• Informs and authors digital policy.
• Builds and sustains internal digital community of practice.
Program management is the administrative side of digital. Its function is to enable the digital process by ensuring that the digital team is properly resourced, which includes the management of staff, vendors, and capital expenditures. The program management function also oversees the tactical evaluation of the digital team and digital platform performance, in essence measuring how effectively they have implemented the organization’s digital strategy.
Core digital team program management resources are an important and often missing link between hands-on digital workers and the rest of the organization. Program management resources offer jargon-free, quantitative and qualitative evidence to leadership in order to garner fiscal and strategic support for the growing resource needs of the digital team. Unfortunately, many organizations have a weak digital program management function. For some, tactics for the measurement of digital performance are elementary with a focus on website page hits and social media “likes” instead of on things like related fiscal business performance and user experience metrics. Usually, no one in the organization has a clear understanding of what is being invested in digital. Often, digital efforts are sustained by the non-strategic leaching of human and fiscal resources from communications and IT budgets. A result of that is an often siloed approach to digital development. In many organizations, resources can be found for initiatives that center on communications or IT-focused tasks like content creation, visual identity, and systems platforms and application development, but the more obscure but essential digital functions like taxonomy, component content modeling, user experience, and digital analytics development are left without support. A mature approach to program management would address the full scope of digital and ensure that staffing and budgeting are adequate for all areas.
Ideally, an organization’s core digital program management function would be staffed by individuals who have a firm understanding of the capacity and capabilities of digital and who also have management expertise. In many organizations, the program management function is filled by the Chief Marketing Officer or a senior marketing manager. In organizations that have a stand-alone digital team with communications, digital, and IT resources, this role could be filled by a director or vice president of digital. Or, if much of the core team function resides in the IT department, this program management function could rest with the office of the CIO or some other senior IT manager.
DO’S AND DON’TS
DO: Consider the make-up of your entire digital team. That includes not just hands-on resources but also business stakeholders who have a vested interest in the effectiveness of your organization’s online efforts. They have a role to play as well.
Unfortunately, digital program management responsibilities are sometimes minimized or dismissed by digital leads that come from a hands-on digital development background. They focus the core digital team on production, possibly jumping in and playing a hands-on role themselves, while pushing aside practical management tasks. The result of this hyper-focus on production means that the digital team staff often suffers from a lack of professional development. Many Web managers and digital directors have only worked in digital and are unaware of tried-and-true human resource management tactics that could support and grow their staff. To add to the confusion, the human resource staff is often locked in a pre-Web worldview of canned marketing and IT job descriptions and is not able to effectively support the appropriate resourcing of the new field of digital. In a healthy environment, human resources departments, Web managers, and digital directors work together to manage and develop the digital team staff so that they have the same sort of career growth opportunities as those in marketing, sales, or IT.
Core Team Product Management
NOTE PRODUCT MANAGEMENT RESPONSIBILITIES
• Supervises product development and maintenance.
• Assists in Web development of community support and training.
• Gathers digital metrics.
• Informs digital policy.
• Defines digital standards.
• Implements and supports core infrastructure technologies.
• Develops and maintains the organization’s “corporate” or top-level website.
The core team’s product management arm is responsible for ensuring that the organization’s entire digital system works coherently on many different levels. That includes technology platforms and content strategy, but also the “meta” aspects of development that give digital its power, like information architecture and taxonomy. This diversity of mission means that the core digital product management team serves as a digital domain expert, a service provider, an integrator, and a business analyst—all at the same time.
The product management arm of the core team is often responsible for defining digital standards and providing domain expertise in the definition of policy. They are also responsible for implementing strategies and technologies to support the measurement of digital effectiveness. Resources on this team help define the specific metrics and implement the processes and technologies for digital effectiveness measurement. They are also responsible for ensuring that shared aspects of digital are effectively managed and that other people in the organization who need to use those systems are properly trained to do so. That means that things like Web content management systems, analytics software, search engine software, ecommerce engines, and marketing automation software are often implemented and supported by this core team.
In practice, the core team is responsible for the tactical management of an organization’s core digital presence, such as the main organizational website or the top-level pages of that site. See the “Core Team Roles” for a better understanding of the potential members of the core team.
NOTE CORE TEAM ROLES
• Application developers
• Content strategist
• Data analysts
• Developers
• Editors
• Graphic designers
• Information architects
• Librarians
• Producers
• Program managers
• Project managers
• Records managers
• Scrum manager
• Social media moderators
• Systems administrators
• Technologists
• Trainers
• Translators
• User experience specialists
• Videographers
• Writers