Skatin' on Thin Ice Buildin' Business & Makin' Trouble

Touchpoints When Preparing a Release

Ok, so you've written the code. You've tested, retested, run the beta, rewritten and retested again and again. It's as perfect as it's going to get so you're ready for production. Right?

Wrong.

Let's take yesterday's release over at Passpack for example. It was mostly a bundle of fixes and couple of minor features - nothing milestone. Yet that release produced about 20 hours of non-programming work that needed to be accomplished before it went into production. Plus there's at least another 8-12 hours of  work to be accomplished post-release.

In general it's best to get as much accomplished pre-release as possible, because the additional hours post-release will be highly diluted by a spike in customer support, sales inquiries, press relations and the inevitable bug fixing. Oh - and a big fat nap.

Channels, Touchpoints, Tasks & Scope

I'm taking the liberty of expanding the typical use of touchpoint to include "materials I much touch".  These materials are spread out across the channels I manage on a regular basis:

• Help (aka: Customer Support)
• Marketing (including PR & Media)

In addition, these two are regularly managed by Francesco, but in the event of a release, it's my job to manage certain touchpoints for a release:

• Corporate (anyone else abhor this word?)
• Application (the software itself)

Touchpoints are the materials to manage, organized by channel. And each touchpoint will have any number of tasks. The scope of tasks may be once for an entire release, others must be iterated on each item in the release (ex. every new, updated or removed thing-a-majig). Sometimes the scope is for milestone releases only.

My Touchpoint Grid

This is not a task-list per se, rather a guide to what we've got going on where. I've excluded channels I don't have to personally deal with, like IT and Accounting.  Most touchpoints have completely different materials, even if they may seem similar at task level (ex. images, videos). Some touchpoints even have the same name (ex. Social Media) but are different  because used differently by each channel.

Channel	Touchpoint	Task	Scope
Help	Knowledge base	find/update existing articles	item
		find/update/upload existing images	item
		delete irrelevant articles & redirect	item
		create new articles	item
		create/upload new images	item
	Support admin	find/update existing canned replies	item
		find/update links to knowledge base changes	item
		delete irrelevant replies	item
		create new replies	item
		update categories & automation rules	item
	User follow-up	prepare replies for any affected open tickets	item
		prepare social media replies (twitter, fb, etc)	item
	Social Media	create new videos	item
		upload new videos to youtube channel	item
		upload new images to flickr channel	item
Marketing	Downloads	update/upload Admin getting started guide (PDF)	item
		update/upload User getting started guide (PDF)	item
		update technology white paper (PDF)	item
	Website	update all pages involved	item
		update all images involved	item
		update timeline in About page	milestone
	Press	update/upload media kit (ZIP)	item
		create press release	milestone
		upload press release to media center	milestone
		distribute press release online	milestone
		research/compile short list journalists	milestone
		pitch & send press release to short list	milestone
		research/compile short list bloggers	release
		pitch, pitch, pitch!	release
	Social Media	write/publish company blog post	release
		tweet/retweet blog post	release
		notify news on company twitter account	release
		notify company friends in facebook	release
		create/upload images to flickr	release
		create/upload video to youtube channel	release
Application	News	news alert in the application home tab	release
		news alert in the application login screen	release
	Inline Help	recompile with knowledge base updates	item
		update all on-screen instructions	item
Corporate	G&A	check/update tac/ua/privacy/copyright	item
		check/update credits	item
		update internal features/release schedule	item
		update internal competitive analysis docs	item
	Stakeholders	update timeline & deliveries documents	release
		prepare/email summary of status (PDF)	release
		call to brag :)	milestone

Tally It Up

Back to our example release, here's how it all panned out.

1. Switch in currency, added free trials, updated refunds policy, added new premium package

Our product pricing centralized in a database and we have a policy to never quote a price directly but rather link to those sources. Thanks to these two factors, we breezed through the Marketing and Help touchpoints.

Most of the work fell was in the Corporate touchpoints, particularly "Billing & accounting"  (pre-release) and "Investor" (post-release). Clearly out investors know a price change was in the works, but they also expect to be told when it actually happens. Welcome to "investor communications 101".

2. Website redesign

Very little impact on the release outside the design & development itself.

3. Three interface tweaks

Yikes. These were "itty bitty" changes to the interface, but with BIG consequences in terms of work produced. The key word is "interface". The interface is visual, which means not only are we adding and updating the text descriptions of of the features, but there are a lot of images and (sometimes) videos which are effected as well.

In this particular release, we had a lot of backend stuff we were in a hurry to roll out, so we opted to postpone about 80% of it post-release. All in all, the work done/to do is: all the tasks marked "item" in the grid x 3.

May the good winds fill my sails, I've got a long way to go!

4. Two non-interface tweaks, back-end stuff & bug fixes

Special attention needs to be paid to the "User follow-up" touchpoint (post-release). We had two pretty important patches in there, so I had quite a bit of follow-up to do in the help center with user that were awaiting a reply from me. I'm still wading through those as they generally require a personal reply.

Happy Side Effects

It's pretty easy to see how it things add up quickly, making the best reason to do your own grid better planning and productivity. But  it's worth the exersize in anf of itself.

I've also found that the exercise of compiling a touchpoint grid in and of itself has its merits. Any redundancies will immediately come to the forefront. You may even identify ways to consolidate disparate systems or media in a way to save you time.

You'll also have a more intimately organized view of your company's real needs. Following the most recent release, we've decided to eliminate a number of redundant systems. In particular, I'm beta testing an awesome cross-channel customer support & social media service right now. Can't wait until that service is in production. It'll save me oodles of time.

Now, enough blatter. I've a lot of work to do. ;)