Many years ago, I had an epic automation fail that taught me a big lesson in tech implementations. It’s the kind of lesson you only need to learn once before it changes your understanding of the success drivers during digital transformation. My buddy Corey Miller would refer to this as a Red Learn (fail) and a Green Learn (growth).
I’m an operator, so naturally I look for ways to drive efficiency, optimizations, and scale.
Imagine you had to manually send out application deadline emails every 8 weeks, for 800+ different online programs, across 60+ education institutions day in and day out. This is a perfect use case for email automation (table stakes today, but novel back in the day). Let’s zip past the 💪Herculean effort to gather business requirements, select the vendor, do the implementation and customer config. This isn’t about that.
Let’s just get to the part where we built a great master template that had a bidirectional sync with all the necessary compliance, content, and data to power a single automated program (where operators swoon). This template pulled in 26 dynamic content field to ensure it matched the right program and institution – things like, the actual deadline date, the school name, the logo, the program name, the key value props, tuition cost, apply now link, etc.
So what happened?
The automated program worked as intended technically speaking. But here’s where the ‘uh-oh’s were:
- Among those 800 different program names? Masters of Business Intelligence was spelled wrong (🤦♀️face palm for being spelled Intellgence) in the original CRM set up that it pulled from. That field was never intended to be public facing and so it wasn’t QA’d back in the day. Just correct the typo you say? We did, which then broke 11 different business reports that were integrated with that data field. Other departments depended on those reports – not great.
- How about that easy date field? 🤦♀️Uh-oh, we didn’t accommodate the day/month vs month/day formats across countries. We just manually knew to reformat.
- How about that tuition field? 🤦♀️Uh-oh, we didn’t have a data governance protocol for ensuring all 800 programs were maintained with price adjustments as time went on.
- How about that Apply Now link? 🤦♀️Uh-oh, several pointed to a URL that we didn’t have control over and no mechanism to know if it changed and thus gave recipients a 404.
Here’s the big learn: Your data is the foundation of success; so are the business processes around data governance and maintenance. Do not underestimate this part. If you’ve seen this movie before, it doesn’t matter what tech project you’re working on, you enter it with a healthy respect for your data strategy.
It’s also why you know that implementation will be 20-30% longer that that lovely original timeline if your data strategy is not ready. But, this all solvable. And it’s a skill. So go thank and fist bump the Business Analysts, Data Folks, PMs, Delivery, and Process/Workflow people in your life.
Jourdan Marie Hathaway 