One thing that we preach in project management is to do a “lessons learned” session as part of the wrap up or closing of the project. This is an opportunity for the team to review the project and document what worked and what didn’t.   As you might guess, the object is to keep doing those things that worked and to improve those things that didn’t. I would like to share with you some of the things we learned from a recent Micro Continuity product launch project.

 

First and foremost, have realistic expectations. We read that a Micro Continuity product could be launched in 48 hours. Well, we had a team on the project and it took us 2 weeks. Now, we made some mistakes that I’m going to explore in this article but 48 hours is not realistic for most of us. If you have your research completed or some of the product outlined and created, you might be able to accomplish this. It also depends on what your product is going to be. For us, it took several days just to complete the research on keywords and wants of the prospective customers. The research is vital and you don’t want to skip it.  The unrealistic timeline we had going into the launch caused frustration and unnecessary tension. So the take away that we had from this was to set realistic expectations and timelines. Depending if it is a brand new product line, you may have a longer project, if it is repackaging other items into a new product, it may be very quick.

 

Second, we learned that you should register your domain name right away. We came up with the product name and began working on the web pages for the product but held off registering the domain name until we had something to put on the web site. We knew that we would be launching in a very short period of time so we thought it would be ok. We were wrong! In less than a week our perfect product name and web site domain name were snapped up by someone else. The lesson here is, register the name as soon as possible and point it at either an existing site for the time being or “park” it. Because we had mentioned the product name in our audio series, we had to do a little rework for a new product name that added to our time.

 

Third, do things in the right order. Its number three on our list but if we had this one right in the beginning, we would have shaved close to a week off of our 2 week launch project. That’s right, we could have saved 50% of our time and time is money. We had checklists, but we didn’t have a process or workflow mapped out. We would start working on something and get part way through it and have to pause while we completed another task that the first action was dependent on. For instance, we were building the web pages and needed the autoresponder form to capture the name and email address but we hadn’t create the autoresponder list yet. When we did our lessons learned, we immediately dived in to developing the process that we needed to improve our efficiency. We have already taken that process and tweaked it to improve it (it will be available in the future in the CFBENetwork.com members area). I expect that we will continue to tweak it as we learn more each time we launch a new Micro Continuity Product. The big lesson to be learned here is to take the time to develop a process and follow it. Keep improving it through a continuous improvement process so that it keeps getting better and better. The return you will get on this small investment is huge.

 

The last tip is that the product is only about 15%. It’s important to have a strong product but the product has to meet the WANTS of your target audience. Therefore, the research that leads to the product is vital and must be complete if you are to have a strong product that will sell. Once you know the product, we need to sell the product. This is where the bulk of the efforts must be applied. The product must be marketed, and marketed and marketed. The marketing efforts are by far the largest piece of the future success of the micro continuity launch and you should begin those efforts when you begin to do your research for the product. Be constantly thinking about how you are going to market your program.