46 online management principles

If you’re looking for free online management principles then you might find the following 46 points useful.

1. Act on customer feedback and behaviour – don’t simply collect and observe it.
2. Be comprehensive and thorough, publishing all possible information that might be of help to the customer.
3. Build a strong, centralised team with an independent capacity to make decisions.
4. Build a sustainable site; one you can adequately resource,
5. Consistently review task performance and adjust as needed.
6. Constantly track trends and identify best practices.
7. Continuously engage key stakeholders to create understanding and commitment.
8. Create a consistent experience across platforms and channels.
9. Decentralise management and allow each department / unit to control their online presence.
10. Don’t flood your organisation with analytic data–limit it to specific goals and objectives.
11. Ease of use is the best way to enhance the image / brand.
12. Embrace a built-to-change rather than a built-to-last philosophy.
13. Encourage collaboration between technology, design, content and usability.
14. Ensure all possible customer tasks can be completed online.
15. Ensure customers can quickly and easily complete their top tasks.
16. Ensure that content on the web is for action, not for ‘reading’ or ‘information’.
17. Establish an effective governance body that represents key stakeholders.
18. Establish the authority to say no to new content and applications and to remove what is out of date or irrelevant.
19. Evaluate new ideas based on how they help customers’ complete tasks.
20. Every customer task is important. Give all tasks equal priority.
21. Facilitate the collaboration and sharing of ideas across silos.
22. Implement a fast and easy content management review / removal process.
23. Focus first on customer tasks. Everything else is secondary. Business success will naturally follow.
24. Fund the web from operational rather than project budgets to facilitate continuous improvement.
25. Give every customer a personalised experience.
26. Have customer satisfaction as the ultimate measure of success.
27. Have task completion as the ultimate measure of success.
28. Hire people who are passionate about serving the customer.
29. Hire people who are passionate about web technology and content development.
30. Identify your customers’ top tasks based on what they do, not on what they say they do.
31. Keep content as concise and simple as possible.
32. Let the content be led by customer tasks and let everything else (graphic design, etc.) be led by the content.
33. Make decisions based on evidence and facts – not opinions.
34. Make it part of everyone’s job to interact with and observe customers.
35. Make sure everything has an owner who takes responsibility for ongoing review and improvement.
36. Make sure team and stakeholders develop the expertise to properly interpret data.
37. Make the top tasks easy to do even where that means making the tiny tasks harder to do.
38. Manage for the customer’s world – whatever device, channel, website or app they want to use.
39. Measure how easy it is for customers to perform their top tasks.
40. Monitor customer behaviour in real time.
41. Move from ‘let’s fix the website’ to ‘let’s fix the top tasks’.
42. Provide on-going training to improve web team skills.
43. Regularly explain how online strategy supports business / organisation strategy.
44. Regularly test and obtain feedback from customers.
45. Relentlessly focus on saving the customer time and effort in completing top tasks.
46. Small improvements are generally better than big redesigns.