The five questions are:

What I want to do
Why I want to do it
How I’ll do it
How I’ll eat doing it
My pipe dream after I’ve done it

Admittedly, it’s still a new thing and it’s very possible that I’ll jettison the whole idea after a while. But so far, I like it because it forces me to be less excited about an idea. Not in practice, but in terms of the sheer possibilities that abound and worrying more about ‘how cool it would be if I pull it off’ and instead, focusing my energy onto how I’ll get from point A to point B and so forth. The last question My pipe dream after I’ve done it is reserved for “what will you do if you actually pull it off? What is your goal beyond just setting it up and actually getting it going? What will you do after that?”

I wonder if other people have their own ways of “checking themselves at the door” when they’re in the midst of plotting a side project or something, especially those among us who are full-time idea spinners who run their own startups.

The second one I have the answer for. Part of that is, if there is no one in-house able to identify these things, they’re important to bring up. But if a client asks you for an assessment and recommendations, to spend energy and time to tell them that “here’s what we think is wrong and here’s what we’ll do if you hire us” is a bit silly. The client isn’t asking you to do it. They might later, but they’re asking you to help them assess strategy and to make recommendations objectively.

I know that’s asking a lot. To say “please give me recommendations and I’ll ask your competitors to do it.” But what happened to serving the customer well and if you do, eventually getting rewarded for that?

In an era where everyone is an expert at something, people need to dig deep and really assess how they’re treating their clients. Everyone has to eat, I get that. But why waste people’s time with assessments that fail to assess, with surveys that don’t produce demonstrable results or site visits that don’t answer questions.

You can get away with cute IT tricks when you’re an in-house IT person. That’s what they’re trained to do and everyone expects that. But when you’re being paid as a hired gun to come in and solve issues and problems, you should come in and make it look easy. Make it go faster than they expect, make it go smoother and take up less of their time.

Things are already complicated enough in institutional environments. Whether we’re talking academe, government or other bloated ships out there, no one really wants someone else to come in and make life more miserable. Even if the outcomes are better than what they have, I’ll be pleased to see when experienced firms out there are spending more time on the product and presentation, rather than the dollar signs they get regardless of whether they try or mail it in.

I’m proud that we implemented the college’s first CMS ever and we’re on the cusp of another CMS project later this year just for admissions. Financial aid, admissions and scholarship applications are all online and as a result, it’s contributing to increased traffic to the web site. The news archive and additions of podcasts and video have also been great. It’s the best looking site in the state and once it gets to Phase 2 later this year, it’ll be even better. It went a lot faster than I expected it to honestly.

I will say that every institution is different, but I’ve enjoyed the opportunity and the challenges that come with working at a two-year institution. There are a host of very specific issues that come from this environment that don’t necessarily have a lot of discussion. Most of these come from the inherent difficulties in working in understaffed environments where there are considerations coming from all sides, split positions where the roles aren’t clearly delineated and a lack of desire by those in power to alter those roles because it would require an entire reorganization of personnel resources.

This isn’t just a community college problem. Some colleges have gotten in front of this and others have failed miserably or ignore it completely. Just slapping a title on someone and expecting them to fulfill a role related to new media or technology isn’t enough. There need to be institutional resources devoted to reworking college marketing and recruiting areas to be integrated with new media. Some schools have counselors devoted to it and I’m sure they can speak to their roles and the importance/benefits of their existence, but I think in the not-too-near future, we’ll have entire New Media marketing offices at colleges at are somewhere at the intersection of admissions and pr/marketing.

I have no idea where that rant came from, but I feel like we’re just beginning to scratch the surface on the discussions of where these new technologies can help offices and people behind the scenes accomplish these goals more dynamically and effectively. I’m not moving to a place where this has been fleshed out much better, so that’s not an indictment on where I came from – at all – as much as it’s a discussion about what we need to be airing out and discussing as a web developer community. Technology is a great thing and while it can be fun and dandy to discuss all of the wonderous ways we can reach out to new people out there, none of it matters unless there are people on the ground floor trained to figure out what all of it means.

Trained is the operative world. So many people are just Level 1 web consumers. They use the web because they have to. They haven’t embraced web technology as a way to truly improve their lives and as a result, it makes them unable to understand what innovations and improvements exist.

On the flip side, there are people who have ‘taken it too far’ and want to be constantly integrated and connected in every way possible. I think that’s an institutional decision if you want admissions counselors twittering to students, IMing and talking to them constantly. I think that’s a pretty big waste of time, but I’m not entirely convinced of the benefits of myspace and facebook in demonstrable ways short of the collection of friends as trading cards.

The ascent of new media professionals in all areas – not just higher ed, but in business and medicine – will provide us with a much broader arena in which to discuss ways that all of these startups can create actual value, rather than just buzz in Silicon Valley and fairy tales of IPOs and billion-dollar valuations from their founders.

With that, I’ll be offline for a little bit. When I come back, I’m going to start to contribute more regularly with my observations/ideas/thoughts. Or at least, that’s the plan…

It was important once the CMS arrived for me to find ways to break it. Ok, not really. But I worked hard to find problems with it. I wished I could’ve had it a month before launch, but we didn’t get it setup and installed until about two weeks before initial launch. It wasn’t awful, but I worked pretty hard to find what I could and discover critical areas of consternation throughout it.

Part of my frustration with proprietary CMS relate to my initial experiences during this time. There were so many poorly thought decisions made in the UI design that I remain befuddled as to what anyone could have been thinking when they were developing it. Makes me think that non-tech savvy end users ought to be employed to beta test things more often. Because if they’re the clientele, then they should get their hands on the product to see if it’s really what it says it is.

Ours was and was head and shoulders above what we had before. That to me, deems it a success. But it’s important to look critically at the product and to use any free tech support time or help from the developers as a chance to get them to reveal things to you. If you wait too long, you’ll regret it.

I’ve never been much of a tournament player, so losing isn’t any really notable deal. The real issue is the fact that I decided last year, that after playing tennis for almost 20 years of my life; that I had grown tired of it.

It’s simply not fun anymore. It never really was fun in a traditional sense. Part of that is largely due to the fact that I was never very good and it took me almost forever to actually become a semi-competent ballstriker.

In spite of that, tennis was great to me. Not just because it was something to do growing up, but the fact was..it was all I knew and I learned well from watching. So I develop my eye for coaching pretty early on, but never imagined that I’d actually get the opportunity to run my own program someday.

But I did.

I had the opportunity to see my high school tennis coach a few weeks ago. He’s well into his 80s and not as vibrant as he once was. I called him before I went to his house and the conversation went something like this:

Me: “Hi Coach, this is Ronald Bronson.”
Coach: “Ronald Bronson?”
Me: “Yeah Coach, Ronnie.” (Note: Coach remains the only person to this day to call me this. In other words, don’t get any ideas…)
Coach: “Ronald Bronson” ::pauses:: I had a Ronald Bronson on one of my teams. He didn’t hit the ball real well. But he could organize stuff. Made him captain his senior year.
Me: ::laughing:: “That’s me, Coach.”

The moral of that story is something he always said me to after my playing days were over during my (sporadic) visits back east. He always told me that what he liked about me was that I didn’t quit. That all of the years when I played, when I was clearly terrible, it never occurred to me that I should stop playing. I just never seriously thought about it, no matter what else I had going on.

When I thought about that this weekend and how it relates to my fears about business, I started to see the parallels.

A few years ago, when I started to take my own entrepreneurial projects more seriously; I came to the conclusion that if I really didn’t want to do this, I would’ve quit a long time ago. Because nothing about it is easy and you spend inordinate amounts of “free” time working on stuff that may go up in flames for any number of reasons. But if you can’t fathom a scenario in which you’d rather be doing anything else, it becomes interesting to consider other things to do with your time.

It’s not that I haven’t thought about “well, what will I do if [insert thing here] doesn’t work out” because I’m pretty good at that. It’s more like, I don’t want to. And I don’t feel like there is a need to (at least, not yet…)