Everything you wanted to know about your project

You’ll remember the six steps I outlined last time:

• Discover
• Define
• Design
• Develop
• Deliver
• Debrief

Well this time wells look in some detail at the first of those steps: Discover

This stage of the job happens just after your Client Services team have learnt there’s a chance of some work from a Client. It may be an ongoing agreement to do work (a restored agency or retained work, for example) or it may be a pitch situation, but in any case you should have been called upon to start steering the work right from the off. Having a Project Manager, even at this early stage, is essential to make sure any digital marketing project starts off in a controlled way that will, ultimately, save time and money later on in the job.

Between you and Client Services you’ll be asking a lot of questions of the Client, such as these obvious ones:

• Is there a website to be built?
  • Will it be a micro-site or a brand web presence?
  • Is a content management system needed?
• Will a banner campaign be needed?
  • Will they be static, animated or rich media?
• Will there be any data capture?
• What about emails?
  • Are they generated dynamically or are they static?
  • Do you have a recipient list already or do you need to acquire one (and how)?
• Will you need exposure through social network tools and which ones?

In a perfect world your Client Services or Planning team will be asking all these questions but as the Project Manager you have to make sure they do – and not just those questions. You’ll also need to know:

• Who do you want to talk to?
• Why do you want to talk to them?
• What’s in it for them?
• What do you want them to do after you’ve talked to them?
• How much are you willing to spend to reach each person?
• When do you need to talk to them?
• What are the targets so that the project can be considered successful?
• How is your client perceived?
• How about their competitors?
• Why is your Client’s product or service better?

And don’t limit yourself to these questions – if you feel you need to know other things then ask.

Once you’ve gathered this information it’s a good idea to review it to see if what you’ve learnt has, in fact, generated more questions. Don’t be afraid to go back to the Client and ask for clarification and more detail – time well spent now will pay back many times over by helping you to eliminate misunderstandings, misconceptions and miscommunications early on. It should also gave you greater insight into how the Clients think and speak, exposing you to their processes and terminology from the very start of the project.

Now for the most important bit – you need to find out what the Client expects. It’s not just enough to have a list of deliverables; quite often the Client has an idea of a style or a key concept they feel should be incorporated into the creative. Less often asked about, but probably more vitally important, is what the Client doesn’t want the project to include. They may have seen another campaign, someone else’s website, any number of digital marketing assets and either been inspired or deterred by them, but you need to know what these things are to be able to feed that forward into the creative and technical teams when it comes to executing the project and steer the result more closely to a successful delivery.

When it comes to the creative or technical execution the project team may not agree with these expectations, but right now you’re trying to put together all of this information so you can write a totally comprehensive the brief for the project, the ultimate goal of this stage.

Yes, you will have to write the project brief.

A Client brief is usually just a top line summary of what they want to do, which is why you ask all of these questions now. This way you get to write the brief for the Client in terms you both understand and in enough detail as to be precise about what the project covers.

Once written you’ll get the Client to review it and feed back, either with amends or to sign off on the brief. It helps demonstrate that you understand the Client, their customers, their business and their problem (the one that created the need for the project in the first place). It saves the Client time as they don’t have to write the brief for you.

Best of all, though, it brings the Discover stage to an end and gets you ready for the next step – the Define stage.

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