approach, framework, and methodology you and your team have chosen. Here we assume that you have selected an option where continuous improvement is natural or can be added without hindrance to your project.

Continuous improvement ties especially to the Agile approach of running a digital project, where it basically is an inherent part. However, always improving in every stage of a project is essential for the project’s success.

Here are some common actions in regard to continuously improving your digital project:

• Regular feedback: Provide your co-workers with frequent feedback to point them in the right direction and to get a clearer view of the situation
• Regular iterations: Don’t stick to a mammoth product, be modular and discard, improve, or initiate new solutions on the go
• Showcase values: Engage both co-workers and stakeholders by demonstrating the values you generate, as this can send more resources your way

Third-party collaboration

In many cases your organisation will have to collaborate with external professionals, who possess skills, experience, and other assets you don’t. For instance, you might lack the skills in implementing a marketing automation tool, and it’s therefore necessary to involve an external agency who specialises in such matters.

In addition to applying many of the mentioned digital project principles to third-party collaborators, you also need to consider additional aspects:

SLA

A service-level agreement (SLA) is commonly used as a commitment between a service provider and a client. Particular aspects of the service—like quality, availability, and responsibilities—are agreed between the service provider and the service user.

Such an agreement can also work perfectly well between you and a third-party collaboration partner. Explicitly stating expectations of quality, timeframe, cost, communication channels, and who’s responsible for what can help you save both time and money.

Make sure both parties attend an SLA workshop, read the written agreement, and sign it as a token of mutual trust.

Solution partners

Not everything has to start from scratch or a completely blank page. If you need external help with a product or a service, help may be closer than you realise.

In this case you should research whether or not a vendor you are buying from has official solution partners listed on their website or another repository. These are well-versed experts recommended by the vendor, and have a higher probability of delivering what you require.

Successful delivery is not automatic, however, so be sure to put solution partners through a thorough review—complete with an RFP and a PoC if relevant.

The end of a digital project

All things must come to an end, and a digital project is no exception. But there are some qualifications to this statement. The right question to ask yourself at this point is the following: Is the project continuous or a one-off project?

If the project was one-off, e.g. a reboot of your web operations or development of a new app, congratulations! You have now reached the finish line. Everything you have learned—from purpose, project types, pitching, setup, people and tools retrieval, doing the actual work, and reporting and evaluation—have now been, or are ready to be battle-tested.

However, if the project is continuous, e.g. for maintenance purposes in your digital experiences or to steadily deliver digital services in your organisation, you must now move back to the starting line. But it’s not quite the same as starting from scratch. Now you already have a lot of knowledge, ready-made templates, an eager team, and many tools. You have acquired the framework to work and improve continuously in an efficient manner.

Head back to this guide to revisit recipes and best practices, in order to always keep you sharp as a knife in your digital project management.

Thank you for reading!

This guide is proudly delivered by Enonic and written by Vegard Hovland Ottervig.

Vegard Hovland Ottervig holds a master’s degree in film studies and has worked with journalism and marketing since 2010. He loves cycling, philosophy, gaming, and writing.

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