Idea from a road work project – how a marketing role on a project team can be valuable
Tip to information based technical teams – step away from tradition and create a marketing/sales oriented role on your team. Also make sure this person is on point for all your projects, especially when something is temporarily taken away from the users either to repair it or make it better. This will make your job easier and will increase the chances of better satisfaction levels with your customers and probably get you more projects.
I was out on a lunch time ride yesterday. It was another gorgeous Colorado fall day. I came up to an intersection where road work was occurring.
Just like most road projects our first contact was with the flag (or stop/slow sign) person. The role of the flag person is pretty clear - direct traffic through a limited portion of the road at intervals that are safe for the work crew and drivers. They have one job to do for the project and they are focused on doing it and only it. This is a good thing.
Unfortunately they are in a tricky situation since they are also the first and sometimes only, place where drivers can get information about the project and how it impacts their day. More times than not the flag person either is not equipped with the information to handle all the questions from the drivers or could care less about marketing the project and or other projects impacting the drivers and that is understandable. My analogy here is not to focus on the flag person but rather to look at the situation around the interaction of the flag person with waiting drivers from a different perspective. Through this project staffing model cities, contractors, and other related organizations are missing a golden opportunity to sell their work for this project and possibly others and stand out to drivers on the value of the work being done.
A guy in a car when we were waiting was getting really agitated. Total time has been about 5 minutes but I can appreciate how this feels like 5 hours to some people. Starting to see the relation to information based solutions? He got out of the car and asked the flag person how much longer the delay will be. He obviously got an answer that he did not like as this made him even angrier. He stormed back to his car and started to do a u-turn when the flag person changed the sign to allow us to move ahead.
Imagine if the response he got instead went something like this - “Sir I appreciate your frustration. I also do not like being disrupted like this. On the bright side though when this is finished your travel through this part will be even better. Here is a schedule of our planned work on this road and others in the area. We will be working on the road east of here next week. Once we are finished the estimated travel time through this area will be reduced by 5 minutes and will be more comfortable and safer with the new bike lanes road stripes and no pot-holes. Can I answer any questions? Here is my contact info. Please do not hesitate to call me with any questions or suggestions. Ok, they are ready now you can go, thank you for your patience.” The driver may still have been aggravated but probably less so and the long term outcome would be totally different.
In information based technical projects the same unfortunate situation almost always happens. Almost universally a person who has very specific internal management or tech duties is also put in the place where they are the first point of contact for many of the users. This is not fair to the person or the users and it is an opportunity lost to build a bond with the user, get them on board with the project, get their support to help you reach out to others during the repair time about why it is good. Just like in the road work situation the tech person is there to do something related to the actual fix. Most likely they could care less about marketing and overall impacts of projects on the bigger picture. Even if they did care most likely the way their information is framed will be technically focused, not user solution focused.
As the guy drove off and past the work crew he probably forgot the whole thing and probably will not even remember he was mad when he goes through again after the work. Yeah, ok the argument could be made that this is ok isn’t it? Sure, but why take that chance? If the person got the treatment I mentioned above I am willing to bet that he/she would have had much more appreciation for the project, the bigger picture and how the benefits of waiting a few minutes are worth it. Imagine how having a person with this more positive approach could benefit you, your project, and future projects?
I can hear all the tech managers yelling now - good idea but we will never be able to afford that. I disagree, how can you afford not to? Marketing is all about standing out from the others. It is no different for an internal IT project than for a can of soup. It is not a silver bullet but the small investments in it can pay off big time down the road with increased understanding, acceptance, and excitement from the end users and other project teams. Perception and user understanding is as important, if not more so, in information based solutions as the actual solution itself.
Ideally a project manager would have the ability to break tradition and staff a marketing/sales oriented role on the project team. If this is not immediately practical start working more with your marketing department for help or ideas on how to make this work in your situation. Put on your creative hat. Make sure they are in the right places with the right information just like the flag person so that when the users first encounter the work you are doing they get the info they need and more.
Adding a marketing role to your tech team has some cost but the right information at the right time given in the right manner is priceless. We in the information based tech world should know this as well as anyone but we fail to take our own medicine at the times when it is most needed.
Tech teams almost never embrace marketing. They think their work will sell itself. This is just not how it works though and is a reason, at least from my experience why so many information based tech projects ultimately fail. Take marketing seriously for all projects. Everything needs marketing and everyone has a need for information. Thanks for reading.
You will see a lot of my writing around the topic of selling/marketing internal tech teams. I have been around so many teams/managers that knowingly and unknowingly shoot their own foot by ignoring or even despising selling of their efforts. This has been a big frustration of mine for years. I have tried to share my thoughts but traditions and myopia are pretty strong in technical based teams. They would rather bank everything on the final outcome hoping the solution will sell itself. That is very risky and most often fails.
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