Well, for those of you who’ve read me my stuff for a while, know that my website hasn’t really changed in a while. Well, we used the exact setup for the JaveLLin Solutions website as well. I was able to transistion this over to my partner to run (I still have to write my own content… but at least he’s handling the day to day stuff). Well, he wanted to update our look, so I said ok. We purchased Optimize Press, and he started playing. Like anything, it’s a big ramp up period, so he found someone that was willing to help on their off time for an hourly rate (don’t get me started on this one).
Well, I thought great… I have a ton of content out there on the web, so it should be more than enough for someone to chunk it up, shuffle it around, make it look better, make it sound better, etc… Damn, was I wrong on that. As it turned out, it was nearly as much work to have someone else come in. Even though the concepts of SM are second nature to me, when a complete SAP outsider looks at the data, it’s pretty much jibberish to them. So, I spent a lot of time re-writing my own content. In the end, will it be a better product? probably? do I feel it was worth the huge investment of my time and our limited business capital, not at all.
What’s the lesson for today… there’s a couple that i leanred.
1. For anything like this, do NOT do an hourly engagement. The person Mike picked didn’t know SAP & didn’t know Optimize Press. This turned out to waste a lot of time, and in essence, we paid for them to learn a new skill.
2. Make sure who ever you outsource this to has at least MOST of the knowledge you need. Like i just mentioned, no SAP knowledge, and no Optimize Press knowledge made things go a lot slower and cost a lot more. It also increased the amount of time Mike and I had to invest in rewriting our own content, or bringing back content that was trimmed out, but was very important to the message.
3. Make sure the contractor understands what you really care about. And even more important, make sure everyone is on the same page of what needs to happen. For example, my big hot button was to get some template pages setup, so we could just plug and play our content. And I wanted landing pages to direct people to for our new White Papers. Mike was interested in changing the whole look and feel. Not that I was against this… but it wasn’t my priority. Anyway, get on the same page before you do anything.
Good luck and thanks for reading,
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike