The five-pillar-approach in action: My Content Operations master’s thesis (pt. 2)
The practical work of my master’s thesis on content operations and governance is entering the home stretch. Woohoo! Reason enough to summarize and reflect on some of the methods I used.
Read up on the five-pillar-approach from part 1 to get the full picture.
Business requirements matrix
In the best case, a business requirements matrix is created at the beginning of a content project with the help of stakeholder interviews. It is determined which goals are pursued in the respective project and how important these are for the company. The important questions are: What do we want to achieve and how do we get there?
A business requirements matrix is an important step in the initial phase of any content project. On the one hand, you get the opportunity to talk to stakeholders about the intentions of the project, and on the other hand, by asking them about their needs, they are valued and heard. To get a clear picture, I interviewed the stakeholders in my project separately. This also makes further communication on the content project much easier.
Why it is important: To create a solid content strategy, it is immensely important to also bring all stakeholders on board and ask them about their needs and goals.
Challenges: Coming up with valuable questions to ask, asking the right questions in the right time frame (people are busy!)
Learnings: When stakeholders take this interview seriously, you really get a chance to hear stakeholders’ thoughts and needs that you might never talk about in your day-to-day job.
User research & creation of personas
The creation of personas is preceded by user research. In the best case, this is based on quantitative data from social media, Google Analytics or similar tools, and equally on qualitative research such as user interviews in my project.
I work for a travel company and was lucky enough to be able to interview vacationers directly in a travel destination, Mallorca. The answers I was able to collect on-site really helped the project enormously.
Why it is important:
- If you know more about your users, you can deliver the right content at the right time, in the right format, on the right channels.
- Understand the user & build empathy, put yourself in the user’s shoes before creating content, otherwise it’s easy to end up in the same procedures over and over again. Important as an editor: Before writing or conceptualizing, ask yourself which information is really relevant for the user and offers added value.
- Additionally, everyone in the team gets the same idea of the target group which simplifies coordination and communication.
- Result: efficient and effective content!
Challenges: preparation of the quantitative data, coming up with relevant questions, finding people to interview
Learnings: At first, especially stakeholders in the team were not enthusiastic about the idea of personas. A project on personas was started a few years ago, but in the end, they were never really used.
However, after the benefits of personas were explained in detail and audio recordings of user interviews were also played, I was able to turn this around. In a workshop in where everyone in the team helped to develop the personas, three personas were created. Since then, we no longer speak of “the target group”, but of “Philipp”, “Sabine” and “Carina”. It hardly gets any better than that!
Content Ecosystem Map
See my blog article on Content ecosystem mapping!
Pain point assessment workshop
Together as a team, we held a workshop on pain points in everyday work based on the Lightning decision jam method.
Post-its were written on the topics “What brings you forward”, i.e. what already works well, and “What holds you back”, therefore what does not yet work so well. The focus was on “What holds you back” — after all, we want to improve these points.
The post-its were then voted on by all team members. Therefore, the post-it with the most votes affects the most people and also holds the most people back in their work.
Then the most voted topic was taken and the question was asked, “How may we improve…”? and again ideas were prepared on post-its by all team members. No limits were set, and even unrealistic solutions could be proposed.
In our most voted “What holds us back” our current CMS was mentioned. This was followed by numerous suggestions on what we can do to make the CMS easier and better to use.
You can guess what happened next. Again, the proposed solutions were voted on. The suggestions for improvement were then structured according to impact and effort.
Finally, concrete action steps were taken directly for the best-proposed solutions: For example, meetings were arranged and responsibilities for the next tasks were clarified.
Why it is important: This workshop worked quite excellently. It is particularly important that everyone from the team has their say and that everyone can present their point of view through the post-its and the votes.
Challenges: finding and taking the time to conduct a workshop with everyone in the team
Learnings: Honestly, my learning is that I want to use this method a lot more. It just worked so great. What is excellent is that with this method all team members are on the same page and also action steps are developed directly to improve problems.
Message architecture (card-sorting workshop)
A message architecture workshop is an excellent basis for a tone of voice guide. A set of cards full of values gets sorted in the workshop and a future state, that is how the company wants to act and be seen in the future, gets defined.
- Divide cards together into “Who we are” “Who we are not” and “Who we would like to be” (~ 20min).
- Take away “Who we are not” cards
- “Who we are” cards are sorted into the “Who we would like to be” category — cards not destined for the future state are discarded
- There is only the “Future state” pile left. The cards are now grouped as the participants think it makes sense (3–6 cards per group + reasoning why grouped).
- These groups are now to be prioritized. Cards that may be leftover will be discarded.
After the workshop, we as a group also defined vision and mission statements as well as a brand promise and a brand position statement, which will be incorporated into the style guide.
Why it is important:
- gets to the heart of the values and character that the company wants to embody
- can influence not only text but also photography and design
- a consistent user experience also inspires trust. If copy is completely different on every page and on every channel, and sometimes varies not only in tone but also in quality, it doesn’t inspire trust and seems unprofessional.
Challenges: Convincing stakeholders of the importance of the workshop
Learnings: During the workshop, you have to keep an eye on the time. The card set I used contains a lot of cards. The group likes to discuss some meanings and interpretations. However, it works best when working and sorting rather quickly.
Now, this was an excerpt of my used methods for my master thesis. I hope my thoughts and learnings can help fellow content experts.
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