Managing Online Projects in 5 Easy Steps

You have clients, deadlines and tons of work to do. You have to deliver results and stay on top of your lists. You have to be productive. Otherwise you’re out of the game. And being out of the game is not fun.

I had an online business for more than 10 years and I pretty much know all the thrills of it. It’s engaging, passionate and filled with action. You don’t have time to get bored. Unless you step out of the game. Which, as I already said, it’s not fun.

Over the years, I created, implemented and launched more than 25 online projects. Each with its own budget, promotion, human resources and logistic. Some of them had 2-3 years projections and even more. Some of them become market leaders, some of them dropped dead after a few months. And despite their success or failure I enjoyed doing them all.

In today’s post I’ll share the process I used to make all those projects alive. It got refined over the years, adding something here, cutting something from there. It aims to be simple enough to be applied to a niche blog, but sustainable enough for the next huge social network hit. Which is exactly what you’re working on right now, of course.

Online Projects In 5 Easy Steps

Every online project would answer to only 5 questions, and those are:

1. what is it?
2. who’s going to use it?
3. how does it look?
4. what does it do?
5. how can I do it?

Each question has its own role and specific implementation techniques. I told you, it’s not complicated. Let’s take them one at a time:

1. What Is It?

This is the cornerstone of your project. It has to be contained within only one sentence. For instance: google is a search engine. DMOZ is a link directory. Mashable is a social media blog.  You got the idea. Keeping it in only one sentence prevents you from starting mutant projects, with overlapping or even opposite functionalities. Usually, the first answer that pops into your head is the correct one, although you can get some improvements if you brainstorm it a little.

From my experience, if the root of your project is not clearly defined, you will have serious troubles later on. Too many times, on a technological, geeky rush, we tend to skip this step and go straight into implementation details. As fun as it may be for some of us, the development part is only the 5th part of this set of questions. Skipping the first 4 points will be like dining out naked: you can be sure you’ll make a huge impression, but you cannot be sure it will be the desired one.

2. Who’s Going To Use It?

The second question is about the beneficiary: who’s going to actually use your product? This is what I call “role playing project management”. Oh, this is the most entertaining question of all, that I can tell you. Impersonating other people is always fun. Trying to actually picture the portrait of a standard user for your project is enlightening. In a mirroring way, finding the fundamental traits of an ideal customer will reveal parts of your project you didn’t even know you had.

Another interesting segment of this step is to identify at least 3 consumer characteristics of your ideal user, regardless of your project. It’s a very fun exercise. For instance, how often does he goes to the movies? Or what kind of car does he drive? What tooth paste does he use? Does he use toothpaste at all? You may think right now: what’s the link between the toothpaste of an imaginary character and my online project? Well, if you can’t imagine the user of your project, chances are he doesn’t really exist.

3. How Does It Look?

This deals with the actual support of your project. An online project is not only a web site. It can spread unto other protocols, like email, or mobile. Most of the time, your online project will have at least web and email as its basic information support, but with the latest deployment in the mobile industry, including iPhone, you will have to include mobile as standard pretty soon.

Also at this level, you start to identify the type of messages you are going to use. It could be text, images, animations, video or audio. This step is mandatory and it will have an important impact in the final step. Many project managers call this “provisioning”, I used to call it “how does it look”. This stage will also be responsible with the logical structure of your project: home page, content pages and the relationship between them. You’re wireframing. And while you’re wireframing, it’s pretty smart to start designing your own SEO strategy before adding content to your product. Identify target keywords and hot content areas.

4. What Does It Do?

Slowly, we’re getting there.The 4th question deals with the flesh of your project. If wireframing means constructing bones, now you’re adding some flesh and blood. In this stage you’re defining your features list. Starting from the simple ones, like “I want a link bar at the top, containing these links” up to something like “this workflow will enhance user experience and make him stick with our product”. Or something in between.

I often found that in this stage of a project you can create some very basic unit tests. Don’t freak out, it’s nothing complicated, just a list of desired actions and expected results. If you create an ecommerce site, one of your desired activities in your estore could be “putting products in the shopping basket’‘. And the expected result would look like ”updating database with new values and showing this on to the user“. It can get complicated, of course, but this approach it’s a gold mine especially if you switch teams a lot.

5. How Can I Do It?

And it’s only in the final stage that we’re actually doing it. And we don’t even start with doing it, we start with planning it. Yeap, so far we didn’t have any plan at all. It’s time to create milestones, chose our technologies, start coding and get on with the launch. This is by far the most exciting stage of an online project and many entrepreneurs are starting directly here. Now you understand why we had to chose around question no 3 the types of messages we will use. Because based on those choices we are choosing technologies right now.

From this stage ahead, you can leverage everything you learned about planing, coding and launching. This is pretty much what you do every day, only you can do it now without constantly asking if you’re doing the right thing. You already decided this. You already answered every question which could potentially become a leak in your planing. And that’s refreshing.

One more thing: after you finally launch the project, getting back to the question number 1 ”What is it?“ would be really interesting. You may have some surprises

***

This project management flow was part of a presentation I did a while ago at a local tech event. If you’re interested, you can download the mind map used for the presentation (a screenshot of it is just below this paragraph) Managing online projects in 5 easy steps (1602) - 146.54 KB. Also, feel free to ask any questions about this strategy in comments.

Practical Astrology: The Moon In Signs

As some of you may know, I use astrology for personal development. Among some other stuff, of course. And by that I mean I use it constantly as a symbolic model of reality. The position of the planets on the sky is having some kind of influence on our lives and I learned how to understand that. Today I’ll share a little experiment which lasted for more than a month. It’s about the Moon and its position on the sky during a complete cycle from New Moon to Full Moon. If you still think astrology is only a horoscope in the morning paper, with no value whatsoever, I recommend you to read more about understanding astrology. And if you still think this is just new age garbage, feel free to skip this post, it’s ok.

I guess you already know the Moon is having a complete cycle in around 28 days around the Earth. During this cycle the Moon is staying between 2 and 3 days in each astrological sign. The nature of the sign in which Moon is at some moment is affecting that part of our being which is ruled by Moon. There are many interpretations of what Moon “is” in our lives. For the sake of simplicity I chose to understand Moon as the ruler of our emotions. It has a number of other interpretations but staying only at the emotional level will just be enough for this experiement. Just remember that the Moon represent the things that can hurt us and the things which we need healing from. The Moon is the unconscious pulse of our emotional field. From joy to sorrow, from compassion to anger, everything that is in your emotional filed has something to do with the Moon and its position on the sky.

The Experiment

During a complete cycle of the Moon I monitored my emotions. I also monitored the position of the Moon on the sky and noted my impressions and reflections of what the Moon in the sky could be. I did this in a kind of geeky way by using, of course, an iPhone. There are two apps on the iPhone that I used during this, none of them directly related to astrology, but more on that later on after the experiment description.  For now, let’s just focus on what I felt during a complete cycle of the Moon on the zodiac, from Aries to Pisces.

Moon in Aries

My emotions were extremely intense, like powered with high energy. On the whole, I felt an intense drive to action. Anything I started was out of enthusiasm, was powered by my own choices, not by external circumstances. I also felt an interesting silence on the emotional level, not too much noise, everything seemed extremely pure. It seemed that Moon in Aries favors clean emotions focused on achieving immediate results. Moon in Aries is also accident prone, during this interval I had a small driving accident (no consequences, but the burst of energy was almost physical around me). (more…)

Mind Mapping Online: Mind Meister at version 3

My first post about Mind Meister, an online mind mapping tool, was written more than one and a half year ago, and at the time the product was just about to be launched. In the last year Mind Meister has dramatically evolved from an experiment to a mature online collaborative suite. The other day I received an email from them announcing the new 3.0 version. They were sweet enough to call me a “key influencer” in that message and they also told me not to whisper a word before November 3rd, 14:00 UTC. How about that?

Well, it’s been well over November 3rd, the United States has it’s first Afro-American President, Barack Obama, things have settled, so to speak, so we can move on with our tiny little review.

Beforehand, you should know that Mind Meister has its own blog and that some of the new features are already outlined there, so if you are impatient, you can go directly to the related post on their mind mapping blog. But if you care to spend another 3-4 minutes around, here’s a quick list of what impressed me:

• very good support for tasks within mind maps – now tasks can have a priority, a start date, duration and an email reminder. Cool.
• new user interface with what they call “organic lines”, meaning the mind map will look a little more natural when you drag around the nodes
• export enhancements, especially in the export dialog area. Oh, you can export now in the MindManager format, the default format for all the mind mapping I do
• export related also, the ability to print the mind map via PDF integration
• there is an OpenId integration now, although I haven’t been able to sign up with my OpenId, I guess this is a temporary glitch
• new team admin interface (if you go for the business package, see pricing below)
• there is a new embed API, which, from what I could think right now, it would make a huge difference in the future. The ability to “script” my mind mapping is one of those things that make me think, you know…
• there were also a number of significant improvements in sharing – it’s a collaborative suite, after all, but I’ll be honest with you and confess that I haven’t used that feature yet. Although I think there is quite a market for such a feature…

All in all, this version 3.0 seems to bring important enhancements. More important, the price has been adjusted, so that a premium account is now 4 USD / month, and a business account is 6 USD / month. Worthy to note is the fact that there is also an academic package, at only 15 USD / year.

Mind Mapping For iPhone: iBlueSky

After my last GTD software review, the article about OmniFocus for iPhone, I received a lot of positive feed-back. But among all the messages, there was a specific email which intrigued me. It was an email from a United Kingdom based software company called Tenero, in which the main developer announced the availability of a mind mapping software for iPhone. Are you kidding? A mind mapping application for an iPhone? That would be really something.

Minutes after I received the message from the developer, I checked AppStore, search for an application called iBlueSky, and installed it. And started to play with it. And continued to play with it. And played with it even more. And, if I wouldn’t have to write this post, I assure that I would play with it even now .

How to mind map with your iPhone

The first thing you notice when you use iBlueSky is the extreme simplicity of the interface. You only have 3 buttons on the lower bar and this is actually all you need.

Adding child items is as easy as hitting the “+” icon in the lower bar. Before that, you have to select the item which will contain the child branch. If you want to delete an item, or even an entire branch, you hit the recycle bin icon. Easy as pie. And if you want to edit the content of an item, double click it:

And yes, this is actually an iPhone in landscape mode, and we all know that this is the best mode for text input, since the keyboard will spread over much more space. I personally think that the lack of a landscape mode in the Mail of iPhone is a serious drawback, by the way… (more…)

My Most Downloaded Mind Maps – reloaded

Mind mapping is not only one of my favorite’s way of brainstorming and idea forging, but it was also a constant topic on this blog, since the very beginning. I first published a mind map on 8th February 2007 more than one an a half year from now. It was a Meeting Mind Map Template, which people found quite useful if I look at the number of downloads since then, more than 1000! The most recent mind map was called Put Your Blog Into A Mind Map , published on July 17th this year, and it was conceived as a tool for enhancing productivity and effectiveness of a professional blogger. I was quite pleasantly surprised the other day when I noticed that a StumbleUpon user reviewed it. So I thought it’s time for me to post another list of my most downloaded mind maps just to see how they performed and how and when people found them interesting.

Before going further I’ll remind you that I use the excellent Mike Jolley’s plugin for downloadable content, and the mind maps are in the Mindjet’s Mind Manager format. You don’t have to buy the software in order to see the map presented below, there’s a free viewer at Mindjet website. But you will need to buy a license if you want to create your own mind maps.

So, here’s the updated list of my most downloaded mind maps. Next to each mind map link you’ll see the updated number of downloads, and right after that the number of downloads as on September 4th 2008. That’s for the case you’ll came back to this post after several months and see how the numbers changed.

1. Meeting Mind Map Template (3412) 1040
2. The Procrastinator Mind Map (3121): 771
3. Project Management With A Mind Map (2694): 748
4. Blogging With A Mind Map (2100): 516
5. Review My Software For A Free License (1498): 438
6. Ghost Action Blog Post (1474): 420
7. Managing online projects in 5 easy steps (1602): 192
8. Put your blog into a mind map (2804): 87

As you can easily see, the Meeting Mind Map Template is still the star with over 1000 downloads in around 500 days, which gives an approximate of 2 downloads per day. For such a specialized type of content I think it’s quite impressive. Second in place come the Procrastinator Mind Map, a funny way of using productivity techniques in order to procrastinate more. It was also an interesting exercise for me.

I’ll jump to the last 2 places, because the rest are just scaffolding mind maps for some of the posts I published and their main purpose was to show a real life application for mind mapping.

The 7th position is a mind map I created for a presentation I had in Bucharest several months ago. It is a little bit more complicated, yet pretty easy to follow. It was a very successful presentation and the mind map was also many times requested at the event.

And the last position is the mind map I constantly use in my blogging activities. What’s downloadable here is just a model, and in order to use it you have to fill in the blanks with your own posts, categories, social networking profiles, etc. But I use the same model filled in with my own posts, categories and topics. I must say that this tend to become one extremely useful mind map for me. And the number of downloads is showing this pretty clear, it has the highest download rate, more than 2 downloads per day, and I expect this to become the new mind map star.

But that’s, of course, entirely up to you, the readers of eDragonu’s blog .

[tags]mind map, mind mapping, blogging, productivity, procrastination, fun[/tags]

Put Your Blog Into A Mind Map

There were several posts here at DragosRoua.com, related to mind mapping, over the last two years. In fact, there were so much posts about mind mapping that I had to create a separate category for them. From an introduction of how and why to blog with a mind map, up to a recap of my most downloaded mind maps, I wrote extensively about this. For the newcomer, mind mapping is a writing technique, which expand the linear thinking by letting you write in different “directions” or “nodes” of a mind map. This seems to be the brain’s most convenient way of representing reality, and it is often used as a creativity enhancement tool.

I found mind mapping very useful when it comes to speed up my management activities. Such as maintaining a blog. Like this one. You know, writing on your blog is a completely different beast than maintaining it. It requires a different set of skills, it takes a certain amount of time, and, like all other activities, can be optimized. If I can use mind mapping to streamline my blogging activity as a whole, why not do it?

My blogging process is the result of several different things: the software I use, the ideas that I want to write about, the posts, the categories, the plugins, the downloads, the revenue strategy… Quite a bit of stuff, right? And is not from the same league, as you already saw, it’s a mix of information, skill, activity and strategy. The challenge is to keep this in a manageable structure.

One very important management principle says: keep everything visible. If there are things on your business that are not visible to you, chances are that your customers won’t seem them either. Keep a broader perspective, try to always look at whole picture. And there is nothing more convenient for the “whole picture” than a mind map.

So, I put my entire blogging process on a mind map, and started to unfold it. Here’s the result:

As I already told you, blogging is a mix of different activities, information and tasks. Must be all visible in order to keep a consistent perspective, right? Must put together all items that create the blogging process and my whole blogging process look like this:

1. headline
2. categories
3. posts
4. revenue
5. promotion
6. plugins
7. downloads

As you may see, there is no specific order in which I added them, and no consistency, some of them are information, like posts and categories, some of them are activities that I have to perform, like promotion and monetization, and some of them are pieces of software, like plugins. Not all blogs may have all the items listed above, but my specific setup does, and I’ll take a wild guess that the vast majority of blogs are pretty much like this.

(more…)

Mind-maping contest: we have a winner, and a new contest – Mind Map Your Love Life

Ok, so time for letting the world to know the name of our Mind Manager license winner. If you have trouble remembering – I admit I have, because I’ve made such a long pause from blogging – here are the details of the contest.

And the winner is: Simonne from AllTipsAndTricks. Congratulations, Simonne and please let me know what are your contacts (again) so I can put you in contact with the nice people from MindJet.

And now, time for the next contest, which is about love. Exactly, let’s use mind-maping in order to clarify your expectations, your availability, your dreams about your love life. Just start mind-maping with love in your heart and I’m sure you’ll come up with something amazing.

Here are the rules:

• you must submit a map related to your (real or desired) love-life
• you must submit real mind maps (can keep your copyirghts just state it somewhere)
• you must have a blog
• you must display a badge of 120×60 pixels in your blog, advertising your participation in this contest; and you’re free to make this badge as you see fit

The contest will be held from 15 July to 15 September. 2007, of course .

Good luck to everybody, and remember: even if don’t win a free license of MindManager (that’s 349 USD in value, by the way) you will still end up with a valuable experience: you’ll know how your love life must be.

[tags]mind maping, love, contest[/tags]