Systems Advice from Wisebread
As you know, his year, I will be speaking in FinCon13 a work session, The session is for advanced bloggers and is called “How to Build Systems for Your blog”.
During the conference I will share input I have already received from others. Ahead of the conference I hope to highlight some of that information and share it with all of you.
In this post, we hear from Gregory Go at Wisebread. Wisebread wants to help their readers ‘Live large on a small budget’ by providing:
- Shopping tips
- Financial advice
- Career and money-making ideas and
- “General adulthood know-how your parents forgot to tell you”.
Greg said:
These are the systems I think are most valuable to us today. They have evolved from our 6 years of operations.
1. Success Vision. “What does ‘done’ for this task/project look like?”
A common problem with publishers is never finishing a project. There’s just so many opportunities that we often dip our toes into something new, but never take it to completion. This results in a ton of busywork with no discernible benefits.
To solve this problem, we try to focus on what it looks like when this task or project or open question is “done”. By defining a “done”, it helps us with scope creep and having a ton of open ended projects.
The “success vision” phrase is from the Getting Things Done book.
2. Templates & Processes.
Write down instructions! Write down how a problem was fixed/solved, so it’s faster to fix it next time.
When producing content, there are hundreds of small decisions the author/editor can make in order to “optimize” that article. When there are hundreds of posts to deal with, it’s not efficient to repeatedly make those tiny decisions on every article. So, we try to standardize a process (and write down the steps in that process) whenever possible.
This standardization probably costs us a little bit in “optimization” for a particular article, but the long term benefits of being able to semi-optimize a lot more articles a lot faster are well worth it.
We apply these templates and process constraints as much as possible. Sometimes, a little constraint can eliminate decision paralysis and result in much higher productivity.
We use Google Docs extensively for standardizing these processes.
3. Daily/Constant Communication.
Since we’re a virtual team — half dozen people work from home to run Wise Bread — communication is a critical part of keeping the company humming along.
We have daily phone meetings among key stakeholders. We try to keep these phone meetings to just 2-3 people.
We have a Skype chatroom for all team members. This chatroom is invaluable for tackling day-to-day issues, and for keeping the team in constant contact with each other. The personal off-topic discussions shared in this chatroom also help develop camaraderie and improve team morale.
BTW, the Agile Project Management framework has helped us here. It’s implied that meetings will answer these 3 questions:
- What did you/we accomplish yesterday?
- What are you/we working on today?
- What are roadblocks you/we are encountering?
Thanks Greg, for providing these valuable insights!
If you are attending FinCon13 and are interested in how to build systems for your blog, stop in on this session on Saturday afternoon for more.
