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We're thrilled to have been announced as a finalist in this year's Recommended Agency Register awards.

The RAR Awards are unique because they are assessed by the people who really know how good an agency is - their clients! So to make it onto the shortlist for Digital Agencies is a real honour.

RAR collects 5000 client ratings each year, with clients assessing agencies on their skill at specific marketing disciplines - design, digital, advertising and so on - and also their service levels - creativity, value for money, ability to deliver on time etc. Each rating is given out of 100. Average weightings are applied so that agencies with more good ratings are scored higher than those with fewer ratings.

The results of the 2012 awards will be announced at a dinner on Wednesday 4th April 2012 at the Bloomsbury Hotel, London.

It’s that time of year again. The time when you get in touch with everybody you know and send them a card to wish them all seasons greetings and best wishes.

We’re the same, but instead of just sending out cards or a digital Christmas game-thingy to send best wishes, we thought we’d do something a bit different this year. This year we’ve done something a little bit more special and have hand-crafted our take on Christmas & made some little home movies to send out a bit of Christmas love. We figured that although what we do is digital it’s actually also completely handmade too, plus, we wanted to share a bit of what gets us going around this time of year. So, in the next few days you’ll be seeing the fruits of our Christmas labours and we’re hoping that it’ll provide a bit of Christmas cheer and a few laughs for everybody out there.

You can find it all over here and we hope you’ll enjoy it enough to get in touch and maybe share it around a bit. We love this time time of year... Happy Christmas everybody.

We are really proud to announce that Pathfinder has won not one, but two awards in the last month. 

Designed and developed for Snow+Rock, Pathfinder is available exclusively on the Windows Phone 7 platform.  The app, which has also been an official Webby nominee this year, not only won the 'Best Interactive Design' category at the 2011 Cardiff Design Festival awards, but also took the silver trophy in the 'Best use of mobile and portable devices' category at Communicate Magazine's Digital Impact Awards 2011.

The Digital Impact Awards recognise, benchmark and celebrate excellence in digital stakeholder communications.  Beating Harrods' and Marks & Spencer's mobile apps, Pathfinder was pipped at the post by New Look who took the Gold award at the ceremony which took place in London at the end of October.

Find out more about Pathfinder by watching our short video about the app.

A successful digital project is like a fast train running, or a mountain biker on a descent, or a team about to win a world championship (sorry Wales, but it was close!).

It requires absolute focus, meticulous co-ordination, perfect interworking and flow. Its endpoint nature is to be disruptive, to beat the impossible – to crack a deadline, to deploy a new technology, to amaze a client. Yet in its execution it must be managed through discipline,and achieved through personality and imagination.

It requires a unique person to manage it – often born than made, but there are 5 things you can work on if you feel like stepping into one of the most rewarding roles there is:

1. You must live to organise.

You must be the kind of person who sees something disorganised and can't leave it that way. Are you naturally the one who gets a grip and wrestles disorder into order? Do you really care about doing a good job, and your organisation being run well? Do you care enough to personally change your working world as best you can? Don’t hide it - turn that energy into a salary by being a digital Project Manager!

2. You need to be visionary.

You need to develop a vision for how your role ties to that of your team and of how our team’s role ties to everyone else in the business. You need to be able to align all those people around a vision that delivers for your client, on time and budget. You should also have a vision for how you see yourself succeeding in your role and you also need to know how to turn the pain of failure into a win next time – and never show your doubts to the team!

3. You need to be central to everything, but never get in the way.

This means you need to develop a sixth sense about when to be there, and when you being there isn’t helping. You’ve got to bring out the best in your teams and that means influencing and guiding them, but more often listening and responding to them and making their work ‘flow’. You can’t let the deliverables slip, so great estimation and planning needs to be followed up by brilliant tracking, measuring and testing. You need to be a hub, a support and a lead. This comes with experience, so start small and build up to more complex or high budget projects.

4. You need to be a player when it comes to risk versus reward.

You need to feel a twinge of excitement when you're asked to do something that as it stands is not possible, but with your energy applied to it – it could be. To stay at the front of digital, almost every project needs to include one new technology or way of doing things differently. The key is not to forget the basics in the excitement of the new. Be rigorous with the planning, the communication, the reporting. Track, measure, control and use the excitement of what you are doing to fuel the project when the time comes to pull it out of the bag.

5. You need to know it’s all about people.

You’re going to need every person you can get, and you need everyone on side. A good digital PM can weave their way through arguments, stress, disappointment, excitement, wild dreams, concrete reality and make it look easy. They can broker between technical and creative people, clients and the business. Get to know your team well and yourself better –identify your own areas for development. Read Stephen Covey’s 7 habits of highly effective people. Think win-win, and when it all gets too much don’t blow – get a coffee and remind yourself you’re not building a nuclear reactor. Your just becoming a great Digital PM.

We're looking for Project Managers to join our team so if you think the above sounds like you then get in touch! 

In my previous blog post on how training and the run/ swim disciplines in a Triathlon compare to web project management. In this final instalment I look at the run and all important transitions.

4) Run

I’m a hopeless runner, and it’s definitely the hardest left to last in my opinion. The run up to the launch of a web project (see what I did there) is where the race can be lost or won, and, without proper planning it can be the most painful part.

You can have the best designed, most richly featured web project, but if it doesn’t work, has a content drought or if no one knows about it then it will not likely make become a career personal best.

Content creation and population takes longer than you think, and, in my experience, is typically twice the job you thought it was. Also preparation is key (Just as most people could swim and do the cycle without any training, few could run more than a few hundred meters), content must be planned, audited, reviewed, shaped, prepared and honed well before the project goes live.

The moment you cross the line is only when the real journey begins. You have to position the web project in part of a wider digital strategy, users need to be able to find it and you want to keep bringing them back. I’m yet to meet someone who stops after just doing the one Triathalon. Similarly your web project needs to become a continual process of development and evolution whilst you think about all the other stuff that goes one in your organisation.

If you keep at it you will see how things can improve and change and you’ll capture feedback, tips and opinions from other ‘competitors’ to fee in to your thinking on how you can trim just a few second off here and there.

Finally you will find yourself endlessly analysing the numbers and statistics - thinking about how you can improve further, and before you know it you’ve a list of tweaks, optimisations, enhancements that will improve performance yet further.

5) Transition

The fourth discipline as Triathletes describe it cannot be overlooked. In the web world the handover between teams, individuals or phases of the project is one of the biggest risks a project can face.

Until telepathy becomes a reality, knowledge capture, documentation and transfer is tricky. Typically the only way to manage that risk, and make sure nothing falls between the gaps is to use documentation to make the next person in the chain have to read what you want them to think/ do. Valuable (and to be honest relatively easy) seconds can be made up in a Triathlon for having a well organised and planned handover between disciplines.

In a web project we use simple concepts such as project teams, who, if possible, physically sit together to work on a project. We also sometimes use ‘scrum’ meetings to bring together all the different disciplines together to share their progress and announce focus for the coming day.

In conclusion I think the web world really pushes the envelope, as you’re reliant on the very different disciplines of Business Creative and Technical being pulled together in perfect harmony, and that preparation is key – rushing the groundwork or skimping on the training is unlikely to give you the result you’re hoping for.