Top Ten Demand Generation FAILS (Part 6) Lumpy Pancake Batter

As you anxiously take the first bite of your stack of hot buttermilk pancakes, dripping with maple syrup, you notice that dusty, dry sensation. The light, fluffy texture is interrupted by a giant glob of unmixed, uncooked flour, salt and baking powder. Lumpy pancake batter has ruined your breakfast.

What caused the lumps in the batter? Inconsistency. The inconsistency was caused by shortcutting the mixing process. Your grandma probably insisted you mix your batter 200 strokes. You probably use an electric mixer. But whether you are building your biceps with a wooden spoon or decorating your backsplash with an electric mixer, shortcut those 200 strokes and you get lumpy batter. And how many lumps does it take to put a ding in your otherwise glorious breakfast? That’s right, just one.

Let’s see how your Demand Center might suffer from lumpy batter. Even if you have properly assessed and documented your process and tailored an infrastructure and organization to work optimally in that process, shortcuts lead to lumps. We’ve all seen them and we’ve all experienced the outcome, either massive operational headaches or deployment mistakes. It’s a simple result of the Compound Delay Effect.

Under normal operations, a campaign deployment process looks something like this:

When early-stage tasks get delayed, the effect is compounded into later stages. Not only is there a delay in beginning the task itself, there are additional delays caused by re-scheduling. The task itself becomes larger because of the start/stop activities added to the mix. And resources are often shuffled to accommodate, meaning originally scheduled resources might not be available and other – and perhaps less ideal – resources are substituted. The compound result becomes distorted and looks more like this:

 

As any Project Manager will tell you, there are only two ways to combat this Compound Delay Effect: move the timeline or add more resources. Sometimes there are no additional resources and sometimes there is a dependency that prevents the useful addition of resources, even if they were available. Other times, the timeline is rigid and tied to an external event that cannot be moved (like a national trade show). Therein lies the great temptation to shortcut the process, leading to lumpy batter.

Nobody wants to shortcut the process. It is sometimes inevitable. When it becomes the norm, you have a real operational problem. Let’s look at a few outcomes, underlying causes and potential solutions.

1.     We’re not quite sure whether or not the project is on schedule, but we think so.

Projects are consistently delivered behind schedule and every deadline is a mad rush to the finish, resembling a college “all-nighter” prior to a big test.

Build project management into your process. Yesterday. If you have in-house PM expertise, figure out how to utilize it. If you need to hire project managers, do it. They will help you build realistic project plans that include all the dependencies, hand-offs and all those tasks you never thought to include in a project plan.

2.     QA is constantly seen as a “roadblock” to completion.

More than likely, QA is not the roadblock but, as the final step in the process, is receiving its assets too late to practically make deadlines.

QA should be considered an integral step in every process. As with any project plan, sufficient time and resources should be assigned. This plan should include time for the normal-case scenario, not the best-case, which is most often the plan. This means plan for mistakes and re-work. Because you know that is going to happen. If your assets were delivered mistake-free every time, you wouldn’t need QA at all.

3.     Tasks keep falling through the cracks.

You consistently think you are nearing completion, only to find out some details (or critical component) has not been completed. After much shouting and finger-pointing, somebody bribes some resources with beer and pizza to work after-hours to cobble together something you can pass off as a deliverable.

This is not an operational plan. Assuming you started with a project plan listing all of the tasks and associated deliverables, somebody still needs to be paying attention. Project Managers are responsible for making sure tasks are completed on time and in the proper sequence, handoffs are made and deliverables are delivered.

According to dictionary.com, the primary definition of inconsistent is “Lacking in harmony between the different parts or elements; self-contradictory.” Like lumpy pancake batter. Or Demand Center processes that don’t always follow process.

Assuming these solutions sound preferable to the alternative, inconsistent chaos, we should begin to see a pattern in the solutions. Project management helps achieve the discipline necessary to keep our execution consistent with our defined process. Failure to consistently manage our projects leads to Demand Gen FAIL number 6: Lumpy Pancake Batter.

Notes:

Your defined Demand Center processes must be consistently followed in the execution of each and every Campaign. Even small variances can lead to poor execution and a negative user experience.

Formal Project Management will help you stay on course and consistently execute according to plan. Implement some form of project management into your system.

In next week’s edition, we will look at Demand Generation FAIL number 7: Testing, 1,2 3! How to make sure Quality Assurance is actually assuring quality.