MMP10: Dirty Secrets of Web Directors

Moderator:  All right.  Thanks for coming to our session here.  I want to once again encourage people to come forward since we have exactly one slide.  I'm going to go ahead and put that slide up now and just leave that up for the remainder of the presentation.

[Laughter]

We're not all proud of what we've done to get to where we are.  Yes, so we originally had four people on this panel and one of those is Rachel Rubin and unfortunately she couldn’t be here with us but for probably the best of reason, she got promoted yet again and got a nice new job as an AVP of Marketing Communications, so good for her bad for us.  We're going to go ahead and do a panel without her and this is going to be pretty free-flowing session today.  We're going to mostly just have a conversation hopefully not just up here hopefully you guys will have questions as well.  We also have Patrick Burke from University of Central Florida in a corner here who is monitoring Tweeter so if you are interested in asking a question and you for whatever reason don’t feel like raising your hand, you could easily tweet at, you know, the session and he'll get the question to us, all right?

So we have a couple of questions that we had posed among ourselves when we submitted to talk.  One of them, we're talking this morning and actually one of the questions was how do you convince your boss you deserve to get paid more?  So do you guys have any tips on that?

[Laughter]

Panelist 1:  Let's see I guess from a director's perspective, doing good work, number one.  So completing task of course and really talking about kind of working through the entire process not just like doing something because you know it's what comes up in your head actually doing some research, asking some people things and actually being open to having discussions about anything that you’re actually working on and then talk about those discussions so that people see that you’re not just a someone who can oh no, you’re including people we don’t necessarily even I have connection to a project or anything like that, really showing the active effort I think goes a long way.

Panelist 2:  I think for me, one of the things that I guess I and probably a lot of us here sort of have a chip on our shoulder from the days of being called the webmaster or the Web guy and this generalist they can do everything but those days just aren’t really around anymore and I think that it also is part of our responsibility to show that we are experts, we are professionals.  There’s lots and lots of specialization now that each and every one of us has.  I mean, I don’t mean to sound negative but is there anybody here, how many webmaster title people are there here?  Actually, more than I thought.  I think more and more though as a trend that’s going to stop happening as much and it's not like it's a bad thing by saying it but I think that I have never been a webmaster in my life and I just think we need to be advocates for ourselves as much as anything else.

Moderator:  Real quick, how many people – show your hands, how many are actually directors or managers of the Web group or department now?  Wow, awesome.

Panelist 1:  Say, 80 percent.

Moderator:  Yeah.  How many are you are aspiring to be in that position and hoping you’re going to get the director... OK.

Panelist 2:   OK.  And how many of you just want to understand what the hell are your directors thinking?

[Laughter]

All right, pretty good, next of everything.

Moderator:  Well hopefully we can give you some insights into the insanity that is the people who have agreed to run a Web Department.  One of the things I always struggle with this managing people something that actually was it Carolyn Morrisette said it really well in her session right before lunch that most people get promoted into a management job not because they are great managers but because they’re good at what they do.

They're experts, they're subject matter experts and they get promoted and now they’re expected to be managers and there are a whole bunch of really terrible managers so something I worked really hard on is learning how to manage people but managing creative's and managing developers, geeks, divas, whatever you want to call them is one of the biggest challenges I’ve had.  What are some tips or some stories you guys have had around managing those types?

Panelist 2:  Different sorry.

Panelist 1:  No.

Panelist 2:  OK.  So I'm in a little bit different position than Chaz and Nick.  They were both developers before they started.  I was a front-end person before I started being a director so we have this long conversation this morning about how they have really hard time working with designers.  Well, not a hard time.  I don’t sorry if like one of you guys has been player this year, I feel bad now but it's a challenge for them to wrap their heads around that mindset whereas for me it's the same thing like with developers as much as I would love to know development, I really don’t.  And so, I have to train myself to learn and think in their shoes.  Yeah.

Panelist 1:  No, I guess one of the things that the way I got to where I am, is kind of interesting because I started out in the department as a student and then a full-time employee and then the director.  So everyone that I guess I manage I worked with like on a day-to-day basis beforehand.  And so, it's kind of difficult to go from that colleague relationship to that boss relationship.  And so, luckily I had the time to develop an idea of everybody's working habits and I what was I guess that was probably the best thing that happened to me because if you come in to a position fresh with new employees especially creatives or developers, you cannot treat them all the same.  Everyone works completely differently.

You know, there are different hours of day, different types of coffee that each one drinks to really make sure that they can get into zone.  They can actually do work.  And so, I guess for me it was taking the time to see everyone as an individual and make sure that they had the tools that they need to get their work done in effective way.  Whether that be in the nine to five or they’re working at home at 8 pm to 2 am to get work done.  If that works for them then so be it and for me I guess it's just taking really knows relationships and trusting the employees that they know that they need to get stuff done but you need to also give back and give them some leeway.

Moderator:  Yeah, I really struggled with that until I realized that not everybody is like me.  Everyday is their own different things that drive them and motivate them.  From a work standpoint, I know my developers love doing fun projects something that's challenging, something that's different so we give them a projects.  We did our campus map thing and that was a challenge because they’re learning a lot of stuff they'd never had to do before and trying to work with Google API that change mid project and all of the things and that was fun.  It's challenging but it's fun for them.  And then I’ve got designers that care about making things look amazing and they will do everything they can to make it look amazing and the most demotivating for them is getting in their way and telling them, "You know, we can't do that.  The client doesn’t want to." or "We can't do that that’s too different."  That’s soul crashing for some of the designers and not everybody is ambitious.  Some of my designers and developers want to continue doing what they do and do great work.

And on the other hand, wanted to manage our team and that's not something that everybody has aspirations to do so realizing that not everybody is in the same mindset as I was and everybody has individual aspirations and motivations critical to learning how to manage them better.

Panelist 2:  That was one of the things for me as like when I started, I’ve just been like a doer and I’ve had lots and lots of bosses, lots and lots of really bad bosses.  So I had a good president of what not to be as a director.  I knew exactly what not to do because I’ve had a lot of horrible bosses before and I think one of the things for me though is I started to realize I'm a perfectionist and really inner attentive person and sometimes I was the bottleneck.  I was the problem like getting out of the way and I hired people because they’re more talented than I am.  I would hire them to do and I like I got in the middle and in the way I think.

Moderator:  What's the number one thing you learned from a previous boss of not to do.  What's the best lesson you learned, behavior not to emulate?

Panelist 2:  I have my

Moderator:  Go for it.

[Laughter]

Panelist 2:  OK.  I had this boss who like every single day, there’s like an early morning I guess she was to drop by and she would stop by 11 in the morning and like, "So, Matt what you doing?"  And like you don’t know how to react to that it's like do you just want to socially chit chat or do you want a list of what I'm doing and it kind of reminds me of the office when the Charles guys like, "Hey, Jim give me a rundown."  I don’t know how do I react to that?  And to me, it would happen more than once a day and it's just like let me do my work and don’t put this like awkward because we weren’t like socially engaged and so, it was this fake thing that I think was really trying to see whether or not I was doing work.

We have this session a while ago with my team and we all sat down over beers and just kind of kicked around everything we did in the last year and I asked all of us brought together any personal issues we had with each other and just be blunt including with me and no one said anything bad about me.  And I thought it was weird so I started probing and I was like, "OK, does it annoy you guys that I spend a lot of time in the office and stop by and interject myself and stuff because I hated that my last boss did it."  And I guess, it was the fact that I actually know what the hell they do that I can add to that conversation, so

Moderator:  Yeah, for me it was a boss that built a really great team dynamic and we liked working for him and we had a great time and we were all very good friends and there's this really strong creative team then I realized toward the end of his tenure and long after the fact that he built that team dynamic by giving us a common enemy, it was the IT Department on campus.

And so, it's always the IT Department's fault.  They were the bad guys.  They were the ones getting in the way of us achieving greatness and after the fact I realized all of our relationships were so badly damaged because he set this evil IT organization up and then everything that we go wrong we could always point to them.  Well, that made it easy at the time but also caused us to not get stuff done because you have to work with the IT Department sometimes, and we actually have offsite servers that we host ourselves, completely separate from the University because of those kinds of bad relationship and it something that we could have avoided plus save the ton of money and probably managed a lot better.  Also, none of my guys are sysadmins.  None of my guys want to be in ad business.  They want to be great developers and designers and now they’re forced to do stuff as a result of a decision he had.

I don’t know if he's conscious or not but the evil IT empire, it's not how it works.  So, this guy is far to them though by the way.

Panelist 2:  The board will assimilate you.

[Laughter]

So we keep going just – Do you guys have any questions so far like…?  Yeah

Audience:  [12:41 Unintelligible]

Moderator:  So the question is where is content in all of these?  She's a Web director and she has, you have content on your team or you’re the content person?

Audience:  I have content on my team, Web strategy contents and social media.

Moderator:  OK, Web?  OK, great.  And so, it sounds like you have a good-sized team.  You have social media and strategy.  And so, do you guys have content people on your team and how does that fit in, how do you work with that?

Panelist 1:  Well, OK.  So we used to have a content person and then now we no longer do and so we actually have to rely on we have one content administrator.  It kind of oversees how content is being published and then we train each of the schools and colleges department.  We're actually publishing the Web content – how to write for the Web and effective ways to get used with attention without being blinking tags and stuff like that but I guess from my standpoint, we don’t write a lot of in-house content that isn’t already kind of not provided but already comes from press releases or marketing material that we just kind of reshape to the Web.  So we don’t do a lot of original writing.  Is that part of your department, original writing for the Web?  As is for what like the homepage or your

Audience:  Everything.

Panelist 1:  Everything?  So you guys produce?

Audience:  [14:14 Unintelligible]

Panelist 1:  OK.

Audience:  [14:18 Unintelligible]

Moderator:  We had Tiffany's last year where we realized that every single project takes twice as long as it should and what could be probably done if we didn’t have clients in the room in like a week and a half really stretches out to almost a year long for just a department side and I see people shaking their or nodding their heads.  You guys know what I'm talking about.  The problem was the content.  We can design.  We can build templates.  We can put stuff in the middle for you about your content.  We need your expertise to get that in there.  However, the people who are writing that content are not content people. 

They're not writers.  They’re not Web people.  Usually, they are faculty or they're admins, somebody whose job it is not to produce content but to do something else.  So producing content for their websites always felt lower priority and if we had somebody to produce content for these sites even just a work with the clients, we would get these things done so much faster.

So we just hire, couple of weeks ago he started, two weeks ago we just had our first copywriter full time starred and the goal is to have him on every project go and interview and at least help fill in the big chunks of the sites because the content was so bad when we would get it and they would be mad because they can't be bright pink Times New Roman and I don’t understand why they needed the format in the first place.  We're not talking the same language.

The end result is we have to make an effective website.  It has to communicate.  Do what it supposed to do.  But I can't rely on a non expert to be able to do that well.  And so, we need to have an expert on our end say at least help facilitate it.  My hope is the best can smooth that whole process over a lot.  I might be optimistic.

Panelist 2:  At every job, I’ve had previously on any website that I was a part of, I never got engaged in the content of the site.  It was really bad thing.  It's really bad to just be like the Web guy and be like I just care that it functions and it looks good and all that but I don’t care what it says.  I think it's really bad thing and I have this. I guess, my own epiphany recently and it's like my very top hiring priority is to get a copy editor because I think that in any site that we do I mean, I think it's the biggest problem with websites on campus is the copy.  I mean, designers design and it might suck but people are there to get information.

The number one reason people are on a website, they’re not there to react to the aesthetics of it they’re there to get something.  When we did our university website, we had atrocious copy.  It was horrible.  And so, I went to my writers.  We have writers in our division but not on my staff and I talked to them and I talked to the head of the team when I said, "You know, like they're really, really talented at what they do but they don’t know Web copywriting."

And so, I kind of said, "I want her."  And I said, "You know, I'm going to kind of bring in a freelancer to do this."  And so, I worked with a freelancer.  They worked with the freelancer as well and when the project with me launched they said, "I'm so glad you did that Matt because we learn so much by reading what this writer wrote."  And so, they’ve been able to learn from it but still like I think I really need someone that's on my team like the writers have the news, like the news and press stuff.  They do the magazine.  They do all that but I think it's one of the biggest positions that I'm missing on my team right now.

Moderator:  I used the analogy when we're trying to make the case for hiring this thing.  It was like giving people a nice, pretty wrapped box with the bow and really great wrapping paper and was structurally sound and it validates too but there’s nothing inside the box.  Then it's like the worst present you could possibly get as, "Hey, how great this is."  And then there’s nothing there.  That’s what we're getting people or giving our clients a pretty box that’s solid but has no substance to it and that was the content.

And then eventually, we brought in a vendor and five of the six people they brought to the meeting were writers, were content people.  And he asked them, "Who works at your company like 30 people?" and almost all of the people who worked there are responsible for content.  They have a couple of designers.  They have a couple of developers.  Everybody else is content because that’s what people want.  That's ultimately what they're providing and that was what got our boss thinking, "Oh, really, you guys have content people."  Yeah, go figure.  So

Audience:  My question... [18:48 Unintelligible]

Panelist 2:  We have that conversation this morning and it seems... Oh, sorry.  His question was you have at least different people with different personalities and you have to manage them all differently.  What about people that are strict nine to five employee versus these people that do these really kind of alternative all-over-the-place schedules and now I lost the track of my answers.  So go ahead and I’ll come back and think of it.

[Laughter]

Moderator:  I think the question was about how to manage without showing favoritism.

Panelist 2:  Yeah.

Moderator:  Well, you got different kinds of people and you don’t want to

Audience:  [19:51 Unintelligible]

Moderator:  Yeah, we struggle a lot with – OK, so my entire office, my policy is you can work from home basically whenever you want.  Everybody comes in on Wednesdays, first staff meeting and I have 101 meetings with my staff and we do all those on Wednesdays, blocked up.  So no people are going to be there and then typically people are in throughout the week off and on and they have different schedules.  They have different needs.  One guy doesn’t want to pay for child care three days a week for four hours so he works from home and kind of does that though anybody who have small kids you know how hard it is to work from home and have a small kid running around.

I'm kind of skeptical if that’s working for him but ultimately I believe that you start with saying, "OK, I trust you to do what you need to do and work from home."  It's a privilege but it's not one that you’re going to have to earn over a long period of time with me.  I want to see that you do your work but as soon as I see that you’re not, it's something that we're going to dial back and I’ve done that before as well where it wasn’t working out for somebody.  I wasn’t seeing things getting done and I don’t have to see them doing their work to know that it's getting done.  I can approve and I can review the quality of the work after the fact just as well.  But other departments on campus have a real problem with it and they don’t understand how this works.  They’re very skeptical if anything is getting done because they don’t see it.  If they come by or call somebody's office and they’re not in the office, they assume nothing's getting done but listen this is the Web and things happen and we also have to be very quick to respond when something happens.

The homepage might need to get changed, something breaks.  Somebody's going to be on the phone to get it fixed.  So I know I can call any of those people at 11 o'clock at night and know that they’re going to drop what they’re doing.  They’re going to get this thing fixed and I know a lot of the guys are working early in the mornings or late at night to cover for it.  I completely respect the lifestyle that they want to have and it's high rate I can't pay them what I like to pay them.  And so, this is one way I can.

Audience:  Do you have your HR blessing to be doing that?

[Laughter]

Panelist 2:  Yeah.  Well, I know when we talk about it this morning like he seemed as much more informal about that.  We have kind of like a there’s no like you check in allocation of days but everybody on our team, everyone as well works from home and we definitely not as much as his.  We try and keep it to maybe like once every two weeks or something like again we're not writing it down.  We're not checking it.

If someone maybe does a couple more at least one month whatever and we just keep kind of, we're all adults.  You can take care of your stuff and all I give a shit about is that the work is done.  I don’t care really when we're doing it.  We did after a little while, we realized that we're starting to grow more and more and as we get bigger and bigger when we have people on really alternative schedules, we decided to kind of have what we call our core hours where we at least want like a solid overlap of a certain chunk of the day so that we don’t have some people coming in like seven, some people coming in at like eleven-ish, and then some people staying too really, really late and then really in the end with once thrown in there, you get maybe like four-hour overlap, three-hour overlap and it's just hard to be productive doing that I guess.

Audience:  We're doing the same thing... The Google decided on that any way. But I think it goes back to the original question was what do you do when the one guy decides that those guys forget to do that...

Panelist 2:  It happened to me at my last job.  I was the guy like I worked in the more like prints office and I was the guy that was never at the office.  I was a million times more productive when I wasn’t in the office.  My boss knew and acknowledged that I was a million times more productive when I was not in the office and I even have the conversation with her she goes, "Oh, Matt I can tell you’re getting shit done."  And I'm like, "So, what's the problem here?"  "Well, you know the office assistant is just getting really jealous and I'm like, "OK, fine I'm back."  Whatever, you know.  I mean, it's just a thing you have to deal with again if someone's really uncomfortable with it, I guess you got to change that.

Panelist 1:  I guess it really depends on the team.  So if it's somebody internally hopefully you have employees who talk to each other and who can communicate and be civil with each other and say, "OK, this person is getting XY and Z privileges and this is why and so if you want something different, sure, we can work something out but if it's beyond the department so say it is like the dean's office or something who's like, "Why is this person getting special treatment and my employees can't do this and that?"  That’s an issue that either if you can keep it

Panelist 2:  Mind your own business?

Yeah.  You can kind of keep it on the down low that might be better if you know because really know who may speak up.  I think you can probably tell your institution who’s going to have a problem with like flex schedules but if it really becomes an issue then it just has to be talked about and maybe the flexing just does not happen in a way that it was before.

Moderator:  To be fair my vice president doesn’t condone what we do for staffing.  As soon as she found out that one of my staff is working from home, three days a week, on average two and a half to three days a week she flipped out and said, "Those people shouldn’t be working from home more than one or two days at most, at most.  And the question was "Why not?  How does that affect their work?"  I mean, explain to me how it affects their work.  I'm not going to get drawn in that argument with my vice president which she said, "Yeah, I can't believe that.  Wow."  And you just, "OK, great." But I try to fly and the radar with some of these things because she's not managing my people.  I am and I'm responsible for their performance, their behavior and she doesn’t agree with my management style sometimes but I think she's coming around to some of those things but she also doesn’t manage millennials.

She's a vice president.  She's very late in her career and she's been managing people for a very long time and I have 20 something's that are fresh out of college and are learning how to work and that's a completely different challenge than what she's used to and her take is, "Listen, you want to motivate people.  If they can't motivate themselves fire them and hire people who can." which is

Panelist 2:  Oh, that's pretty blunt it really cut through there the whole back.

Moderator:  Well, it's naïve.  That is one way to look at it and in certain industries that can work just fine and in higher ed where you’re limited with the resources and time.  You have to learn how to manage people with the motivations they have so I hope I didn’t just get fired.

Audience:  [27:08 Unintelligible]

Panelist 2:  Well, I'll turn 30 next month and I don’t think I'll ever be mature so I mean, [Laughter] Yeah

Audience:  [27:51 Unintelligible]

Panelist 2:  Oh, yeah.  We meant to do that very first thing.  Actually, I'll go ahead and start.  So admittedly these two guys are much further along and much more advanced so I'm like the rising up the hill and these guys admittedly have much larger and more advanced teams.  So again, it's just different perspectives than what it is right now.

But I have none of that so again I'm speaking of what I have and these guys have got – they’ve done an amazing job with what I – these guys are kind of like the people like I have known these guys for a while and I talked to them all the time whenever I get to a point where I'm like, "OK, I need to hire new people."  How'd you guys do it?" because they’ve done all sort of the heavy lifting so like I mean, it sounds lame but I'm kind of like aspiring to be there and I think they’ve done a great job on it.  So I guess they can give their perspective of like kind of being there.

Panelist 1:  I guess real quick like at Wayne State University where I come from has got 33,000 students.  And so, we are Web communications, part of Marketing and we don’t have a presidential mandate for anyone to come to us.  So we actually started six years ago as only a two-person team, a designer and a writer and then we eventually got a developer but only to manage the homepage and the admission site.  And so, over those six years you kind of grown to start taking on other sites at the university just kind of by influence.

And so, not we don’t have a mandate so have to just kind of show of that we are doing the right thing for our students and things like that.  So now, we've redesigned in the past six years over 400 sites at the institution and kind of brought them all into one identity manual and once kind of server environment CMS, so now we have myself, a Web content administrator, three developers, two designers, and a multimedia person and some student minions.  But it’s taken six years to get there and now I think that we actually work like a mini agency within the university which is kind of unique because we do charge each department for our services and that not to make money but just to keep our staff and I think that's kind of the case with Chest too.

Moderator:  Yeah that's our – you don’t charge in your department, right now at least?

Panelist 2:  I will be shortly.

Moderator:  You will be shortly.

Panelist 2:  Part of the growth that we're probably going to be doing pretty quick is that we have people banging on the doors to work with us now and we still have to do all of our core functions at the moment.  So we're doing the growth so that again we can become a little bit more of a service-oriented group.

Moderator:  So our group at Notre Dame is actually called Agency ND.  The website there right now is what I manage.  I have nine people reporting to me.  I have four developers, one of them is purely Web support because as we all know every time you launch a new site, you’ll be maintaining it and helping them with that for a long time whether you like it or not and then I’ve got three other developers that do programming in front-end, and so on.  I’ve got two designers.  I have an information architect, Kate Russell presented yesterday on content tips you can take back for clients and then I have a project manager, and a traffic manager.

The traffic manager is about getting tasks from to the right person and scheduling essentially and the project manager is overseeing the flight of a project from start to finish.  He just started a few weeks ago.  We have probably 40 – 60 concurrent projects at any given time in our group not including the probably 150 minor projects or support tickets or whatever.  They go on and off any given time so we also charge and that’s part of how we've been able to grow as the university essentially said, "You know what, everybody wants more money, everybody wants more people, and you guys actually charge for your work so make more money and hire more people and pay for them."  And so, we've been put more on the direction of being a revenue-driven agency.  It's kind of weird.

Audience:  [33:12 Unintelligible]

Moderator:  You guys, Nicky mentions student minions, you want to speak to that one?

Panelist 1:  Yeah, we have two developers, two minions, and one kind of like content.  He does a lot of content migration and things like that.  And so, they’re just student assistants.  The developers are part of the computer science program and the contents migrator. I forget what program he is part of maybe I think the Journalism.  I think he is going for Journalism Degree.  And so, actually we

Moderator:  For pay or for credit

Panelist 1:  Therefore pay and so actually within our department that they pay a little bit more than the other departments which kind of they use student assistants like run letters back and forth between departments so we're lucky enough to be able to incentivize them with actually a little bit more pay than other departments.

Panelist 2:  I have no student workers at the moment but as far as the relationships part, you mentioned IT that’s a really, really, really sore subject with myself and my team.  We kind of early, early when I got well, OK. Web had traditionally my university been under IT that the team that it was under is still technically there and I was brought on to bring on a Web team that would like actually do things well.  So that team still there and I pretty much had it out with the CIO within short order of moving there because they told us they wanted us to share point as our CMS and I told them to go whatever jump off a bridge.

And so, that has set a very bad president and I fought myself for that and it's something that right now, I'm really working to repair that relationship because I feel it's really, really, really important to whatever you’re in have that relationship and right now I'm trying to bridge that gap by building good relationships with the lower level managers and directors in IT.

And we're kind of making end roads and I'll work my way up to repair that relationship. So with me, I'm a motivated person and when I want to do something, I want to do it fast and the CIO really thought that he could keep me under his thumb when I started because I'm a young person and that makes me madder than anything when people treat me like that so that's my worst departmental relationship but it's something that I'm working on.  So

Audience:  [36:03 Unintelligible]

Panelist 1:  Yeah, well so I was in not in my position but I was in the department when we started charging and it was a little I guess our university tradition was very decentralized, everyone had their own servers, they could publish whatever they wanted at anytime they wanted.  It was blue, pink, purple.  It didn’t matter.  There was no oversight.  And so, there also wasn’t like full time Web people in each department.  And so, I guess if you already have a department in place that currently services other units on campus for free.  It's kind of hard to say this is what we're worth and we require you to pay us for that.

One way that you can maybe start I guess that trend or at least that way of thinking is to actually create like invoices but having no charge in the end.  And so that from my standpoint when department see like, two weeks out from lunch but we want to add this feature and this feature and we don’t like how this looks, how much that really impacts the cost of a project whether they’re actually being build or not.

And so, we always put together, we are actually billing but you can put together well this is 15 hours of design and 10 hours of writing and 4 hours of programming to get this change done, that's an extra $1,500 for this change just so you know and for me, that has kind of gave us or at least the work that we do some value, that there's an actual tangible cost to it even though it's internal money and stuff like that.

And I think, even having it as an estimate even though it's not charged they see that dollar amount that goes along with each change request goes a long way even if it doesn’t hit their pocketbooks.

Moderator:  Just getting something done on the Web can be done for very cheap but getting something good done on the Web is a very expensive and time-consuming process.  Do you guys all know who mStoner is?  It's a lot of nods.  There are great vendor.  There are great agency out there.  They do fantastic hard work.  They’re very expensive and rightfully so because they do great work.  And I don’t think most people on campus realize just what goes into that work just what comes out of it, what that cost is.  So I'd like to sometimes we try to draw a line between a project and the cost it would take to do this on the outside because none of this people in campus can do that work themselves.

You can't just hire your nephew to go and do a project like mStoner is doing though a lot of them think they can.  So you actually get them a bid from a company like mStoner or another agency and say, "Listen here, I want you to go talk to them.  Give them your requirements and say we're going to help you get an estimate for the work that you’re talking about doing when they see a very large price tag on the other end of it they may say, "You know what?  That's not worth it for us."  But hopefully they will look at it and say, "Wow, I don’t have that kind of money but I wish I did." 

And then, you get to start to bridge the gap between, "I don’t want to pay for anything."  And "I don’t want to pay for what you guys do." Because you’re probably going to be as an on-campus entity who's starting to charge considerably cheaper than mStoner.  You may also not have the staff, the expertise, and all of that they do.  I hope I'm not insulting anybody from mStoner.  I really like them but

Panelist 2:  I too.  I recommended them to so many people but like they’re so expensive.  You know.

Moderator:  I used them as an example and listen if you want to do this kind of work and you don’t want to work with us that are absolutely fine.  Here, let me put you in touch with them and I’ll send Patrick DiMichele on mStoner and he will talk to them and usually after a five-minute conversation, they know whether they are in the game or not. And that usually helps move that conversation long.

Audience:  [40:31 Unintelligible]

Moderator:  Not doing stuff.  Seriously, the question is how do you convince people outside your department that you need more help.  I assume you mean staff, you need more people right?  My answer is if it's not broken, it's not going to get fixed so the better you cover up problems and hide the cracks the easier it is for the leadership who control the first strings, who control the personnel are going to be able to overlook the fact that you keep asking for more people.  I need more people but you're staffed on and if you continue to get those things done through heroic efforts then you’re not going to get more people.

Panelist 2:  They assume that's just what you do.

Moderator:  Right, yeah.

Panelist 2:  Save the day.

Moderator:  So, heroic efforts are not a sustainable resource and leadership.  They would understand that but they don’t understand that you're putting in heroic efforts and they hear bitching and whining from everybody on campus asking for more people.  So typically it's letting something fall down, something that it's not going to get everybody in trouble or fire.

Panelist 2:  So it's the thing that I'm on the cusp of right now is that growth thing to the point where we do enough stuff and now everybody wants to work with us because we've done really, really well on the stuff that we've worked at and my VP is really pushing me to do this, take on this, take on that and I said, "The reason I’ve been able to do such good stuff is because we keep resources in check." and he realized we have very, very limited resources and if you keep pushing on us like this we're going to start to produce shitty stuff and it depends on what do you want, quality or quantity?

And I think again, these guys teamed across the board have produced really, really quality stuff because their universities have made the commitment to staff and to appreciate what they do. I mean,

Moderator:  We’re down to about two minutes so we're going to terminate the next pure quick fire question and answer.

Panelist 2:  So anybody an awesome question?

Moderator:  Any great questions?  So the question is you’re a one-man shop basically you’re a one-man department and you’re booked and now you’ve been given additional responsibilities which you can only put so much water into a cup before it's going to overflow, so the question I would put back to your boss or whoever is giving you this is to simply ask, "OK, what would you like to take off my schedule because I can't add more to it without something else dropping?"  He may say nothing but something will drop and hopefully, hopefully it's not something you care about.

Panelist 2:  Yeah and I think with the CMS part of it.  I mean if I'm going to be in charge and this was the case, I was in charge of the CMS selection committee and the CIO try to push her plan on me and with the support of my boss I said, "I'm in charge of this committee." so I mean, I didn’t like wait what was selected but I was the one that drove that because I'm the one who's going to have to run and support that application, so you're not going to tell me what tool I'm going to use to do my job day in and day out.  So I guess that for me was it.

Moderator:  All right, I think that’s all the time we have for today and I just got the thumbs up because she's been waving her arm saying, "Stop, stop."  So thank you guys.  Have a good rest of conference.

[Applause]