Ziff Davis Media Accelerates Project Cycles and Reduces Group Emails from 100 per Day to Zero

1UP.com, the gaming division of Ziff Davis Media, one of the largest technology magazine publishers in the United States, has been a Socialtext customer for one year. 1UP.com was created to consolidate the online activities of several leading magazines. New General Manager Tom Jessiman sought an efficient and effective alternative to email and attachments as a way of working together.

This customer case study shows how use rapidly evolved from strategic planning to day-to-day coordination and communications, supported the brainstorming and launch of a new product and has led to promising experiments in group writing. Using Socialtext Workspace for group communications has reduced email volume dramatically to result in soft cost savings in excess of $1 million per year for a 50 person team. Project communication accelerated the project cycle of a four-month project by a month.

Agile Strategic Planning

The initial reason for adopting Socialtext was as a substitute for group communication by email and attachments. When General Manager Tom Jessiman started the job he noticed, "a lot of confusion using email, well over 100 group emails a day, which was unwieldy, even nightmarish. Nobody knew what was the latest version of an attachment, everything was lost in inboxes and you had to data-mine your emails to find anything."

The initial use was as a strategic planning tool. Upon the GM's direction, the editorial team used Socialtext to brainstorm ideas for future articles and determine an editorial calendar. Editor Sam Kennedy said, "We used it to creatively plan what we were doing a week to a quarter in the future. It helped us to capture ideas, to adapt the plan as things change in our competitive market, and to communicate changes clearly."

On adoption the GM said, "It took them a month to really start using it as it was a top down decision to use it. Then we left it alone and people took it in directions we didn't we anticipate."

Day-to-Day Coordination - Stay on the Same Page

In order to put a story together, Art, Production and Editorial departments have to work together. The Editorial team is on the 8th floor, the Art team is on 9th floor and someone is always out of the office.

The team and department heads realized they could use Socialtext for day-to-day coordination, scheduling and requests. The groups need to communicate to each other what's needed for stories in progress: Art, HTML requests, copy, all in a back-and-forth conversational style. The groups set up a page for each activity, posting requests as they come up, and tracking fulfillment of the request. A structured approval process wouldn't address the need for iterative communication. "Because its not always a regular process, we can communicate when something isn't clear and coordinate getting it done," said Kennedy.

Conducting the co-ordination openly in the workspace, instead of hidden in email, benefits other teams as well. "Because we post things like feature schedules and article schedules, Sales gains visibility on what to sell," said Kennedy. "Marketing gets current information about game coverage that can inform buys with Google or another search engine. We update daily and longer-term schedules to make sure everyone is on the same page."

Fast feedback cuts software development schedule by 25%

Socialtext supported the development of a new version of their website, a major software development project that included complex back-end development. The development team of 20 included three external vendors who were given direct access to the workspace.

Socialtext enabled the team to brainstorm ideas for the new site, drawing upon diverse expertise from social networking, blogging, gaming and software development. Specifications and over 100 screen mockups were posted with accompanying annotations. The wiki enabled communication across stakeholders and allowed the team to move quickly, avoid scope creep, and keep the project on deadline.

"Using Socialtext saved us 25% of the time of a four month project," said Tom Jessiman. "We couldn't have done it any other way. Otherwise we would have been stuck in endless meetings, trying to keep track of decisions with printouts and lost emails. We always know the latest version, and had archives of older versions. If there was any debate about something, someone would always say -- go look at the wiki."

Coordinate a Smooth Site Launch

The new site was launched at E3 and moved them ahead of the competition. During the launch, the workspace was used to coordinate interviews about the new site as well as on-the-ground coverage of one of the largest industry tradeshows. E3, Editor Sam Kennedy said, "showed that people familiar with the wiki can manage themselves by all putting in their information, activities and schedules."

One feature of the new site was providing a weblog for each personal page of a gamer. The most popular blog was unexpected, by an art designer within the team. GM Tom Jessiman credits using Socialtext inside as a way of experimenting with the form and fostering his talent before going public. Now the team is active in public blogging.

Group Writing

When Nintendo launched a new mobile gaming platform it was a complex and sudden story that called for unique coverage. The team turned to the wiki not only to coordinate group coverage, but engage in group writing. They were able to post "Very First Impressions" from a diverse group of experts before the competition. This hints a potential future use, where writing and copy-editing is performed openly by the group.

Less Email, Faster Development and Better Communication

The initial objective of deploying Socialtext was reducing email volume and making communication effective. Group emails, otherwise known as Occupational Spam, account for 30% of email volume according to the Gartner Group. With email volume growing at 40% per year, its a significant drain upon productivity.

1Up.com practically eliminated group email which was at a volume of 100 per day before using Socialtext. At the fully loaded cost of an employee and each email requiring 1-2 minutes to process, this results in a soft cost savings of $1-2 million per year for a 50 person team.

Beyond reducing the cost of communication, ad hoc processes were created to manage daily publication (20-30 stories a day with up to one thousand images). Communication became more effective and reduced the need for status reporting.

In support of a software development project and launch, Socialtext is credited with reducing project cycle time by one month within a four month project. Project risk was reduced through clearer communication and coordination. Project quality was enhanced not only by saved time, but allowing the participation of a diverse team of experts regardless of location.

By using Socialtext to work openly in projects and day-to-day work, the team has developed a group memory contained in a living, searchable knowledge repository. One of the team members also commented that its become a social medium that serves as a virtual water cooler in absence of being in a single location.

Covering the gaming industry is a highly competitive business. Over the past year of working with Socialtext, 1Up.com has not only become more productive, but enhanced innovation to defeat the competition.

Ross Mayfield, June 3, 2004 | permalink