Enlightenment

Funny, isn't it?

When I first started doing project management for a living I couldn't understand why you have to be trained in that stuff...and why people get it so badly wrong.

After all, it's just so much common sense, no? I do it naturally when I'm running things - surely everyone does.

I said as much to my boss, CNG, who was the epitome of the craft, as far as I was conerned. When he managed a project, it stayed managed.

"Shhhh...don't tell people that", says CNG, "I've been peddling common sense for nearly 20 years".

Nevertheless, the more work I managed the more I saw that, despite it mostly being common sense people mostly didn't do it. It's why poorly managed projects go over time, over budget and/or don't deliver what people expected.

Our company has excellent project management skills and excellent technical (architecture, landscape, design, construction) skills but we both agreed we're a bit under par on the selling ourselves front.

It's particularly important for us to be able to get our message over because we sell a service that most people don't even know they want.

We've been told that we talk engagingly on the subject and our enthusiasm defintely gets people on-side but we have a website that doesn't get the message across nearly as well as it should.

So, today, we attend a design/marketing workshop.

I was waiting for mind-blowing insight; big ideas that identified exactly where we've been going wrong.

So, after three hours or so, three discussion groups and some presentations did I have enlightenment?

Oh yes. Yes indeed.

What I learned was...ummm...common sense.

Each of the discussion groups broadly said the same thing as far as we were concerned.

1) Understand who your audience is
2) If you've got more than one group in your audience, make sure they get a tailored message.
3) Understand what your audience is looking for - and give it to them.

Well, duh...

I really don't understand why two intelligent, capable people couldn't aready have worked this out and put it into practice, but the fact is, we haven't.

We've been looking at our website for ages wanting to make it better and yet couldn't put our collective finger on what was wrong with it.

Now we've got a starting point to do our much overdue rewrite - but we're not starting with colour, fonts and pictures this time - we're starting with a strategy. And looking at it - it feels quite embarrassing that we needed to betold that by someone else.

But that's the thing, isn't it?

One man's common sense is another woman's revelation.

Due respect to all of us who peddle common sense...or, rather, not-so-common sense.