Greg Dunlap
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.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/greg-dunlap/
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1HFuobWvvg
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.
