NETTING IT OUT

We've seen quite a few mistakes in search projects. By search project, we mean any application or business system that is heavily dependent on search, navigation, findability, or knowledge management, including customer support, customer self-service, corporate Web sites, corporate knowledge management, intranets, and leading edge decision support systems.

Many of the mistakes we see are pitfalls common to all projects: poor project planning or management, an inexperienced implementation team, inadequate budget, lack of commitment. But a few are uniquely problematic to search projects.

The earliest mistakes deal the heaviest blows, and the first one is virtually unrecoverable: failure to establish and communicate the right vision. If you fail at this point, the project will not succeed, and you will probably not be able to resuscitate it. Now, this particular problem will slay most any project, but it is particularly difficult pitfall to avoid for search projects. Search projects have a project and program lifecycle (presented here), for which many project teams—and their colleagues—are not prepared.

In establishing your vision, you must set a significant, desirable, achievable goal. To communicate it, you must present a simple, familiar, and evocative story that helps anchor people to the project, tell them what to expect, and help them think through what will happen and what it will mean.

We offer two stories from history, which serve as examples of successful vision and which you can potentially use as metaphors—stories—for your search project: Man on the Moon and Central Park Restored.

SEARCH PROJECT MISTAKES

Biggest Mistake Is the First One

In our consulting work, we've had the opportunity to review many search and self-service projects, enough that we've developed our own list of critical success factors (CSF) or their flip side, the big mistake parade (BMP).

As with any discipline or technology, there are major missteps in search projects and myriad minor no-nos. The death traps peculiar to search are few and come early in the life of the project. Later missteps are far less serious and easier to recover from, but they are more numerous and thus more difficult to altogether avoid.

The first mistake, and it can deal a deathblow to the project, is in vision and communication. This is true of any big undertaking.

But it is especially easy to get wrong with search.

Impact of Failure

If you fail to establish and communicate the right vision for your project, here's what happens:

• You may not have the right goals and may not actually know how the project should unfold.
• You can't communicate to key people how this project will change what they do, how it will benefit the company, and what support you'll need from them.
• People don't mobilize to provide the support the project needs.
• People think they understand, but make incorrect assumptions.
• People don't ask all the questions that help you vet your project plans.
• People are frustrated because they don't know what to expect.
• People raise objections as they get requests they didn't expect and feel they can't afford.
• People throw darts at you, especially when things don't play out as they imagined.
• Your time is spent putting out political fires.
• The project cannot achieve its goals, and the reputations of you and your team suffer.
• When the project fails, your organization doesn't get the benefits you need. Calls are not deflected, costs are not contained, productivity is not enhanced…these are bottom line impacts to the company. As a result, your budget, your power, your headcount, and your ability to recruit talent all suffer.
• When the project fails, your company doesn't get the benefits it needs. The impact of a failed search project can be far reaching. Customer experience takes a dive when you can least afford it, partner efficacy suffers, or a valuable information asset is not available where its needed, putting you at a competitive disadvantage.

Dropping into this first search project pitfall is virtually unrecoverable. Your search project, or your search-dependent project, will not be a success. Its wounded staggering may give the illusion of life, perhaps allowing you to escape unscathed to another project, but it will not achieve any of its goals. In fact, escape is the best action you can take to rescue the situation: Get out of town. The original team will have little credibility, and sometimes only new blood can step in and get a hearing for a rescue plan.

This is a rather a dramatic introduction, but appropriate to a success factor that hinges on storytelling.

GETTING OFF ON THE RIGHT FOOT

Getting the Vision Right

The right vision presents a significant, desirable, achievable goal. Vision is a problem if the goal is too big, too small, or not desirable. Too big? Unachievable. Too small? Not worth doing. Not desirable? Well, sometimes teams convince themselves that the cheap or easy or politically expedient action will deliver what's needed, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Avoiding the vision problem does not require arcane skill. It is more a matter of tenacity, persuasion, and courage. You will have to enlist people to help develop the vision, and you may have to persuade them to give up assumptions, constraints, or policies along the way. You also need to present compelling reason to act: either benefits to be achieved or disaster to be avoided.

When you are establishing your search project vision, start with people and what their lives should be like. Collect anecdotes, and create stories about what it would be like if people found answers to significant problems in just a few steps. Decide how long people should spend searching for an answer. Compare that to the current state. Your stories will sound like this:

"When we adopt our new system...

• Our customers can come to our support Web site and, in 1 minute, find the answer to a question on how to use our system. Today, this only happens if they ask one of our 46 FAQs. Otherwise, they can either spend 30 minutes or more, or call us."
• Our customers can find the right product, which fits their situation, in 5 minutes. Today, they can get a list of potential choices in their first search, but they can't narrow the choice to the right one without our help. Our conversion rate for products that have a product selector is three times as high as those that don't. Extrapolating from that, making it easier to choose products could increase our online revenues by 9 percent."
• Diana, our top sales person, can find out in 5 minutes if anyone has a contact at a key prospect. Today, it takes her an untold number of phone calls, and she probably won't find out."
• In 15 minutes, she can discover a proposal very similar to the one she needs to write, alter it to fit the situation, and have it ready to go. Today, she spent an hour, and interrupted 4 people, to find the proposal she needs. She could have made another 3 sales calls in that hour."
• Mel, our systems engineer, can find a project plan in 10 minutes that he can use as a guide in developing the plan for a new engagement. It took him 2 days elapsed, and about an hour of emailing, to find one this week."

These are examples of desirable and valuable results. Diana, Mel, and the customers would be very happy with the new system. In order to scope the vision, make a list of all the sources that must be combined in order to deliver each answer. Then note the organizations owning the information. You'll come up with something like the rows depicted in Table A.

SCOPING EXERCISE FOR VISION
(Please download the formatted PDF to see the table.)
Table A. Use this table to assess the key scope issues for your vision, the breadth of information required to satisfy the vision, and the number of organizations that will be involved.

What does this table tell you? It tells you how many organizations you’ll need to work with, which provides the political scope for your project, and how many information sources, which provides technology and information management scope...