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Pricing  What it is How it works The Long Neck Task Management |
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What is task management? Web task management is about managing your website around top tasks. Success is measured on the ability of customers to quickly and easily complete these top tasks.What is different about web task management? Traditional website management focuses on managing the technology and/or the content. Such website management approaches are generally project-based. Under traditional web management models, for example, launching a search engine for the website is a project. Once that search engine is launched, nobody is made responsible and there are no quality measures for success. The search engine is simply left there. Equally, there are various projects concerned with putting up content on websites. The focus is on getting the content up as quickly and simply as possible. This sort of approach is particularly found when new content management software is being installed. Transferring lots of content to the website becomes a big project. These management approaches fail because they manage and measure the wrong things. If you manage purely from a technology point of view, then the technology itself becomes the focus. Organizations have often bought overly complicated content management software because of the belief that if you buy the 'right' software, you solve the problem. Only passing attention was given to what customers wanted to do on the website. The tool itself became the focus. It is an equally bad idea to manage from a content point of view. Communicators love to communicate. An intranet or public website can seem like a nirvana for the avid communicator. Vast quantities of content get published, not because of a clearly defined need, but from a 'have gigabytes must fill' mentality. Are you measuring the wrong things? The fatal flaw in managing from a technology or content perspective is the management metrics these approaches deliver. If you manage from a technology perspective, then the metrics are nearly always volume-based. It's about the number of documents that are published, or the number of searches that are carried out.Managing from a content perspective is even more volume-based. Many senior managers are still quoting the utterly useless measure, HITS. (HITS stands for "How Idiots Track Success.") Why is this? Well, many years back, probably at the beginning of the Dot Com boom, there was a request from the CEO's office for something to say about the website at some conference. The web team pored over the website log data and saw this wonderful metric called HITS. And why was HITS so wonderful? Because it was a very big number. And so began an obsession with volume. The more volume the more success. HITS may have taken a back seat in many web metric models today, but page impressions/views, as well as repeat and unique visitors, are certainly thrown around with gusto. This approach to measuring a website's success will surely end in tears. For a mature website, measuring the increase in page impressions is as likely to reflect its failure, not its success. Suppose someone has to visit 20 pages on a website to complete a task, when with better management, they would only have to visit 5. Thus, the more page impressions, the more frustrated customers become. If a website has lots of repeat visitors, does that mean they couldn't complete their tasks on their first visit? If a website has increasing search behavior, is that because the navigation is so confusing that people are forced to search? The trap of volume is a dangerous one. There are people who won't remove old, out-of-date content from their websites because it might result in a drop in the number of page impressions. What sort of logic is that? Measure based on task completion Task management is based on the idea that your customers come to your website to complete top tasks as quickly and simply as possible. It measures success by how quickly your customers can complete these tasks.Task management is not simply about transactions. It is easy to understand booking a flight as a task. However, finding out what the weather will be like tomorrow is also a task. Finding people, training, and job vacancies, are top intranet tasks. Understanding the policy on when you can book a taxi and claim it back as expenses is also an intranet task. Reporting a pothole, contacting a councilor and checking what garbage goes in what bin, are top local government tasks. Finding details on a particular course is a top task for a prospective student visiting a university website. Researching the cure for an illness is a top health-related task. A top task for those who visit hotel websites is to get easy-to-follow directions. Web task management measures success based on a simple question: Was your customer able to quickly complete the task they came to your website to complete? Answering this question demands a very different website management approach. Task management is observation-driven. It involves constantly observing customers in order to see how easy it is for them to complete top tasks. This observation needs to be turned into averages. You need to be able to identify the average length of time it takes a prospective student to get the course details they want. You also need to be able to identify the average length of time it takes to find an expert using the intranet. Once you establish averages, you can set a clear plan for improvement. Let's say it takes an average of 7 minutes for a mother to find out what government support is available for her autistic child. Next year you can seek to reduce that average time to 6 minutes. What is success on the Web? Your customers being able to do the things they need to do quickly and simply. It is time to break away from the old measures of quantity, and focus on quality. Task management focuses on the quality of the customer's experience. Managing the technology is organization-centric. Managing the content is organization-centric. Managing the task is truly customer-centric. Measuring the success of your customer is the superior way to gauge the success of your website. Our Customer Carewords solution is part of this overall task management approach. We can help you deliver the maximum value from your website by giving your customers exactly what they want, quickly and simply. What Customer Carewords is How Customer Carewords works Pricing and deliverables The Long Neck explained Email request for more information
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