We’ve all heard the expression, “the cobbler’s children have no shoes”; internal marketing and design projects can give the expression new meaning. It’s truly confounding when design firms struggle to design their own collateral and when marketers fail to market themselves. Having been through some of these experiences myself, I’m writing to share some of what I’ve learned about why it happens and what you can do about it.

Why we fail

My top 3 list of pitfalls that cause projects to fail.

1) We can’t empathize with ourselves
When we design experiences, we usually start by trying to empathize with the people we’re designing for. If we can understand how they feel, it’s possible to understand the design challenge on a deeper level. Usually, we can embrace empathy while maintaining a perspective on the design problem, however, when we’re designing for ourselves things tend to short circuit. In this case, we often “feel” the problem in a way that prevents us seeing the bigger picture and preserving our perspective. Without being able to do so, we tend to narrow the opportunity space and bring emotional baggage into the design process.

2) We don’t treat ourselves like our clients
We basically assume that we’re going to be good clients to ourselves and that we’re going to provide good service to ourselves, so we stop doing all the things that we’ve developed to keep ourselves in line. We take a laissez faire approach from the project proposal process all the way through project management and customer service. When we do this, things slip and projects head into a downward spiral that either leads to a crash or a slow disappearance into the fog of organizational memory.

3) Our leaders aren’t leading
The leaders within our organizations don’t think they need to lead internal initiatives actively and tend to be drawn away be external efforts. I’m not really sure why this happens, but I’ve seen it over and over again. Perhaps it’s because leaders think this is the job of managers. but the reality is that internal projects often require more supervision than external ones due to the backdrop of internal politics, deep investment in the brand, and other factors. There’s also the case where leaders take a top down approach, which they’d avoid with clients, that prevents the project team from going through their normal process.

What you can do about it

1) An independent team
One way to deal with the fact that we can’t empathize with ourselves is to create a firewall between the project team and the internal client. This team should then go through a normal engagement process as if the project were with an outside client. It will be a little frustrating because it will take longer, especially considering that internal stakeholders often believe internal projects should be quicker, but it’s really the only way to insure objectivity.

2) A complete team & a room
Creating the firewall will not be enough in and of itself, you’ll need a complete team that can manage the project on a normal schedule. Thus, you’ll need your project lead, a project manager, and all the rest on the project team. Plus, you’ll want a defined client contact and approvals team on the other side. One common challenge is that the project team usually has ongoing regular external responsibilities that don’t just stop while the internal project is going on. One good way to deal with this is to set up days, or times during the day, when the team is not to be bothered with work outside of the internal project. This can be hard to do, but setting up a project team office can be very effective at stopping interruptions.

3) A leadership advocate
Dealing with the leadership problem can be solved by getting a commitment from a project sponsor on the leadership team who will communicate about your progress as the project is in process. The leader should ideally be independent of the  project team as well as of  the client side. And, most importantly, they need to understand how challenging internal projects are, what the pitfalls are, and be motivated to serve as a project advocate.

Thanks for reading and shoot me a comment to share your experience with internal projects.