August 7, 2018

4.5 : Project plan monitoring and review

4.5 : Project plan monitoring and review

Dr. Aleksej Heinze, Associate Professor at KEDGE Business School (France), Visiting Lecturer, Salford Business School, UK

When you’re monitoring and reviewing your project, is it essential to think about the people who have to be involved in those particular meetings, the information that those individuals will need, and the frequency of those meetings etc.

Usually organizations have a weekly operational meeting where you would have a regular communication and you have operational data present at those meetings and again reviewing of basic information such as your visitors numbers to your digital profiles so, for example, how many people have been to your website, what is the time length that they have looked at, what are the pages they have been looking at and, ultimately for an e-commerce transactional website, what is it that was purchased and what the revenue from those particular purchases were.

There will be weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly reviews to monitor the project plan

These reviews will involve different people, information, reports, and meetings

From social media activities you would be looking at things like how many people have engaged with you in conversations, what are they talking about, is the sentiment of those conversations positive or negative, are there any extraordinary comments or complaints that need to be escalated to a senior level of the organization that might help your product development and services teams, and any other information that you might be able to think about future product development.

Ultimately, the statistics that you would use during those meetings are very much operational. So on the long-term perspective, you as an organization have to look at the other competitors, and that data could be done at monthly meetings where you would be able to cross-compare your data with your competitors to see how you’re performing. Again, it all depends on the organization and the resources you have available, but bear in mind that there are different reports that you might be able to feed into your meetings and, obviously, discuss those as a team and learn from them.

Colin Telford, Managing Partner, The Candidate Ltd, UK

Immediately monitor and analyze the activity and then optimize it so if it’s working well, invest more time, invest more money in it, make it work harder. And if it isn’t working, then you can pull it quite quick ‘cause you’ve got that understanding that it isn’t working and then you can minimize the cost or any exposure that that’s going to have for your business. So that’s the beauty of digital, the beauty of online campaigns that you can test things on low budget, invest in them, and go as far as you need to to be able to make it work.

Regular campaign monitoring helps you to understand when to invest more in a campaign and when to stop it

Alex Charalambidis, Digital Marketing Strategist, MONKS, Greece

Based on every channel we have some benchmarks. We know that in this industry you have to have this amount of CTR or this amount of engagement. So usually we are giving our campaign for 2 or 3 days in order to see how it goes and we are trying to optimize always to be close to the benchmark of the same industry. And especially if it’s a running business, an ongoing process, we know where we already, so we are trying to have a better monitoring and review.

A new campaign can be reviewed in two or three days to see how it is performing compared to other industry benchmarks.

Exercises

Monitoring and review

Review the campaign report for the JEMSS project focusing on the section that analyses the campaign and reviews its implementation – see pages 22 to 25 (it is available to you in the Additional Material section of this unit).

If you are working in digital marketing and have developed a useful technique to monitor and review campaigns please share your example below. If you are new to digital marketing, review the above-mentioned report and share one lesson that you find useful and that you might consider using in your practice.

Before posting your comments below, see if the same point has been made by others and if so reply to their comment. Once you have posted your contribution, comment on at least three contributions of your peers.

Additional materials

Campaign report example

JEMMS REPORT – JEMSS-campaign-example

References

Monitoring analytics

 http://www.smartinsights.com/socia…

Monitoring strategy guide

 http://www.academia.edu/5895092/SO…

Focusing on what to measure

 http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/so…

Monitoring tools

 http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com…

For other sections of chapter 4 follow these links:

4. 0 How campaigns fit into a wider implementation of the overall organisation strategy
4.1 Example company campaign plan
4.2 Key elements of campaign management – Gantt chart
4.3 Risk management
4.4 Digital project management tools and techniques
4.6 Marketing automation
4.7 PPC campaign planning