Lessons from a global CMS rollout: Face-to-face communication and why it matters

It’s 7am in the morning and I’m at my desk at home on a teleconference call. On the line are some UK and South Korea colleagues to discuss their new website under development. I am new to the company and the project (and I haven’t had my morning coffee!) The conversation about changes to the sitemap gets going and I quickly find I cannot follow the conversation as I can only understand about 1 word in 5 from my Korean colleagues, even though it’s all in English. But somehow my UK counterpart — from whom I will be taking over the project — understands and communicates with ease. I’m not new to different accents, so how is she able to do this — is she half Korean or what ?! I’ll tell you why in a bit.

The British Council is the cultural relations body for the UK and has offices in 110 or so countries. It also sells English exams and language classes to millions of people each year, so the websites need to be consumer-oriented. Each country’s operation is different, not least in language requirements, so a dedicated website is required for each country. I was part of the project to replace an old and creaking content management system (CMS) with a brand new one across all their websites. It was decided that at the start of each website project, members from the UK Digital team would go out to the county for a kick-off meeting lasting two to three days. The UK team would consist of a Project Manager, UX architect and Content Manager. During the course of the CMS rollout over about 2 and a half years, I travelled to many countries and worked with stakeholders locally.
This post is a collection of many of the things I’ve learned about working with people and why face-to-face communication is essential in certain scenarios.

So what were the objectives?

Understand local business goals and audiences, introduce the principles behind a new standardised structure and then agree on localised version of that structure that best served the business objectives of the operation. In addition, we needed to promote a user-centric mindset to all the many, many people that would be creating the content and maintaining their sites.

So what’s so difficult about that ?

Well… we needed to do all of the above in three days flat, with a view to the new website going live in six weeks. This wasn’t a ‘lift and shift’, there was no content migration, we were asking people to completely rethink their way of writing content for the web and write it again from scratch — often in two or more languages. Many stakeholders already had large workloads and we would be asking them to go over and above their normal duties and work intensively to get their site launched in the short time frame. There were also challenges specific to countries that we needed to understand fully in order to come up with the right solutions. We needed to excel at listening to our stakeholders and also communicating to get our points across and win them over to work with us as a partnership.

So why did you have to be in country to do all of that?

Many people might ask what is wrong with using modern technology such as Google Hangouts, Skype and video-conferencing software. Well — nothing is wrong with those methods for everyday communications — we used them all the time. But for the project kick-offs, those wouldn’t have been effective on their own. The reasons for this are:

1. Immersion in context and culture
2. Effective communication
3. Trust building
4. Co-creation exercises

1. Immersion in context and culture

This might sound obvious but don’t underestimate the importance of being immersed in the context in which your organisation’s activities are taking place

These include the ability to observe:

• Mass media and advertising (especially those of competitors)
• Popular social media channels and different social media sharing habits. For example, Instagram is very popular in Thailand and they are less likely to share links of pages they like, they take a snapshot and send it to their friends instead.
• Staff and customers at the organisation’s premises coming and going about their daily business. Learning about the challenges they face. For example, colleagues visiting Cairo in Egypt learned at first hand the terrible traffic issues in the city, and it was driven home to them (pun intended!) how difficult it was for customers to get to teaching centres. So thinking of ways in which people could get information and pay for exams and classes remotely were prioritised.

2. Effective communication

If you’ve ever used teleconferencing systems or Skype, you’ll know that the audio quality and reception is very often less than ideal — and that’s just in the UK with supposedly decent broadband connectivity…

So if you take that — plus all of the following:

• Fuzzy line or echo
• Video artefacts
• Accents and people speaking fast
• Some people in the group being out of shot
• Time differences — e.g. it is very early in the morning in one part of the world — while in the other it’s the end of the working day or vice versa
• Cultural differences in styles of communication. Speaking is only one type of communication and others need to be taken into account. On a conference call, you can’t watch your colleagues’ faces to see if their words and facial expressions match nor notice their body language.
• Distractions can be an issue. It’s all too easy for people to believe they can multi-task during a teleconference and start checking emails, but it doesn’t work (I’ve tried) and you’re effectively disengaging from the conversation

… consider all this and it’s obvious that the quality of your overall communications go down and effectiveness is considerably impaired.

Whereas….

If you are face to face, there are no sound quality issues, you will find that you lip-read almost sub-consciously to support comprehension, and you actually start to tune-in to peoples’ speaking patterns.

Other benefits are:

• Questions are answered more fluidly and follow up conversations are easier
• Issues are explored in more detail if needed
• Solutions are agreed together in a more mutual, collaborative fashion
• It’s easier to meet a good cross-section of people from the business — from the director who can give an overview of the business, to the customer services staff — who often have valuable insights and are very happy to be involved

3. Trust building

I would say that building empathy and trust between stakeholders is key to a project’s success. Empathy is more likely when you meet someone face to face (an extreme example of the opposite of this is anonymous trolling on social media). This goes both ways. Small talk is essential in this, finding out about your colleagues and sharing lunch or dinner together and sharing humour too. Another truth I’ve found is that people are more honest face to face. Ad-hoc, informal conversations often reveal contextual knowledge and nuances that would not otherwise surface. When there are challenges or disagreements about how things should be done, then mutual empathy will make finding a solution so much easier.

4. Run co-creation exercises

We would often run customer journey and pen-portrait exercises. This would fulfill several objectives:

• learn about our local audiences
• identify issues in customer journeys that often included third-party sites
• demonstrate our UX expertise to our stakeholders
• challenge assumptions (both ours and theirs)
• focus our stakeholders on their audiences to become more customer-centric in their approach

Typical tools for this are flip charts so we can sketch and write so all in the room can see and participate. It was also to ensure inclusion so those less confident or vocal were able to contribute.

N.B. I would be interested to hear from anyone who has successfully run group exercises such as this remotely and hear about the techniques they’ve used.

Very occasionally, there would be situations mid-project, in which certain colleagues would be unable to accept different ways of doing things according to the new CMS standards and structure. When all conference calls and email communications had run their course and there was still no progress, we would go out once more to meet face to face and run co-creation exercises. I can testify that the result was, without fail, always a solution to the problem at hand. This would usually be as a result of compromise on both sides, I would say due to the enhanced mutual empathy when people are in the same room.

Although this did entail a lot more effort on everyone’s parts (not to mention the cost), the benefit was that the solution was arrived at in a very short space of time, which would allow the project to progress according to plan, and hitherto strained relations were put back on a more positive footing.

To sum up…

There is simply no quicker way of building trust than person to person communication. Trying to achieve the same things with conference calls would have been so much less effective — and I would argue simply not possible in the timeframes we had. The benefits of this initial few days of face to face communication would continue to be realised throughout the project so that it was still there long after we were working remotely again in different continents and time zones. Which brings us back to my initial story about my morning call — can you guess why my UX colleague was able to communicate with our South Korea colleagues whilst I was struggling ? Yep you’ve guess it — she’d been there and I hadn’t: she’d heard the lingo, met our colleagues, and somehow this was all she needed to have conversations over a crackly line at uncivilised times of the day over the weeks that came afterwards.

The British Council Digital department succeeded in it’s challenging schedule to put in place a new CMS, and in only a few years, the reach of the new multilingual platform has quadrupled to 107m visitors a year globally.

For myself, I feel privileged to have travelled and met so many great people all over the world, many of whom I am still in contact with. And over time this is how I came to truly understand, that in the ever-evolving world of business and user experience, building trust and effective communication are as important as your craft.

About Martha

Martha Bramley is a UX practitioner who was part of a team that designed a brand new CMS for a global organisation as part of a digital transformation programme. She travelled to various parts of the world to work with local colleagues, and she argues that face to face communication was integral to the success of the rollout.