An agile approach to content strategy

Team Deeson (this week made up of myself and Simon) headed up to Google Campus in Shorditch last night for London Content Strategy Meetup. The purpose of the event was to work out how we could address and better manage challenges associated with content strategy. Oh, and we also tried a new way of doing this, adopting an agile approach.

What's agile?

Agile helps teams manage that age-old problem of how to respond to unpredictablility in project management through sprints, offering an alternative to the more traditional sequental processes that most of us are probably very familiar with. It's all about creating fast iterations of products based on the feedback of real users. Or in other words as Rachel Lovinger puts it:

When you dive into agile without the big goals written on the wall, you run the risk of doing stuff because you can, not because you should. And while you can create content for any particular goal, you don't know how to craft taxonomy or style, never mind how to create page flows that deliver useful information to your customers, and deliver on your business needs."

And with that ringing in our ears, proceedings kicked off with a couple of really interesting short talks from first Graham Francis and then Liz Lutgendorff, both content designers from the Government Digital Service. You can also get more of their insight on how they managed the HUGE challenge of pushing out Gov.uk at their blog: InsideGov. But it was refeshing to hear what they had to say...NOT being perfect is the perfect approach.

By using the agile approach, we actually are forced to accept that it's ok to deliver content that's not necessarily bang on. The key to it is that people are going to be interacting with that content, and this is where the value is. Why? Because we can establish pretty quickly what is good, useful, meaningful content - and crucially what isn't.

Then it was our turn. After a few iterations, we (as a group of 40) boiled down our numerous core issues associated with content strategy to four.

These were:

1. How to do Aglie when the rest of the business doesn't

2. What is (defining) content strategy?

3. Saying no/Content ownership

4. Buy-in/pursuading senior people & department to work in a different way.

We were then asked to decide which issue resonated best with us before joining that group.

I went into the "Saying no/Content ownership" group (as it best fitted my present challenges) facilitated by the excellent Kate Kenyon and we quickly decided that we needed to focus on content ownership.

Kate then pushed us through tough questions to get to the hub of our personal issues associated with content ownership within our organisations. This was a really interesting and reassuring exercise, because we soon realised that the issues we face are, on the whole, universal. Sure, they may be articulated or played out in slightly different ways, but they are very similar. And that felt, well, okay.

We then distilled even further, right down to what each of us were going to do over the next two months to address our issues. And here's the big share:

My three content ownership stake-in-the-sand action points are:

1. STOP: Reinventing the wheel (or in otherwords, keep it simple stupid)

2. START: Dig deeper into Deeson to discover and share more of the great work of others to create wider engagement and recognition

3. CONTINUE: To keep on enjoying what I do... and big up the company.

What's next?

We reconvene in September to share our successes, learnings and setbacks. We also start the process all over again and see where that leads us.

I plan to write a more detailed blog that focuses on not only the next Meetup, but also whether I've managed to 'do' my three 'do's'. So watch this space...