The SEO Project Management Jedi Challenge: May the seoPM Force Be With You

Almost a month ago (time flies, doesn't it?) I had the opportunity to share a story at MozCon about SEO Project Management (seoPM) with guidelines to enhance the management of the SEO process and achieve more effective results. Since I know you're all quite busy and may need a reminder on the topic, I wanted to check in to see if you're really following the guidelines I shared... in a very fun way, of course. I present to you: an seoPM challenge!

Prepare yourself first with Yoda's seoPM advice from MozCon

For those who did not attend MozCon or skipped my SEO Project Management (seoPM) presentation on Friday morning (too much party the night before, perhaps?), take a look and prepare yourself for the seoPM Jedi challenge by checking out Yoda's seoPM advice:

Test your seoPM Force by taking the seoPM Jedi Challenge

Now that you've seen the seoPM guidelines shared at MozCon, our SEO stormtrooper consultant friend (who, at the end of the presentation, was already feeling the seoPM Force and knew he could be successful at it) invites us to take an seoPM Jedi Challenge to test our skills... Let's take it!

Do you want to save it, print it, or share it? You can download this image or a higher resolution one.

There may be additional seoPM guidelines to be followed, but these are the most important principles and tips shared during MozCon. I'll share additional seoPM guidelines in future episodes, along with challenges that you will be invited to take to keep your seoPM Jedi Master status.

My seoPM Jedi Challenge Results

As it is said in Spanish, I will preach with the example: After taking the tests the result I got is that I'm an seoPM Jedi Master.

Don't get me wrong, this result doesn't mean I haven't made seoPM mistakes. Remember that you need to answer according to you latest seoPM experience, so the status can change easily. This is intentional so that you always keep following the seoPM guidelines.

The truth is, I've experienced many different situations that I've learned from along the way. I've been doing SEO since 2007 and have had a variety of different roles since then. I've worked on the agency side as an SEO consultant and afterwards as the head of the SEO department. I've also been an In-House SEO and an external freelance SEO consultant.

As you imagine, most of the stories shared by our SEO stormtrooper consultant friend at MozCon are mine, too, in some way or another. Nonetheless, I can say that after I started following Yoda's guidelines (and that are tested in the seoPM Jedi challenge), the SEO projects I manage are more effective, my clients are happier, and, of course, I'm an even happier SEO:

Disclaimer: These photos were not taken exactly at the time when the described events happened... but I promise my reaction was very similar.

This doesn't mean that if you don't follow the seoPM guidelines, you won't be able to achieve sucessful seoPM projects, or if you do, your projects are going to be perfect and issue-free. However, I'm positive that if you take these guidelines, customize them to your situation, and follow them in your every day SEO work, you will achieve your results more effectively.

Now it's your turn: Share your seoPM Jedi test results and challenge an SEO friend

I hope that we all start taking these guidelines into consideration, identifying our own situations with them, and challenging ourselves and our SEO friends to follow them.

So, as I need to challenge another SEO to get this going... I want to challenge Gianluca to take the test, share his seoPM results (and experiences) with us, and then challenge another SEO (who hasn't taken the test before) to give it a try.

Here are the different seoPM challenge badges so you can publish them along your results:

Good luck with your seoPM Jedi Challenge tests. I look forward to learning about your results and stories!

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Business Focused Analytics – The Starting Point

Having been a Business Intelligence practitioner for the last 13 years, there has never been a more exciting time to practice this art, as organizations increasingly realize that a well implemented BI & Analytics system can provide great competitive advantage for them. This leads us to the question of – ‘What is a well implemented BI system?’ Let us follow the Q&A below.

Q: What is a well implemented BI system?

A: A well implemented BI system is one that is completely business focused.

Q: Well, that doesn’t make it any easier. How can we have BI that is completely business focused?

A: BI & Analytics becomes completely business focused when they have ‘business decisions’ as the cornerstone of their implementation. The starting point to build / re-engineer a BI system is to identify the business decisions taken by business stakeholders in their sphere of operations. Business decisions can be operational in nature (taken on a daily basis) and/or strategic (taken more infrequently but they tend to have a longer term impact). To reiterate, the starting point for BI is to catalog the business decisions taken by business stakeholders and collect the artifacts that are currently used to take those decisions.

Q: The starting point is fine – What are the other pieces?

A: The next step is to identify the metrics and key performance indicators that support decision making. In other words, any metric identified should be unambiguously correlated to the decision taken with the help of that metric and by whom. Next we need to identify the core datasets in the organization. Please refer to my earlier blog post titled ‘Thinking by Datasets’  on this subject.

Q: What about the operational systems in the landscape? Aren’t they important?

A: Once we have documented the relationship between Business Decisions to Metrics to Datasets, we need to focus on the transactional applications. The key focus items are:

• Inventory of all Transactional Applications
• Identify the business process catered by these applications
• Identify the datasets generated as part of each of business process
• Next step is to drill-down into individual entities that make up each of the datasets
• Once the Facts & Dimensions are identified from the entities, sketch out the classic ‘Bus Matrix’ which would form the basis for dimensional data modeling

 

Q: All this is good if we are building a BI system from scratch – How about existing BI systems?

A: For existing BI applications, the above mentioned process could be carried out as a health-check on the BI landscape. The bottomline is that every single report / dashboard / any other analytical component should have traceability into the metrics shown which should then link to the decisions taken by business users. BI & Analytics exist to help organizations take better business decisions and that defines its purpose & role in an enterprise IT landscape.

The answers mentioned above provide the high-level view of Hexaware’s approach to Business Intelligence projects. We have worked with many organizations across industries and a business focused analytical approach has provided good value for our customers.

Thanks for reading. Please do share your thoughts.