Tools for innovators

In newsrooms, often, everyone wants to be part of the decision and no one really wants to take the final step. So decision-making can be very slow (or occasionally too fast when one person decides without meaningful input). Also, decisions that reflect consensus can be so watered down that they don’t accomplish much. RAID is a process to clarify who is responsible for making a decision and who has advisory power on a given project.

Stacy Lynch, a consultant and project manager at Media Management Center, helped implement RAID as Innovations Director at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This is one in a series of posts about presentations and discussions at KDMC’s annual Leadership Conference last month (more explanation here). Lynch’s presentation on speeding decision-making gave a snapshot of this tool.

The acronym RAID stands for different roles:
- Recommend: Part of the team to weigh options and design recommendation(s)
- Agree: Have reviewed, weighed in and will implement (this one has implicit veto power).
- Inform: Offer subject expertise and information needed to make a decision
- Decide: Chooses among options, makes final decisions

In her presentation, Lynch used the example of an organization looking at adding social networking to its travel site. In virtually every key part of that decision, typically, anywhere from three to five departments believe they are the decision-maker. For example, in Lynch’s “typical” slide (top), news, IT and the executive office each thinks it is the decision-maker on a final prototype. Everyone thinks they are deciding the launch date. That’s a formula for misunderstanding, conflict and delay.

The goal of RAID, Lynch says, is to have “one D on each decision. The (project development) team should have the D as often as you feel they are capable of making that decision.”

Lynch showed a better application of RAID (bottom) to the plan for the travel site. One department alone decides a given issue (the exec office decides on a final prototype, the project team decides the launch date). This model has a lot more Agree and Inform roles—which means everyone gets to have a say without bogging down the process.

Go to Lynch’s presentation for more detail.

Embrace ‘iteration’

Last month, Knight Digital Media Center brought together teams from 12 news organizations to learn more about digital media and make plans for moving their newsrooms forward online. Now those editors are back in their newsrooms making changes—and I will be reporting on their progress in the coming months. In the meantime, I’m preparing a report on the conference—something KDMC can put online to benefit other editors.

As I review my notes and the conference presentations, I will blog chunks of the conference materials and discussions. I hope comments from participants and other editors will enrich the final report.

Here is the report from the 2007 conference. I plan to use a similar format of lists—key takeaways, tools, quotes and questions.

I want to start with the idea of “iteration” from a presentation by Stacy Lynch, a project director with Media Management Center and former Innovations Director at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Lynch focused on decision-making and the difficulty news organizations have in making them quickly because of unproductive loops in the typical process.

“Iteration,” is one antidote. It’s a process of breaking a project into stages and launching them one at a time.

Lynch noted that it’s a model that works in other fields. “In most software development, 60-80% of work is done post ‘launch’ as new versions emerge.”

Those of us who are native to print will have a hard time imagining how that might work on the printed page. And the perfectionistic culture of newsrooms may frown on launching something that is not fully nailed down. But the process seems remarkably simple and suited to online.

Lynch used the example of building a new entertainment site to illustrate iteration:
1, Initially, launch only an events database. Fix any bugs.
2. Add a rating component.
3. Enable users to upload photos from different events.
4. Build in files associated with different performers.

“From the very beginning, say what it will have, but say it’s going to come out in different chunks,’’ Lynch advises.

The process helps prevent overspending resources at the beginning—perhaps adding features that users don’t really want. It builds in flexibility and allows you to get feedback as the project develops. Perhaps most importantly in the digital world, it speeds time to market.

Lynch presented a second tool, called RAID, to speed decision-making. I’ll write more about RAID next week.