Decision making: When you have enough information you should analyze the possibilities and scenarios and take the decisions that minimize the possibilities of fails assuring your success.

Control: Controlling the flow of your plan is vital in order to finds out your position in the project and to anticipate deviations and, if necessary, runs your contingency plans (Never forget to have contingency plans; you could analyze your historic information to reduce your uncertainty). “All project managers face problems on Monday mornings – good project managers are working on next Monday’ problems.” You cannot work on next Monday problems if you do not control how are your project going.

Measurement plan: In this stage we should define the KPI’s for your Scorecard and Dashboard. It should include the company strategy, objectives, tactics, and KPI’s. You can’t manage what you can’t measure repeated Robert Kaplan over and over again.

I would add to this quote, you shouldn’t measure what is not relevant to your strategy. Probably for offline projects is different because measuring is synonymous of outrageous costs, but in online you could almost measure all the people online experience without so much effort. So one of the most valuable advices I could give you is to not measure everything. The Analytics Professionals heard daily our clients ask to measure “all the information we could get from their sites or campaigns” but we should remember that, not all the data is information (but produces cost anyways), not all the information is useful for every single project, and finally as much data we have as much noise we get.

a. Tracking architecture: Your defined the KPI’s going from the strategy level to the data level. Now you should define the tracking architecture from the data level to achieve the required information to the strategic level. It’s vital a complete understanding of each tool’s backend (ad server, analytics, mailing servers, SEM servers, etc.) otherwise you wont be able to know what does the tracked information mean. Remember that for example Unique Visitor is a “virtual” metric that will be defined by the timeout definition (daily, weekly, monthly) and the time base (monthly, rolling) and by the IP tracking (is different for a Logfile analyzer than for a Page Tagging system). Please don’t forget the Tracking architecture document.

b. Constant measuring: Measuring (and reporting) in every case has two objectives, decision making and controlling. In order to define the period time for reporting, I always recommend companies to define the required period they need for decision making and controlling, and that’s the reporting period. Having daily reports, for example, just because is possible is not only ineffective, it’s going to drives you to incorrect analysis and finally, to misinterpret the information which wont help you at all to take the right decisions.

c. “Findings” and “Key Learnings”, and recommendations: After you have the report with the analysis you should get the most important findings (understanding the present), define the key learning (generating historic for future decision making) and recommendations (next steps). The idea understands what is happening, how we could use in the future our learning, and finally, what actions we are going to take in the future to be more efficient (I suggest to learn Peter Senge’s Book “The fifth Discipline”. The problem is not that you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it’s the same problem you had before).

d. Adjustments: While you measure your success you have a better understanding of your business so you could adjust your measurement plan, or even goals to your business reality. I recommend to not taking your measurement plan and goals as untouchable things, otherwise you will be at the end prisoner of it.

Brainstorming process (identify tactics): Once you understand what’s your “weakest link”, you should launch a brainstorming session (or several) in order to find the project or projects (tactic) that will best help you fix your “weakest link”. If you have a lack of information about your client behavior and attitudes then a great idea is creating a social network where they could relate each other and as a result you will get a bunch of information that will help you understand what are they doing and why.

4- Project design (tactics): Now you have the idea (The difference between idea and project is that IDEA is the “what to do” and the project is the “what to do, how, when, etc”), so you need to design your project starting by defining your project scope as much detailed as possible, otherwise you will face lot of problems in the future. I recommend 70% planning 30% execution, and if you think I’m exaggerating just remember how much time have you spent in last projects just fixing problems because of a weak planning. Remember that a “millimeter of deviation in the basement of a building could make your building falls down when finishing the construction”. “If you are failing to plan is because you are planning to fail”.

Identify RCR (restricted capacity resources): Now you should find the Restricted Capacity Resources (Based on “General System Theory”). All the projects are systems, and within those systems flows productivity (not only talking about production but also about communication, sales, quality, etc). In this stage you need to finds what is restricting your system most (project) and attack it with all your efforts, remember that if you pull a chain you will break it in just one link, it means that one link is always weaker than the rest, and when you fix it, then another one is going to be the weaker one. So you need to find the weakest link from your chain (your system, your project). It means that if you are stocking bunch of products, you should focus on your marketing mix, that’s your weakest link.

Juan Damia (analytics)

Very frequent people ask me about how can they make their online projects work, and more frequent they don’t understand when I ask them about how are they aligning their online project with their Corporative Strategy. An ecommerce website, an online campaign, a community website, a SEM campaign, or whatever else are tactics that should be aligned to a Corporative Strategy. If your online tactic is not aligned with your Corporative Strategy, probably the most intelligent decision could be start again from a scratch.

1- Project understanding: Understanding the strategic plan and objectives from the company is the basement of any project. In this stage is deeply important that you have all the answers you need. I suggest writing in a paper one by one all the questions you think all the people that will be working in the project would need and then find the right people to answer those questions. Remember that you will only find the right answers if you ask it to the right person.