Applying “Systems Improvement” to website design and delivery

JMG Systems has always been looking to apply new technologies to help clients do their job more efficiently. One area in particular I decided to explore several years ago was websites. After JMG completed a few web design and development projects, I saw the need to expand this service, so I reached out to Adam Cruse, who was a freelance web developer. The initial reason for us coming together was to improve JMG’s web services for our clients, but we ended up creating an entirely better way to build websites in general.

Before joining JMG, my web projects often took months, and sometimes a year or more to complete. But this timeline was pretty consistent with how websites were being built in the early to mid-2000’s. Even with the booming do-it-yourself website industry, many companies were (and still are) taking months to plan, build, and revise a website. Most organizations can see the need to publish a website or update their current website, but many don’t bother, because of the complicated mess that website building has become. When I joined JMG as a web developer, I was introduced to Matt’s process improvement and system engineering philosophies… Once he educated me on some of these broader principles, we immediately began working together to identify the most expensive issues and pain points and reduce the complexity of building websites.

When Matt and I began going down this path of making better websites, the central theme guiding this process improvement was the client. We really just wanted to make websites less scary and less complex. Up to that point, most of JMG’s clients and potential clients saw building a website as a mysterious black box. Many of these small businesses owners and managers didn’t really understand what they were paying for when they were purchasing a website. Several clients who had already purchased a website from someone else or had started working on a website on their own and were frustrated by the process and dissatisfied with the results. And that frustration and dissatisfaction weren’t unwarranted. Even outside of the realm of websites, it is annoying in any context to have to pay for something, then wait for an undetermined period of time while the thing is being built, and meanwhile not know what’s going on as the thing is being built. But that was (and in many cases still is) how websites were/are built.

JMG honed in right away that this process was a horribly inefficient way to build websites. And more importantly, it obviously upset clients to do it this way. However, since there was no other feasible alternative, this approach was accepted as the way to do it. So for JMG to really improve the process for building better websites, we needed to get over the hurdle of this mindset of “doing things the way things have always been done.” So first, JMG had to create a better way to build websites along with a building better websites. We couldn’t just take a new angle on the old way, or simply look for ways of getting better results from the old way, because the old way itself was problematic.

So we created the “Website Workshop.” The first thing we did when we started a web project for client was to take the organization’s decision makers and put them in the room with our project management, tech administration, design, development, and content people. Contrast that with the old way of making a website where a web designer or developer was only told the specs by a project manager or sales representative who was probably told by another representative that those specs were what the client organization’s leadership wanted. Then the designer and developer would be expected to go and build what they interpreted through second and third parties to be what the client wanted. And this is all backwards. Designers and Developers are the experts on how to get messages out onto the internet, but the client is the expert in their business. So the client needs to be directly involved in the process of determining how their message is going to be communicated on their website.

So for JMG’s more streamlined approach to work, we needed the client, specifically the decision maker, to be an integral part of the process. From JMG’s perspective, it was a huge advantage putting an organization’s decision makers in the room with our creative talent, because ideas were incorporated faster, there were fewer revision cycles, and input from the client could be seen could be seen immediately. From the client’s perspective, building a website in a one-stop shop with using this workshop approach produced quicker, better quality results. And this approach worked extremely well as the feedback we received showed:

From a creative standpoint, The workshop format and the agile principles of the Website Workshop improved how websites were made. The Website Workshop brought together creative talent and industry experts to deliver the final product in a timely manner. However, to do this, there was a compilation of technology being used collaboratively by our collection of talent. At the heart of the Workshop, we needed the proper tools to organize our process and simultaneously keep our team on the same page with the client. That was achieved with a Trello board. Having a templated Website Trello board that could be easily replicated saved incredible amounts of time for the web team. This Trello board of tasks was the authoritative archive where everything necessary to be done for the Workshop was listed. The board contained tasks and essential materials to the Website Workshop process.

From a business standpoint, the Website Workshop also improved how websites were sold. As Adam already pointed out, a delivery cycle for a website could take up to a year in some cases. With JMG’s new Workshop model, we were able to consistently deliver high-quality websites in 5 to 10 days. This quicker turn around meant our clients were not waiting months for delivery and JMG wasn’t always waiting months for payment. JMG’s own marketing improved as we developed better marketing processes for clients. The more we taught our clients, the more we learned ourselves. The tools and processes involved to make the delivery cycle better for both the client and JMG came from research and an insistence on finding more ways to do things better. This process for making processes better enabled Adam and me to develop the business end of making websites more quickly, which in turn helped us to go out and to sell even more websites more confidently.

Before JMG and during those early development stages, making proposals was like pulling teeth. But Matt used his Systems Improvement skills to help me develop a template for making proposals and apply tools for managing many client sales. That process of developing a website proposal template helped us define our sales funnel. When we went on a sales call, we knew the order of things we needed to talk about, which gave us the confidence to be able to go into these meetings and not worry about what we needed to say. Knowing the necessary sequence of events also significantly reduced the overhead time needed to write a proposal even though we were still custom quoting every project.

A website is a very creative and organic thing, but even with this, JMG was able to identify how it could be put in a regimented box and still get creative results. Having a clearly defined process for how to do something and having a process for how to make that process better never hampered the creativity necessary to make the final deliverable great. Rather, this structure gave JMG’s web team more liberty to be creative and more freedom to focus on the client, because we weren’t constantly having to reinvent how we were going to deliver a great product to each individual client.