Article

The planning puzzle

For technology, intelligent planning makes all the difference.

December 11, 2007 by James Bickers — Editor, Networld Alliance

We've all experienced the sinking feeling of staring down a project that seems too big, too unwieldy to be tackled. Whether it's a major business initiative, the day's to-do list or your child's science fair project, we all face situations where the work expected of us is bigger than we think we can handle.

When faced with such a project, there only is one thing to do: Break it down. As any time- or project-management guru will tell you, projects are never completed: steps are completed; tasks are finished. It is those individual steps and tasks that accumulate power and topple the project.

We spoke to a number of experts in the art of deploying self-service and digital signage, and distilled their wisdom into five basic steps, each of them key to a successful deployment.

Assess the need and build the team

Fact-finding and discovery is where it all begins. The business that deploys self-service or digital signage first must come up with a concrete list of reasons why it is doing so. Is it to improve the customer experience? Save employee time and effort? Reduce costs? Speed transaction times? Increase per-ticket sales?

On a superficial level, it might seem like the answer to each of those always would be "Yes." But greater specificity is needed to give the project a target.

"From a project-planning standpoint, it is important to specifically define the project objectives, the technology and business requirements, and the deliverables expected from both the vendor and the customer, and have all parties at the table agree," said Wah Chu, vice president of professional services for software companyNetkey. "This helps keep the deployer from attempting too much, and guides them toward project success."

Once the goals are determined, it is time to decide how progress toward those goals will be measured. Let's say you want your installation to increase customer satisfaction. How are you going to measure whether it is working? Will you conduct exit surveys? If your goal is to use digital signage to increase sales of store-brand products, you'll need to plan to monitor sales figures throughout the day, and compare them to the playlists to see whether the content actually is influencing people to put that specific product in their cart.

"This is one of the first discussions we have with [deployers], because it is so important to quantify your goals up front," said Tom Weaver, vice president of sales and marketing forKIOSK Information Systems. "It's typically fairly easy to get the funding for a handful of kiosks in the conceptual phase. However, without the upfront analysis on success measurements, funding approval on a full deployment can get stalled or blocked."

With goals and measurement criteria in hand, it's time to build the team that will be responsible for the project. Weaver recommends that at least four groups within the company be represented: IT, marketing, finance and procurement. Make sure IT is present at all meetings, especially early fact-finding sessions when the basic landscape of the company's network is being explored.

But when building the team, resist the urge to get overly complicated in terms of task management. Brian Dusho ofBroadSignsays to beware of committees, because "typically no decisions will be made."

Take an inventory

Most self-service and digital signage projects come in at least two stages — pilot and rollout. One major mistake is to do all of the planning with an eye to the pilot, leaving the team with significant growing pains when it comes time to roll out the full deployment.

Things that need to be cataloged during this process include:

Number of hardware devices that will be deployed, both in pilot and rollout stage
Number of software licenses needed for both stages
Network bandwidth requirements — what is needed to deliver the content, process transactions, etc., across all of those devices
Media assets needed — how much creative will be needed to fuel the project? How will that change over time, and as the number of devices increases?
Human resources needed — how many people are going to be tasked with keeping the deployment running smoothly on a day-to-day basis?

Deployers often make the mistake of focusing on the first two items in that list — hardware and software — because they are the biggest and most expensive, at least on the front end. But, over time, content creation and network management can end up being the heaviest load to bear.

"The biggest overall mistake that deployers make is in underestimating the time and energy that is needed to create and maintain fresh content," said Dave Haar, vice president of digital signage for Minicom. "In the deployment phase, the biggest challenges tend to revolve around the cost and time for installing mounts and cables."

Building the plan

With all of the parts lined up like so many toy soldiers on a boy's tabletop map, the importance of a holistic plan starts to emerge. Those toy soldiers need a general — and likewise, any self-service or digital signage project needs a champion within the company.

"In any organization, there are multiple competing projects, so having a champion means someone is taking the lead on obtaining the proper resources and funding to successfully complete and operate the deployment," said Netkey's Chu. "The success of a project is not based on a one-time event, but is itself a process."

The project's champion — or, perhaps more appropriately, Champion — needs to build a plan that the rest of the company can get along with. It begins with things such as software research, media asset planning and environment analysis; it ends with things such as hardware procurement, installation logistics and contingency planning for the inevitable things that will go wrong. The Champion builds this plan on a timetable that works for everyone involved.

Like the focus of this article itself, that plan needs to be broken down into manageable steps — in the parlance of project-management guru David Allen, it needs to be chopped into "next actions," each of them self-contained and doable within a reasonable period of time. This step-oriented approach means there is as little confusion as possible about who is to be doing what, and when.

Roll 'em out!

Once all of the pieces are in place and the necessary purchases have been made, it's time to test the waters. This normally is done in the form of a pilot installation, which serves as a sort of real-world lab test for the project as a whole.

"Opening day — really, opening season — of a pilot can be a valuable window in terms of measuring how to optimize the overall investment," said KIOSK's Weaver. "For example, if a client has a kiosk with higher volume of card-dispensing demand than was originally anticipated, they may benefit from designing dual dispensers into high-traffic placement locations in deployment stages. Alternately, over- engineered kiosks can be scaled back on components to save costs and match true traffic patterns."

Peter Kaszycki, president ofVertical Alliance, stresses the importance of having greeters in the store when the machines go live, to see how they work from the perspective of the most important people in the whole equation: the customers.

"(Companies) don't step out from behind the counter and look at the kiosk or digital signage initiative from the perspective of the customer," he said. "They are so focused on increasing sales, reducing labor, cutting waiting times and improving the customer experience that they forget to view all this through the eyes of the customer."

"Opening season" is a time to take copious notes about what works and what doesn't, both from a nuts-and- bolts perspective (the company's goals, the hardware, the software, etc.) and a usability perspective (the customer's goals, his perceived needs and how well they are met). Exit surveys are a wise choice at this stage.

Monitor, refine, repeat

In time, the pilot will find its legs; it will prove its value to both company and customer. It will become like the gas-powered lawnmower or the cell phone: Now that we have them, we can't imagine life without them.

This is where entropy starts to kick in. The most beautifully developed system will, if left to its own devices, start to break down. Procedures will be ignored; updates will be skipped; preventative maintenance will be put off for "higher-priority work."

Again, it's important to take what appears to be a Herculean task and break it down into manageable pieces. That inventory you built of hardware and software? Divide it by whatever criteria makes the most sense — geo- graphical location, in-store location, cost center — and assign calendar- based tasks for inspection, maintenance and upgrade. Put the creative team on a defined schedule for developing new content and refreshing the old. Monitor traffic levels — are some machines experiencing heavier loads than others? If so, what can be done to realign assets with demand?

"A clear plan for day-to-day operation is required to minimize disruption once the system goes live," Netkey's Chu said.

"A kiosk or digital signage deployment requires a robust device and application remote-monitoring platform that includes content scheduling and management and usage and performance reporting. A documented escalation process is necessary to handle the device and performance alerts being generated by the remote monitoring system. What circumstances can be fixed remotely? Which ones require a service call," he said.

"From a marketing perspective, creating a support plan to promote the kiosk and communicate its purpose to the target audience is key to customer acceptance and generating the expected ROI for the program.