What is digital BAU and why should you outsource it?

Business As Usual (BAU) is the ‘bread and butter’ of your digital touchpoint updates. It usually doesn’t receive the kudos of, say, the launch of a new website, but is vital to the ongoing optimisation of your digital strategy. At DEPT®, we have a team dedicated to providing BAU support to a number of global clients.

What is digital BAU?

Business As Usual tasks are the day-to-day updates that form part of normal business operations for websites and digital touchpoints. Usually smaller pieces of work that need a fast turnaround, BAU tasks can include:

• Creating new content and adding new website pages;
• Making small changes to website functionality;
• Updating existing content and sections;
• Maintenance activities, such as checking log files and cleaning up disk space;
• Responding to urgent bugs and issues.

BAU tasks differ from project work. Projects tend to be larger pieces of strategic development work, and usually disrupt normal operations. Projects may introduce something new, or implement change in the way something existing is presented or works. BAU is focused on maintenance and ongoing improvement and optimisation.

Team skillset

A successful BAU team must be multi-disciplined. The broad range of tasks undertaken require skill areas including: development; QA; content entry; content writers; creative; and UX.

The DEPT® BAU team works closely with our clients’ central marketing and IT teams, as well as liaising directly with business units and country website managers. This ensures the flow of improvement requests, content tasks and issues are prioritised and managed.

Why outsource your BAU?

Global efficiencies

Many of our clients operate in multiple markets, with localised websites for each country. Outsourcing BAU ensures consistency across all the markets’ platforms; we act as a central hub, with the ability to rollout changes and amends efficiently and accurately. This means that effort isn’t duplicated, and clients save on the cost of multiple markets managing separate updates.

Skills-gap

If a team is particularly small, or currently does not have the necessary skills to complete BAU tasks, our team can plug the skills-gap. This provides our clients with the reassurance that the work will be completed efficiently and skilfully, without the cost and time expenditure of employing additional team members.

Project focus

Having a dedicated BAU team gives our clients the freedom to continue with large, new projects, whilst still retaining focus on operating its current websites. Our BAU team will make small, incremental changes to optimise what’s there, as well as satisfying ad-hoc requests from business teams.

The BAU team use their expertise to optimise sites on a daily basis, constantly adding value and implementing improvements that do not require lengthy business case sign-off.

Constant momentum

Fundamentally, a BAU team allows your websites to maintain momentum after they are launched, rather than waiting for the next big project – by which time things may have started to go stale.