Even highly experienced teams who adopt Mobile First practices can still “fall off the wagon”. In a recent post, I discussed 5 Things Project Managers Can Learn From Their First WCM Project. This post expands on one of those topics in more detail: the importance of Mobile First and Responsive Design.
Your project is more likely to stay on track if you and your team understands, adopts, and maintains a Mobile First mentality.
The fact is, it’s pretty easy to Google “Mobile First” and quickly gain an understanding of the concept. However, any given project will have several factors in play which can work against you. A project team serious about Mobile First must be diligent. Let’s talk about some strategies to keep your project on the straight and narrow.
- Hiring and Training. Are there developers on your team who have never had to deploy an application optimized for Mobile? How about your rock-star developers who sling code 60-hours a week and haven’t had time in the last few months to keep up on the latest mobile devices?
The risk: If your hiring and training practices do not make room for the ongoing learning and growth of your team, you risk knowledge gaps which will lead to poor practices and potentially higher levels of technical debt.
The solution: See to it that your organization has some training standards in place so team members are regularly encouraged to study Mobile First and Responsive Design best practices which they can share with each other.
- Process, it’s for the other guy! The tendency for high-performing teams is to hit a stride where it seems like people just come in every day and work hard, and good things happen. Don’t leave it up to chance. Make sure your design and development processes include Mobile First best practices. Hold your teams accountable for these.
The risk: It’s ingrained, so we don’t have to worry about it. Watch out for that kind of thinking. Turnover within your team can undo all the work you did to build competencies in this area.
The solution: Document this stuff. How does your team know if and when it’s appropriate to make a separate Mobile site? When will your team use native Mobile functionality vs. custom or hybrid? How does your Mobile strategy inform and constrain your Content strategy? How (and when, during the project plan) will you drive sponsor alignment for which specific devices you are targeting? These are all examples of important questions you shouldn’t leave up to chance.
- Your toolbox. Who is paying attention to the Javascript libraries and feature-detection? Have you defined your strategy for Media and video formats? Oh, and someone should probably figure out what tools you are going to use to optimize performance for Mobile. Gosh – I hope the emulators we are using will be a good match for the hardware we can’t get our hands on at the moment.
The risk: Just-in-time tools. Once you have your people and processes lined up (#1 and #2, above), don’t leave your tools to chance. Your team will need a chance to get familiar with them, and depending on your level of risk tolerance, decisions you make in this area will affect your project’s budget (among other things, of course).
The solution: Determine who is going to “own” driving the tool selection process, and make sure your team (and your stakeholders/customers) are given the chance to provide input along the way. This is an area of the project where the right decisions will “align the planets”. The wrong decisions will cause re-work and missed requirements. But, hey – no pressure!
The next post will discuss the various ways your team can address “Authoring Requirements” for your WCM project.
In the meantime, I hope you will add your thoughts on how you and your team have approached implementing and maintaining Responsive Design and Mobile Rirst techniques. What topics would you add to the ones above? If you have experience working on requirements or design, how well did your technical team guide your efforts? What would you have done differently?
