The Collaborative Sourcing Model

I received a request for clarification from Dave Cooksey of PhillyCHI on what I meant by "IDEO style" in my recent post A Process for Creating a Proposal for Interactive Projects.

"Mark - Thanks for sharing this with the group.

I have lots of questions, but want to start by asking what you mean when you state in your blog entry:"Additionally it relies on a leader who is facilitating a team IDEO style rather than an account manager who is trying to find the solution on his or her own."

For those of us not familiar with IDEO or their working style, can you give a few bullet points to clarify? And for PhillyCHI members, do you / your organizations have processes similar / dissimilar? Anything you can share with the group?

Dave Cooksey

PhillyCHI Chair"

Here's my response.

Dave,

That's a good question. I put " IDEO style" forward as a broad brush stroke. I advocate the foundations of their process, not necessarily the details. How they handle and staff projects seems to revise itself every couple of years - so I can't really sell their process in detail.

The following details then, of what I call the Collaborative Sourcing Model, are in the flavor of IDEO but come from my participation with many studios in the SF Bay Area web development and ID scene. Nathan Shedroff and vivid studios were instrumental in introduced me to several of these tenets as part of a manifesto called User-Centric Design (which you are all natively familiar with I am guessing).

Here is the Collaborative Sourcing Model.
* Great solutions to problems come from teams working together to solve them
* This model requires a leader
* Great leaders know how to bring the right people together and get their brains to turn on and think with others on the team. They don't seek the best solution alone - or even have much of an investment in being the person who seeded the killer solution
* Solutions to problems start with insights about the customers as seen through the different disciplines and then work themselves up to become business structures and strategies

Challenges to this come from the Business Model of Design. The Business Model of Design means the following
* This model requires a leader
* The Leader is solely charged with being the source for new ideas but may find support through academic pedigree, key opinion leaders, and solicitation of input from production and manufacturing teams.
* Solutions to problems come from leadership pulling in the right generic business models and strategies and placing these structures down on top of the problems of the specific industry

While I think many of us feel at times that one describes heaven and the other hell, many challenges we face in creating digital media and interactive experiences require a balance between the two.

Thanks for the opportunity to write to the group on this. Let me know if you want more detail. It's kind of a cause for me, and I consult on it regularly so it's on my mind constantly.

BTW: IDEO's site: http://www.ideo.com/

Regards,
-Mark

Rebranding America and Our Security

If you believe in the power of brand to significantly impact how people relate to a company
AND
If you believe you don't have to be a company to have a brand - you could be a country

Then Obama's decision today to close Guantánamo Bay may be the greatest rebranding effort of the year and essential for national security.

The NYT Article :
Obama Orders Secret Prisons and Detention Camps Closed

It's good to be the good guys.

A Process for Creating a Proposal for Interactive Projects

The process of creating a proposal that requires some strategy work to prepare, or is for a client who isn't at all clear about what they want, is a difficult one for most studios and agencies to get a handle on. Many start ideation too soon, leave out key internal subject matter experts, fail to create actionable project plans and produce unrealistic estimates.

Basically they implode.

Reflecting on the best practices in the studios I have worked for, I have put together the following process chart. It's a lot to take in but is built around the basic project pattern I outlined in an earlier post.

Additionally it relies on a leader who is facilitating a team IDEO style rather than an account manager who is trying to find the solution on his or her own.

Here's the process. You'll need to click on the image to see it writ large enough to read.


You can download the Visio file (553k) for this business development process from my site.

Typical Project Pattern

Recently I was asked by an interactive agency to help improve its overall processes including strategic consulting processes. They were unclear exactly how to begin ideation and when.

I have always been on the creative side of things; coming up with ideas for my own companies and others. Along the way, I have learned that to be a successful idea person you also need to be proficient at getting these ideas recorded and executed. So I have developed process and project management skills as well. This client put those skills into play.

My first step was to make the following pattern visible. Almost every effort in the interactive space - whether internally at a company or in an agency - follows more or less the same pattern:

1. Intake - Understanding the charge, building the team etc.
2. Analysis - assessing what is there and then thinking strategically. This is the time for innovation.
3. Feasibility- Can the ideas that came out of the ideation work be built? How?
4. Production - The making of whatever you are hoping to deliver
   
5. Outcome - proposal, website, white paper, strategy brief etc.

As you can see from the diagram, projects often lead to others in a continuing spiraling cycle.

Expand the Margins of an Interactive Project

Here is one of the equations for making your margin in an interactive project.

A web development team which understands the vision of a project -> creates better project requirements.

A team that wrote the project requirements -> creates project plans that are more feasible.

A team that created the plan that it is building within -> creates projects that hit their margin.

Account Management teams that work alone in business development and Project Managers that work alone in project planning work against profit in the digital space.

Interactive agencies need to hire Information Architects, Coders, Copy Writers, Creative Directors etc. who can think strategically and these people need to be deeply involved in business development in order for profit margins to be consistently met quarter after quarter.

In other words increase the margins of your digital projects by increasing margins of the team.

Making work meaningful for the whole studio.

A team where everyone feels that the work they are doing is meaningful is ideal and not impossible to create.

Meaning for most web people I have worked with starts with knowing the purpose of the things they are building.

So why then do many of the account managers I have encountered in Philadelphia treat their team like Kinkos? Rather than bringing them in to participate with them and the client early on, rather than facilitating them as an orchestrated unit creating solutions, rather than allowing them partial credit for the success of the account; why do they engage their team as if there is a counter separating them on which they can just drop job orders after working out things on their own with the client?

I think it is the print model of advertising being ported wholly to the interactive space which is causing this problem. The account manager role as brought over to the web from traditional (print) advertising also relies too heavily on motivating account managers by praising and bonusing them - I'm guessing - for their solo efforts.

This model, the print model, as applied to highly interactive projects is inefficient, undermines morale and employee retention, and often leads to confused online strategies and project plans.

Leadership which sees its role as faciliating and guiding a team towards solutions is sorely needed in our interactive agencies. Additionally leadership that understands that the ideas the agency's technologists (and IAs and everyone else on the "production" team) contribute are essential to developing great strategy is also necessary.