Greg Dunlap: CMS Consulting and Web Content Authoring – Episode 125

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Greg Dunlap is on a mission to help people create better content for the web.

As Director of Strategy for Lullabot – a well-known consultancy that is best known for its work with the Drupal content management system – Greg helps clients develop good websites.

As the author of a forthcoming book on web content authoring, Greg is taking his next step toward helping people create better content for the modern web.

Greg Dunlap: CMS Consulting and Web Content Authoring – Episode 125

We talked about:

• his work as the Director of Strategy at Lullabot
• their approach to content consulting at Lullabot
• trust, the most important quality in consulting practice
• the importance of being straightforward in your conversations with clients
• the three elements in the consultant’s “iron triangle” – “good, fast, cheap” and the give-and-take process for picking the right two (because you can never have all three)
• how the process for helping clients pick the right elements in their decision-making process
• the importance of focusing on content authoring and accounting for the needs of content creators and editors in the CMS development process
• his forthcoming book about designing good content authoring experiences
• how the needs of content authors vary by industries, size, and other criteria
• his approach to user-centered system design
• his focus in his forthcoming book on making authoring a first-tier priority in website projects
• how modern content is so much more than “the words that we put on the website”
• the emergence of content authoring for the web as a profession

Greg’s bio

Greg Dunlap got his start in Drupal in 2006 at a Lullabot onsite training for his employer at the time, the Seattle Times Company. Feeling an instant kinship with Lullabot Jeff Eaton, Greg accepted Eaton’s encouragement to contribute and today leads one of the eight core initiatives for Drupal 8. The so-called CMI initiative endeavors to consolidate Drupal’s scattered site data, views, content types, and module settings, to a unified, secure API. The new system, which shipped as part of Drupal 8, makes deploying, testing, and reusing Drupal site configuration more consistent and easier to manage.

Greg is also a world-class pinball player and has been participating in pinball tournaments for nearly 25 years. For some of his career he managed to marry his fascination with the game with his software engineering work, writing C++ code to run various games.

His Drupal resume has included stints with leading Drupal agencies Palantir and NodeOne, and his body of work includes work for Foreign Affairs magazine, Ikea, and the Swedish Government. He authored Deploy module and was a long time maintainer of the Services module. He is also co-author of Packt’s “Drupal 7 Module Development.”

Greg makes his home in Pacific Monterey, CA with his wife Nicole and a small menagerie of animal friends. In Portland he attempts to stay current with the Punk Rock scene. Says Greg, “Some people find their Zen through meditation, I find mine getting crushed up against the stage in a mosh pit.”

Connect with Greg online

• Twitter
• Lullabot

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 125. One of the most interesting ways to practice content strategy is as a consultant. Greg Dunlap has done technology and web consulting for several decades and has learned a few things about how to work with clients to build good websites. In this chat, Greg shares his insights about how to effectively collaborate on web projects. We also talk about the importance of including good authoring capabilities in a CMS and his forthcoming book on web content authoring.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode number 125 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Greg Dunlap. Greg works at Lullabot, a Drupal CMS consultancy. He’s been there quite a while, and he’s a really well-known figure in the content management and content world. So welcome, Greg. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days at Lullabot and in your CMS consulting.

Greg:
Yeah. Hi. I am the director of strategy at Lullabot. That means I run our content strategy practice. That practice was really started many years ago by Jeff Eaton, and he has now gone on to form Autogram. I kind of refer to Autogram as the CMS equivalent of Queens of the Stone Age, kind of the super group of our world. But I was an engineering at Lullabot, and Jeff is a close friend of mine. And I started wanting to answer bigger questions about how people put sites together basically, is what it comes down to because I was encountering a lot of problems when we were building sites that I felt could have been avoided if people had asked the right questions much earlier in the process. And that was what sort of led me to join and move into the content and digital strategy world with Jeff and then eventually form a new department at Lullabot to house that practice.

Greg:
And now I am the director of that department. I’ve got four amazing employees, and we are a busy working content strategy practice, building CMS websites, mostly using Drupal for our clients, but also kind of branching out into more general content strategy, too. We’ve done some projects now that don’t have anything really to do with anything CMS-specific, just content auditing, content organization, traditional sort of capital C content strategy stuff. And I think that’s great. So yeah, it’s been a really interesting ride.

Larry:
That’s very cool, the evolution of… I had a whole career flashing before my eyes of CMS and content consulting. And that’s why I wanted to have you on here is one of the things that folks in your position have is you’ve worked on so many different projects, and you think about this as a practice and helping other organizations benefit from it and embody it. Can you talk a little bit about your approach to consulting? Whether it’s a pure content strategy project or a CMS implementation thing, do you have sort of a, not a template, but a general approach as you go into a project?

Greg:
I think that what we try to approach for the project is that it’s almost… I think we have a lot of things that we do very regularly, but I at least try not to come in with a template because I find that a lot of companies come in and saying, “Here is how we fix problems,” right? And I don’t like that because I don’t think there’s any global solution to any problem. And so what I like to come in is to say, “I want to hear what your problems are, what are you suffering under, and what are the goals and priorities of your organization,” and then take that stuff and create solutions that keeps all of that in mind. Because if you don’t understand where an organization is trying to go or get to or what they’re trying to achieve, then you can’t come up with solutions for them at all. You’re like shooting in a barn.

Greg:
And it’s hard because a lot of organizations that come to us don’t even have that yet. They don’t even know. They know they’re suffering, but they don’t even kind of know what they want at all. And so we’ve often got to kind of tease that out of them. And that’s where a lot of early project workshopping and interviewing stakeholders and all of that stuff is pulling that stuff out and finding the common elements and threads and pulling on them until we have a better idea. And then once we have that and we socialize it with them, we can say, “Okay, now let’s start talking about what the answers are.” And I find that that process is really the part that I enjoy the most because I love learning about how people run their businesses. I love learning about how people work together, etc. And so that early phase of our project, where we’re doing that drinking from a fire hose and research and talking to the people, that’s the part that I really love the most.

Larry:
I love that approach because I think consulting in general can get a bad name because people come in with that like, “Oh, we are awesome at this and just do it our way, and everything will be fine.” But you come in with that identifying the problem, find out what they’re trying to do and what their pain points are and getting there and helping them get through that. So your clients must love you. Is that a safe guess?

Greg:
I will say that one of the things that impressed me the most about Lullabot when I came in is not just that we have very low churn amongst our employees, we also have very low churn amongst our clients. Grammy’s is an example of an organization that we worked with multiple years in a row. And we’ve had stakeholders who will be at one client, move on to another company, bring us in at that company, move on to another company, bring us in at that company because they enjoy working with us and they trust us. And I think that at many consulting organizations, what you see is they work with a company, and then they never want to work together ever again. And to see that kind of return business in our industry is really rare and something that really impressed me before I came on at Lullabot.

Greg:
And it really shows the thing that I think is really the most important quality in consulting, which is trust. And it’s hard because the whole business of putting together a consulting agreement is not about trust. It’s about defending yourself. It’s about putting a contract together in a way where you don’t get screwed. And I really think it sucks that we all have to approach it that way because that is antithetical to us creating good answers and getting to good solutions. And that’s something that I try and break down when we meet with and work with our clients. Because if we can’t trust each other and be honest and work together with problems and solve problems, then we’re not getting anywhere.

Larry:
That’s a lovely perspective, I got to say, because I’ve done a ton of that kind of contract negotiations, and yeah, it’s always attorneys trying to defend themselves from one another. But fundamentally it’s all about that trust between the client and the consultant. It sounds like you’ve done a good job of that. I guess, that potential disconnect between the legal stuff hovering around the edges and then that really fundamental deep trust that you have with your clients, is that mostly about the working relationship? You just talked about your intake process and your onboarding. It must be an ongoing thing as well, I’m going to guess.

Greg:
I mean, I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to say that every client relationship we have is a banner representation of mutual trust and admiration or anything like that. But I will say that one of the things that we tend to do, especially in the onboarding process, is I ask a lot of questions, and I see what kind of answers I get back. And I’m trying to gauge, am I being fed a line? There are a lot of things. One of the things, I have a notes document, and it’s called Things Clients Tell You To Make You Feel Better That Make You Feel Worse. And one of the things is when they say something along the lines of, “Oh, yeah, when you dig into it, you’re going to find out that it’s not that complicated, and it’s not really going to cost us any extra money at all,” and it’s like, that is a clear sign that somebody doesn’t really understand what they’re getting into generally.

Greg:
And it’s not that that’s a red flag to not work with them. It’s a red flag to know what you’re getting into. That’s all, right? And so I would say that, so from our standpoint, we are trying to judge where the client’s at and where their head’s at, and are they being open with us? And at the same time, I’m always very open in the pre-sales discussions with clients to talk about what I honestly think their concerns are, whether I honestly think that their timeline and budget is realistic, just being really straightforward with them because clients that respect and respond favorably to that generally are going to be the kinds of clients you want to work with. And if they’re the kind of clients where they just want to hear, “Yes, sir,” to everything, or they just want to get the lowest budget, then they’re probably not the best fit for us anyways, and that’s fine.

Larry:
And the way you just said that story, it makes me think that even though you go through this really rigorous discovery process where you’re trying to identify true pain points and not doing this cookie cutter templatized thing, they still come back with questions like that, sort of that phrasing of like, “Oh, you’ve probably seen this million times. It’s going to be simple.” And you’re like, “Whoa, no, that’s the the crux of the whole problem.” So that ongoing relationship must be… Is that just a continuous thing right up until the day you hand them the keys to the new CMS, or?

Greg:
Yeah, always. And it’s got to be a give and take. I mean, that’s really the key thing because you’ll always going to come up to a point where there’s a problem, and it’s one of the stress points. It’s budget, it’s timeline, it’s functionality, something like that. And one of the three parts of the iron triangle has to go. And for those who don’t know, it’s good, fast, cheap, pick two, right? And so you come together and you say, “Look, this isn’t going to work. We have to talk about a solution.” And it has to be a give and take. Sometimes we will give, and sometimes they’ll give, and sometimes we’ll both give, and it’ll be painful for everybody. But if there’s no give and take on both sides, that’s where things start to be a real problem.

Greg:
And so we always are very, very open, and we are very collaborative with our clients. There are things that we can give and things that we can’t give sometimes, and it just depends on the situation. And we always try and work through things. And in general, it works out. And I think that’s a testament to us having the privilege to be kind of picky about who we work with at this point, which is a luxury that not everybody has, but also a testament to the reputation that we’ve built up over the last decade and a half of being in business.

Larry:
And when you talk about that, because I’ve always pictured that good, fast, cheap triangle, it’s like you’re tugging at either corner of it at different points, and the client is tugging on it from a different direction. And again, it’s all bespoke. I know that this always ends up differently, but have you identified patterns in that sort of different, I don’t know, client profile, that’s more likely to go for fast and good and willing to spend some money to get that, or do folks tend to profile, or is it still always bespoke and unique?

Greg:
I think there are trends within industries. So for instance, we’ll see in higher ed that they tend to be very timeline focused because in general, when we see a higher ed site, they want to get something launched before the beginning of the next school, when they’re trying to recruit for whatever the next school registration period is or whatever, right? And so we will tend to see a lot of higher ed that’s very timeline constrained. And in other industries, we’ll tend to see things that they want to really focus on quality, right? And a lot of times, honestly, a lot of times, we’ll see people come to us, and they’ll be like, “Get it done as fast as possible.” And we are the ones who’s trying to push them towards quality because we are the ones who are trying to get them to realize that doing something as fast as possible isn’t necessarily going to get them the greatest result in the long run, even though it might hit their short term goals.

Greg:
But at the end of the day, we are here to meet the client’s goals, not our own goals. And so if a client’s goals are, “Look, we understand that it might cost us in the long run, but we have to get this done now, and that’s a price we’re willing to pay,” then that’s what we end up doing because we are here to work towards what they want, not what we want. But as far as trends go, I can see some trends within industries, but it does tend to be fairly different on every project.

Larry:
Yeah. I mean, that’s the thing. I’m trying to democratize content strategy practice, but it’s never going to be a checklist. It’s always going to be pretty high-level practice stuff like this. And one thing that we talked about before we went on the air was that you’re working on a book about content authoring. And there’s a lot of stuff that a CMS does for you. And you talked about how it’s sometimes not overlooked, but it’s not always top of mind with folks. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of content authoring and especially in the context of an authoring system?

Greg:
Yeah. I first encountered this when my first Drupal build was… I was in Seattle. I was working for The Seattle Times, and I was in a group building a website that was kind of focused on nightlife in Seattle. And they had a really strong editorial team that I really enjoyed and had a lot of fun with. And I was noticing that as the specifications for this site were coming together, they were all coming from high level stakeholders and the marketing team. And nobody on this editorial team was ever asked about what they needed or wanted out of a CMS or what functionality caused them problems or what functionality caused them pain.

Greg:
And when it was delivered, there was all sorts of stuff that they needed to do that nobody knew about because nobody had talked to them. And over the years, as I started getting into more Drupal consulting, I noticed that pattern over and over. The people who are actually creating content on the website, they so often don’t have a voice in the building of the CMS that they’re going to work in. And I just think that’s kind of garbage. It’s like you want people to want to enter content into your website. And I always tell this story that at confab a few years ago, Laura Robertson was on the stage and she said, “Raise your hand in here if you love your CMS.” And I was the only person who raised my hand, and it’s like, there’s a reason why people hate their CMSs.

Greg:
It’s because they’re working in a system that has disenfranchised them, which they have no voice in, which they have no ownership of, and in which they were never consulted about how they actually need to do their work or whether it’s working for them. And you want people to want to enter content into your website and edit it and maintain it. And if your CMS is hard to use and it’s clunky and the descriptions are terrible and nobody understands it, then you’re not going to get that. And people spend millions and millions of dollars on these projects. And then they hand it over to a bunch of content authors that are not prepared for it, do not have any good training, and that nobody’s even thought about. And I just think that’s a real missing link in the work that we do.

Greg:
So over the years, I have spent a lot of time with our clients, making sure that we’re in the early process of these projects, that the editorial stakeholders are brought in very early, that their voices are heard, that we’re interviewing them, that we’re showing them functional prototypes as we go along, that we’re making sure that the tools are meeting their use cases, and then working them into the process. And their level of engagement then with the CMS and their content afterwards is so much higher. And it just seems so obvious to me that everyone pays attention to design and to functionality, but nobody pays any attention to this other piece that I think is really important. And so, yes, I’m in the process of writing a book about designing good content authoring experiences. And it’s kind of the thing I’ve got to bug about right now.

Larry:
Yeah. I know you’re still working on the book, but I’m wondering if there’s top principles or helping people… Because I think there’s so much, whether you’re configuring a CMS or building one from scratch or whatever you’re doing. How would you approach that, if you had a green field and you just wanted to create the best possible authoring experience? What would it look like?

Greg:
I mean, I would approach it the same way you would approach any other project, which is that there’s no one size fits all answer to these problems and that the answers come from understanding who your users are and what their use cases are, so in this case, your content authors. And there are very, very different use cases out there. The needs of the content authors at a 1,000-plus-employee enterprise software company versus the content authors at a 50-person startup are going to be very different. The needs of a content authors at a government website platform that has to support 70 government agencies are going to be very different from the needs of a media company. One of the keys is to understand things like what your publishing cycle is, what kind of content you want to produce, what is the makeup of your authoring pool? Because in many cases like in government or in higher ed, you often have authors who are not necessarily website people. They’re subject matter experts, basically, who have been giving the keys to the CMS either directly or through a pass through.

Greg:
How many authors do you have? Do you have any specialized workflow needs? Some types of content have to go through, for instance, legal review in order to get out the door, all of those kinds of things. It’s understanding your use cases and who your authors are and what their needs are is the first key to building a content authoring system. And in many ways, that’s no different than building any other type of website. It’s like, you want to understand what the needs of your users are and what you can do to give them the information that they need to get their jobs done. And a lot of my book is just laying out the ways in which the standards of building normal websites can be applied to content authors, but the process isn’t that different.

Larry:
Yeah. And a lot of this process stuff you’ve talked about, I wanted to just ask about kind of your background and the evolution of your practice because you’re reminding me of my personal evolution from… I used to identify as a publisher, now I identify as a UX practitioner. And all you talk about is user problems, user stories, user journey. You’re completely user-centric in your approach from everything you said to this point. And even, you talk about designing workflows to do that kind of publishing stuff more a service designer as much as a UX designer. Has your practice evolved over the years from a Drupal site building guide to this high level consultancy that you’re doing now?

Greg:
I mean, it’s clearly evolved. I don’t really know why. I mean, I do have a very varied background. I mean, my degree is in photojournalism. My minor was in fine art photography, so I have a strong photography, and to some extent, design background. I came up doing database work. Even before the internet, I was doing consulting for desktop database projects. I’ve done product-focused stuff. I think that one of the things is that I’ve always… I don’t know, I’m trying to identify where that came from because I was thinking, even when I was working, I did some work programming pinball machines for a while, which is kind of a side story, but I was always thinking about, what is going to make this fun for the person who is playing this game, right?

Greg:
It’s like, none of this stuff is for me. It’s all for someone else. And if you’re going to build something for someone else, you should be building it for them, not for yourself, right, because otherwise what’s the point of any of this, right? So I think a lot of it just comes from what seems… It’s coming back to the basic principles of, what is the thing that you’re doing for in the end? And if the thing is for someone else, I mean, obviously it’s for you, too. If you’re at a product company, you’ve got to convert people. You’ve got to do sales, but it’s like, is your product meeting a need? Is it meeting the need that people are actually looking for in a way that they’re actually looking for it?

Greg:
Because to me, that’s the way to confer sales. It’s not martech and SEO and all of that other stuff. It’s like, give people what they need, and if you make it, they’ll come.
I mean, that’s oversimplifying obviously. But if you don’t do that, that’s when you will have problems, no matter which of the other stuff that you do over time. And I think a lot of it just comes down to just, that’s just what makes sense, right? In newspaper publishing, in making pinball machines, in building websites for people, it’s like, you’re ultimately doing something for the benefit of somebody else. And if you’re not taking that person into account, then you are doomed to fail no matter what. And a lot of that has happened on the UX side over the years in user-centric design and all of that. But I think my focus, again, on the authoring side all stems back to my experience at the first CMS website I built where I saw that not happen. And I thought it was a shame because there’s a lot that could be improved if these users were taken into account.

Larry:
Yeah, so regardless of the exact path, you’ve ended up at this user-centric thing, and I think your folks are obviously benefiting from it. So now I’m curious, I’m an old book publisher, so apologies if I dive too deep, but I just want to know, what’s the outline of this book? Because when I think of content authoring, I’m like, “Wow, you can write a whole book about that.” How have you scoped it out, or?

Greg:
Well, I’m very early, so part of the answer is I don’t really know. I will say that I think there’s a lot about how this mirrors standard website procedures, testing, user acceptance, that sort of thing, but with a different angle because it’s sort of a different take on those things. And a lot of times you have a lot more direct access to the people, which can be very helpful in a lot of ways. And then there’s also a lot of plain functional… When you’re designing a forum, you want to do this, that, the other kind of thing.

Greg:
But I think much more of it is about process and how you make this a first-tier priority in your website projects. It’s very similar to when you think about content strategy or UI design, where for a long time, people were fighting to get these to be part of a conversation from the beginning and to make it part of the requirements for a project. And really, I’m trying to outline what it would look like if you took this into your project, made it a priority, made it a top tier requirements and the process that you would go through to make that happen.

Larry:
Got it. One way I’m contextualizing that now, especially as I reflect on other things you’ve said earlier in this conversation and what you just said, is that something that’s been really gratifying to me over the last, I don’t know, five, 10 years is the growth of enterprise UX, focusing on the enterprise users. And that’s exactly what authoring is. It’s the classic example of that. And I’m just curious if that makes sense and if your work aligns with other enterprise UX things. There are places that have whole design ops and content ops and other kinds of things going on, and it seems like authoring would be one of those things that might drop right in that content ops bucket. Is that a new kind of consideration you’re giving to your work lately, or. . . ?

Greg:
It’s interesting. I hadn’t really thought of it as sliding into the sort of content ops area because I guess when I think about content ops, I think about what’s done after the system is put together. Once the system is put together, how are we going to get content made? And a lot of times, a lot of that is separate from the CMS itself. It’s about scheduling. It’s about publishing cycles. It’s about review processes, style guide, all of that kind of thing. What topics are we going to be writing about when? But in a way, you’re right, too, because none of that stuff can be successful if the CMS doesn’t support it. And so you’re kind of right. That does kind of slide right into that content ops conversation in a way. It just kind of brings it to the forefront of the project.

Larry:
Yeah. It’s interesting. I’m thinking that, too. I haven’t done consulting in a long time, but all of a sudden, I’m realizing there’s almost always that… It’s like the car dealership, the guy handing the keys to the car, and you get the keys to the CMS. And you’re off and driving, and that’s often the end of the relationship. And I don’t know, I guess I was kind of fishing, wondering if there’s maybe ongoing… And when I said sliding into the design ops, I’m like, I don’t even know when that became articulated as I feel we’ve all been doing it for a long time, but maybe not calling it that. So anyhow, yeah.

Larry:
Hey, Greg, I can’t believe we’re coming up close to time already. These conversations always go way too fast. But is there anything that’s come up in the conversation that you want to elaborate on, or just, you want to make sure we talk about before we wrap up?

Greg:
I think that one interesting thing I’ve been thinking about lately is how I think a lot of organizations, I think higher ed’s a good example, where they kind of think, “Oh, the content is the words that we put on the website.” And I think that one of the things that I’ve sort of been thinking about as I’ve been working on this book is that content is so much more in the modern age than the words that we put on the website. It’s like, you’ve got metadata you have to worry about. You’ve got to structure your content properly to be able to support things like responsive design and accessibility. You really have to understand the web in a way in modern systems that maybe wasn’t true 10, 15 years ago because the expectations on content have changed enough that just dumping words into a body field isn’t enough anymore. But even just dumping words into structured content fields isn’t enough anymore.

Greg:
You have to have understanding of the taxonomy on your site and how it’s used on the site and how it’s used to organize and do information, SEO stuff, all of this stuff. And this model where you kind of task your subject matter experts with being the person who dump words onto a website, I see a lot of organizations taking that model. And I think it’s the one biggest thing that holds them back because I feel like content authoring has gotten to the point where it’s a profession. Content writing for the web is a profession in and of itself. And starting to talk to clients like higher ed, like government about that maybe they need to put together different models other than just looking at your content as words on the page is something that they need to think about a lot more because when I think of things that would improve their content, having somebody doing their content who understood the web and how it works is a big thing that I would put on the table.

Greg:
And so it ties into content authoring some, but it’s also about just how the web is changing, how it changes, and how, as a result, the people who need to do content on the web need to change. And a lot of organizations, when you go to Confab and you hear from people at organizations like Mailchimp and Spotify and Adobe and all of these places, they know all of this. This is all on the board, and everybody agrees with it. But I think it’s when we get to organizations that are slower to change, that are larger, that tend to be a little behind the technology curve, that we need to continue to get this message out. And we work with a lot of those kinds of clients. I don’t know where I’m going with that, but it’s just something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

Larry:
Yeah. Well, I can’t wait for the book now because I assume that you have figured it all out by then, and we can all enjoy that. So you’ll have to let us know when that’s coming so I can share that here. Hey, one very last thing, Greg, what’s the best way for folks to stay in touch with you to follow you on social media or connect online?

Greg:
You can find me on Twitter. My account is Greg D. Dunlap.

Larry:
Cool. I will put that in the show notes as well. Well, thanks so much, Greg. Really enjoyed the conversation.

Greg:
No, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.