4 Lessons from a Failed London Publishing House

Between 2016 and 2021, I worked for a startup publishing house in London as a Product LMS Consultant. This involved travelling around the UK and USA to collect survey data, coordinating an online team of researchers, and managing the design of an LMS for our clients.

This was a fantastic experience, but as my former bosss would agree, there were several red flags that ultimately led to the project being shut down.

Formalise processes for all roles. Not just one.

Coordinating multiple complex editorial projects at the same time was hard enough. But then having the proccesses in place to train a future coordinator was a harder challenge.

The project had focused on coordinating researchers for business document projects (bids and corporate case studies), and then using captured screen recordings to build an internal training course to automate the training of new freelance researchers.

But there was a problem. What was going to train as future project coordinator when I was gone?

The internal LMS had achieved it purpose for the freelance team, but unlike having a mobile LMS like OnePal offers today, the business as a whole was not yet fully automated to cope with me leaving.

Organise Digital Access Early

In 2018, working digitally with a remote team was not too different. We used WhatsApp to comminicate regularly, and collaborated over shared documents in GDrive.

Each researcher would have access to the private links for each project folder, enabling them to access the draft documents and information they needed throughout the project.

But this came with a problem; we were sharing these secure links over email and re-setting these links when a freelancer left became difficult to track.

With OnePal, we could have created an easy-to-navigate IT file structure for all researchers in the Files app, and then we would have just updated the URL for each external cloud folder without having to change the layout in OnePal for the team.

But we were stuck with access links we had to track ourselves in a spreadsheet, and this became more difficult as the number of projects got larger. Today, with OnePal, they could have clicked on the document in the Files app, opening up the google doc directly on their smartphone using the authorised link.

'Done' is not done

Being able to see researchers edit a Google document in real-time was impressive in 2018. But coordinating over a separate task management application was not yet mainstream, and has only very recently become mobile-friendly today.

Freelancers would get stuck, not ask for additional support, and only report late progress once it was close to the deadline, adding risk to their project.

If they had had a discreet place to update the status tag of each deliverable for 'in progress' to 'stuck', I could have intervened and helped them sooner. If we were working using OnePal, I would have seen these status updates change in real-time on my phone, without them having to message me.

Every Team needs a Digital Hub

Although building OnePal would technically have been possible in 2018, most mobile devices were not yet powerful enough, the react-native framework backed by the latest security of AWS was not as mature as it is today, and it would have cost £2m in development costs.

But OnePal V1 is available today as an accessible price-point for all businesses, and this experience as a Product LMS Consultant made me realise the value in a cross-platform digital hub for many use cases and industries.

Digital teams will not need all the business apps, such as tools for managing member parking as a physical venue, but they can use all the same apps in a way that fits with their business model, and gain the core benefit of organising their team securely.