Digital Projects: All You Need to Know

There are more than one kind of digital project. Just like every industry, organization, and coworker is unique, so is the related digital project.

Factors Determining Project Type

Many factors play a role in determining what kind of digital project you are facing. Project management solution Sinnaps mentions the following factors:

Project Scope

The reach, scale, and impact of a project, specifying the work details, number of people, and factors for success. Accordingly, projects can be big or small.

Timeframe

Description of a project and even project parts from initiation to completion or result evaluation. The timeframe determines whether the project or its parts will be short or long, continuous or finite.

Organizing

An essential part of project planning, organizing refers to how tasks and activities are organized and prioritized. Organizing is also an important factor in classifying the type of project.

Cost

A project can be relatively cheap or very expensive, depending on the scope, timeframe, and organizing. The cost sums up these factors nicely and can help you clarify your classification further.

Communication

How you and your coworkers communicate (face to face, video call, chat, email) can help determine the following: Is the project within a single department, across different departments, across different organizations, or across different geographies?

Stakeholders

The number of involved stakeholders can greatly shape the scope of a project. The larger the project is in terms of cost and resources, the more stakeholders are likely to be involved.

Task Assignation

The type of project is also impacted by how different tasks and activities are assigned to team members. Is the responsibility individually or collectively defined? In most cases, a project manager is responsible for the overall assignments and progress.

Examples of Wide Projects

Digital transformation is an example of large, continuous digital projects many industries and businesses face in the present day. Andrew Annacone, Managing Partner at TechNexus Venture Collaborative, mentions four types of digital transformation projects:

Process Transformation

Modern technology, like analytics, APIs, and machine learning, have enabled organizations to reinvent their business processes. This lowers cost, reduces cycle times, and increases quality.

Business Model Transformation

Digital technologies can also transform the entire business model itself. This is the fundamental building blocks of how value is generated in the industry. Creating value in new ways, like Uber did for the taxi business and Airbnb did for the hotel industry, is a comprehensive project involving many stakeholders and business units.

Domain Transformation

Expanding into another industry, whether established or entirely new due to digital transformation, is another example of a large-scale project. An example is the once online bookstore Amazon launching the successful cloud computing/infrastructure service AWS.

Cultural/Organizational Transformation

In order to stay alive in today’s environment, with shifting consumer behavior, the most visionary organizations embrace a culture of innovation. A full, long term digital transformation requires other mindsets, processes, and skills than yesterday. This can lead to projects which aim to shift to agile workflows, testing and learning, decentralized decision making, and so forth.

Examples of More Narrow Projects

In your role as a digital manager, you will most likely face several smaller projects in your organization, whether finite or continuous. Project planning vendor TeamGantt lists the following examples:

Software and Mobile App Development

Developing an application can be a fairly straightforward process or a more advanced one, depending on the complexity of the proposed product. In any case, the goal is fairly clear and the project team works toward the release of the given software.

Website Design and Development

This kind of project is somewhat similar to software and app development, but with some differences in product attributes. A noteworthy aspect is the introduction of progressive web apps, which merge the traditionally separate website and mobile app. Upgrading your CMS is another example of web development.

Digital Marketing Campaigns

The release of a new product or service, a new report, a change in the organization, or the attempt to raise awareness of any given issue. They all call for a digital marketing campaign. Such campaigns can consist of a large number of assets, events, and involved people, thereby requiring the firm hand of a project manager.

UX/UI Design

Creating great user experience and user interfaces is an ongoing struggle. This of course calls for projects aimed at improving such matters for end users and other stakeholders.

Content Strategy

Crafting a content strategy in line with the broader organizational strategy is another example of a project. It may involve the CEO, CMO, marketing managers, and other stakeholders.

SEO/SEM

Improving search engine optimization and search engine marketing involves a process of identifying market trends, keywords, pain points, tool acquisition, work setup, and so on. Which again leads to another kind of project than the ones mentioned above.

Common Denominators

Rather than fragmenting the following guide with bits and pieces relevant for different kinds of digital projects, we will go through points relevant for all types. Which will be based on their common denominators.

These denominators are implicit in the structure of the guide, like pitching, setup, asset retrieval, the actual work, improving, and reporting.

Your proposal has been approved and the digital project is moving forward. Now it’s time to set up the formalities.

Agree on Purpose and KPIs

As mentioned above, having a purpose is so important for your digital project that you can’t really start without it. Involve the relevant people from top to bottom, and create an explicit document where the purpose of the project is stated.

The second part of this stage is to state your KPIs (key performance indicators). A KPI is a type of performance measurement, and can help you evaluate the success of the project. ClearPoint Strategy offers a list of common KPIs, like:

• Profit
• Cost
• Customer lifetime value (CLV)
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
• Net promoter score (NPS)
• Cash flow from financing activities
• Average annual expenses to serve one customer
• EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization)
• Innovation spending

There can be many other KPIs. It all depends on the specific needs of your project and your organization. Choose the ones that make most sense in the limited scope of your project.

Enable a Prime Mover

Every organization and project needs a prime mover to inspire other coworkers and to get things done. You should work towards finding and enabling a skilled person of conviction, who has the ability to perform decisions in your project or organization as a whole.

If you don't have such a person onboard, the results might become what many people dread in any project attempting to be effective: Red tape and watered down democracy. Where everyone gets a say in the direction, processes are slow, and actions lead nowhere.

To achieve success in your projects, you need a person in a good architectural role, able to make decisions in functionality and in the technical realm. Great product management skills is also a highly desired bonus.

Set Up Documentation and a Quality System

Before embarking on an exciting project journey it’s easy to ignore the “boring” stuff in the form of documentation. However, a well executed and thorough documentation is of vital importance for your project, your coworkers, audits, learning points, and future gains.

A great documentation practice can help you do the following:

• See what was done, by whom, and when
• Learn why specific measures were taken, and others not
• See the source code/material/recipe of a solution
• Control partner actions in regard to invoicing
• Understand learning points
• Review progress
• Estimate future cost

In relation to great documentation comes a quality system. This is a specific implementation of quality concepts, standards, methodologies, and tools. The purpose? To achieve quality related goals, like maintaining verifiable documentation.

A quality management system ensures that an organization, product, or service is consistent. It usually has four main components: quality planning, quality assurance, quality control, and quality improvement. Quality management is thus focused not only on product and service quality, but also on the means to achieve it.

The purpose of this is to ensure that no actions or legal requirements are missed in the course of a project, and that you keep a consistent quality of your work.

Set Up Timeline and Process

It is hardly a secret to know that good planning is key to a successful endeavor. If you want your digital project to succeed, the best solution is to plan in advance by setting up a timeline and process outline.

What is expected to happen when? What are the different milestones? What actions will be recurring, and what actions will represent single incidents? A timeline may look like this hypothetical example:

A process may look like this:

In the stage of setting up a timeline and process, you can go by essentials or go as detailed as needed. The idea is that the timeline and process outline should act as helpful tools for you and your team in the weeks to come. Invite your coworkers to a session where you go through the points, and decide whether or not it is clear and actionable.

Don’t Forget Scaling

Scalability is the ability to grow or downsize an enterprise in accordance with changing circumstances. If, for instance, you are implementing a new reporting system in your corporation, you can start small in just one department.

If the project turns out to be a success, you can then scale it up to impact more departments. But this presupposes that your project is built to scale from the beginning.

What scaling means is that you have a modular core in your project with the option to add or remove more assets and/or manpower. The core drives the project with a purpose, timeline, and processes. It can also receive or remove additional functions seamlessly as the circumstances dictate. Like additional coding power, legal assessment, or simply more money.

So, make sure you craft a project that can scale easily. Both up and down.

Without tools, we humans would be left scraping the dirt off the ground with our bare hands. Luckily, through our rational human mind we have thought and crafted countless tools to use in countless situations.

How to Choose Digital Tools

Before embarking on a quest to find the right tools, keep in mind two rules of thumb:

1. Don’t go with the first and the best
2. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side.

While researching tools, the first one you happen to stumble upon may seem great and exciting in fulfilling your tasks.

But if you haven’t researched any other tools you don’t necessarily know what you have missed in terms of functionality, learning curve, surrounding community, and so forth. Most research processes end up with at least two alternatives where you can compare pros and cons.

Also, you may already have a tool you are not entirely satisfied with. Just remember that even though another tool may seem fresher or simply different, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will make you more efficient.

In this situation, you will do best if you research several tools and compare them against each other and your initial tool with the requirements you have for solving your tasks efficiently.

Digital Platform

One of the most important digital tools you will be working with is your digital platform. This creature goes by many names due to its multifaceted nature, but the ones most common are: content management system (CMS), digital experience platform (DXP), and web experience management (WEM).

The CMS is the engine behind your organization’s digital experiences. In a world where an increasing amount of businesses expect their revenues to be dominated by digital, having a future proof digital platform will keep you ahead of your competition.

Choosing the right CMS for your organization can help you increase your revenue, make you more efficient, and keep your customers happy. In other words, it can be the key to your long term success.

A digital platform will be a costly, but fundamental tool your organization will have to work with for at least the next 5–10 years. Selecting the right one is therefore not a matter to be treated lightly.

Depending on the size and scope of your organization and digital experiences, here is a suggested process to find and choose the right CMS:

• Public forum with relevant agencies and vendors
• Issuing a tender
• Creating a longlist
• Researching all candidates on the longlist and comparing with your requirements
  • Demo
  • Interview
  • Specifications checklist
• Creating a shortlist
• Inviting shortlist candidates to perform a PoC
• Final assessment and verdict

Marketing Enhancement Tools

By its nature, a CMS/digital platform should be lightweight and flexible. Why? So you can choose exactly the marketing tools you love to integrate with it.

Of course, many vendors offer a full marketing suite natively with their product, which may seem easy or reassuring. But this is not everyone’s preferred cup of tea.

Combining your CMS with powerful marketing tools is a great way of building a seamless digital experience for your customers. Look for a digital platform that features ready made integrations with analytics tools, marketing automation tools, SEO tools, A/B testing tools, and more.

A good CMS knows it’s limitations and rather than building their own tools for all of these functions, it provides integrations with best of breed tools that are easily accessible.

Microservices

A technical issue you may consider with the architecture of your digital platform and the modularity of best of -breed marketing tools, is microservices.

These are a collection of separate services in an application that are highly maintainable and testable, loosely coupled, independently deployed, and organized around business capabilities.

Examples of microservices can be an insurance calculator, an API for an order, components of a website (like a box for showing a form), or server side functionality (like a scheduled task).

Microservices fit into modern cloud infrastructure, with many smaller components running that are easier to test, deploy, and maintain for DevOps.

As they consist of smaller pieces, microservices allow your coworkers to be more autonomous, in that they can make changes easier without interfering with other parts of your digital project.

Add to this a modular nature, no single points of failure, that your developers can start building solutions faster, and scaling at will, and microservices may look irresistible.

However, be mindful of possible caveats. These can include poor architecture construction, a more fragmentary nature, and possibly more difficult testing.

Like all tools, you should carefully consider whether or not microservices fit your organization.

While reporting can sound like a dull and tedious chore, you need to keep the following in mind: Reports are an invaluable tool to help you document and improve your efforts.

Knowing what was expected to happen, what actually happened (and when), and what the results were is a resource that you, your team, and your stakeholders can use to learn lessons, identify weak points, and leverage best practices.

In other words: the dusty, old reports can be used for you to work even more efficiently and create more value in the future. You only need to learn how to write them and what kinds of reports to include in your project.

What follows is a general guideline with common principles and steps, inspired by BrightWork and Asana. Not all of the steps may be relevant for your particular report, but you should pick and choose the ones who are.

How to Write a Report

Decide the Objective

Just like you need to have a goal or a purpose when starting a project, you have to be goal directed when writing a report. Having a stated objective enables you to write more clearly, and think whether you need to describe, explain, recommend, or persuade. It also helps you define the target audience.

Name Your Report

A good, descriptive name works as a shorthand for what the report is about. If the report is written in regular intervals, consider adding the date to the name as well. Examples include “2024 May – Project status” or “Project X Risk Assessment.”

Understand Your Audience

The target audience of your report should affect the tone of voice you’re adopting. Writing for senior stakeholders is for instance different than writing for your own team.

Knowing your audience, their style, and their pain points, you can tailor the content to reflect their own preferences and values, and thus make them more susceptible to your objective.

Report Format and Type

The objective and the audience of your report decides its formal appearance. Will it be written, or will it be delivered verbally? Should the language be formal or informal? Will the report address financial, technical, or factual issues—or all of them? Are there any ready-made templates available in your organization?

Indicate the Project Status

In the world of reporting, time is of the essence. You must assume that your target audience is short of time. It is therefore important to write clearly, have a descriptive name, and to quickly indicate the status of the project: Whether it is currently on track, at risk, or off track.

Adding colors—green, yellow, and red—respectively, is another helpful visual cue.

Gather the Facts and Data

A report is useless without solid references to facts and data in order to support your claims and conclusions. Use your selected tools and dashboards to inquire for data in the form of graphs, diagrams, and charts, thus underscoring the points you are making.

Structure the Report

While you are not writing a novel, a report is nonetheless an integrated work of prose. There are three key elements in this matter. The beginning, the middle, and the end:

• Introduction: Provide a context for the report and outline the main points you are going to treat.
• Main part: Present background details, analyses, discussions, and recommendations. Draw upon data and supporting graphics to support your position.
• Conclusion: Gather all the findings into one neat package, essentially repeating in fundamentals what the report has been about.

Give a Quick Summary of the Report

As a bonus to the report structure, you can add a section before all the others in the form of a quick, executive summary. This should be brief (remember those busy stakeholders!) and explain very concisely, in maximally 2–3 sentences, what the report is saying.

Pick Two to Three Key Areas or Milestones to Highlight

Although the main part of your report should be fleshed out considerably, you should also think about focus and essentials here. A digital project may be comprehensive, and it might be justified to just include 2–3 key areas or milestones to highlight.

Will you present the project elements chronologically (“we did x, y, and z”), by functionality (“the developer did x, the QA manager did y, the editor did z”), or by milestones (“we reached goal x”)?

Add a High Level Overview of Each Key Area

Even though we’re working hard to keep your report concise and visually attractive, there’s no getting around the fact that the amount of content may be overwhelming.

To help mitigate this, add a sorts of “mini executive summary” before each key area you’re treating. This can be adding a few bullet points to update your reader on the progress, accomplishments, and upcoming work in the given area. Examples can be “75% of tasks completed, 87% of tests successful, next sprint going as planned.”

Add Links to Other Documents or Tools

Due to the fact that a report should be concise, not every bit of information and factoid can be present. But some stakeholders may want to know more. In this case, you can include links to more thorough documentation or tools you have been using in the digital project.

Give Attention to Any Issues or Challenges

No project has run completely smooth all the way from start to finish. This is completely natural, due to the complexity of all the involved people, processes, and assets.

There's no use pretending that the problems aren't there. Instead you should give them attention, so both stakeholders and coworkers can take appropriate measures.

Readability and Editing

A report does not exist for its own sake, to be read by no one. Spend some time to edit and revise the content, cleaning it for unclear phrasing and making it more readable with simple formatting options and visuals. Include fellow coworkers for reviewing purposes.

Bonus: Medium Type

When you hear the word “report,” you might think of the archetypical folder containing pages upon pages. But a physical copy does not have to be the medium of your report. It can be digital in the form of a PDF, but another option can be a Wiki.

If you for instance deliver weekly reports, a Wiki can easily let you duplicate setup and also let you see earlier reports in an instant for comparing purposes. Yet another report medium can be an interactive dashboard.

Evaluating the Project

Many of the reports mentioned above are about evaluation: Evaluating risk, GDPR/privacy concerns, project status, and budget. However, it is useful for you to evaluate the project itself in order to identify whether or not the project delivered on all fronts.

Analyzing completed goals, objectives, activities, and budgetary elements can help you determine if the project was on track, deviated slightly, or is completely off course.

This will in turn enable you to learn from your mistakes and successes, as well as aid you to improve yourself and your team’s efforts in future endeavors.

What to Evaluate

Near the end of a digital project it is useful to evaluate the following aspects, according to ProjectManager:

• Schedule: Compare the actual dates of your major milestones with the scheduled dates. Assess the deviations and the impact they will have on your overall project, and rectify if necessary
• Quality: Evaluate the quality of your digital project management practices and quality system, and whether you follow the principles. Also compare your team’s results with your quality standard
• Cost: Compare your actual spending with the projected budget. Issue a forecast to predict whether you need to adjust your spending in the longer run
• Team satisfaction: Check in with your team regularly to find out what they think about the project and what you can do differently
• Performance to business case: Compare your actual project as it now is to the original business case. Were the projected benefits realistic? Does the problem the project was designed to solve still exist?

Evaluation Tools and Methods

There can be several ways of evaluating your digital project, in addition to reports. Sumac lists the following:

• Surveys: Can be utilized before and after a project to measure satisfaction of team members, stakeholders, or customers. Can be performed electronically, with pen and paper, or through a personal interview
• Observation: Can be used in e.g. UX testing before and after a change to a digital tool, a digital experience, etc., in order to evaluate differences in time or task solving
• Case studies: In-depth research on any given product, solution, or personage in relation to your digital project. A case study can provide you with both qualitative and quantitative data for evaluation
• Focus groups: Usually consists of 3–5 individuals representing a cross section of your target audience. A facilitator asks directed, open ended questions, providing you with information on how the respondents perceive and are impacted by your digital project
• Interviews: Can be 1-on-1 or 1-to-many, and are typically used to gather marketing information, assess knowledge, satisfaction, interest, etc.

Evaluation Plan

According to MyMG, an evaluation plan is a document that defines and executes activities for analyzing a digital project by specific criteria. The plan aims to determine project efficiency through tracking progress on objectives, activities completion, and dates of completion:

• Step 1 – Identify outcomes: Find the KPIs which will bring you to understand the completion rate of your overall digital project goal
• Step 2 – Choose evaluation method: Choose one or more evaluation methods which cover as much impact as possible for your evaluation purposes
• Step 3 – Create evaluation report: Create an evaluation report which includes your conclusions about the digital project’s ability to produce desired change and accomplish intended goals