Involving the Business
Practical Ideas for CMS Project Success
by Janus Boye
04-Nov-2004
Too many CMS projects fail to meet their objectives, or just fail outright. A well-documented cause is lack of commitment and understanding from senior management. Management and the responsible business units (e.g. marketing, communications, sales, HR, etc.) may excel at managing content, but unfortunately are unlikely to claim ownership of a content management project due to lack of experience and knowledge.
As a result proper targets are not set, purpose becomes unclear, and project direction often defaults to an information technology (IT) group.
While most large organizations today have some experience with a CMS (perhaps homegrown), many disguise their initiatives as self-service or portal projects. Many content management systems in place today are not used, or are underused and perhaps about to be replaced (in the latter case, companies obviously want to do it right the next time). Not surprisingly, then, senior business management often remains uncertain what content management really is, and as a result their expectations can become unrealistic.
These problems are compounded when there is a lack of measurable objectives, no common vocabularies, and dearth of understanding of the different roles that various professionals in the organization will play in a content management system.
Some Practical Ideas
Consider applying the following practical steps to increase the probability of both a successful initial project, but also a valuable long-term process. This list is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather, a just good start.
Introduce content management "KPIs" to measure success
Use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to help your organization define and measure progress. They must be quantifiable and reflect the critical success factors.
Traditional success factors in many CMS projects are as simple as a budget, deadline or just “migrating to a new CMS”. No matter how long or short your project may be, this is not good enough.
Any organization will have both reasonable business and technical requirements. Some of these will simply not be quantifiable, but will either be met or not. Obviously these requirements should not be ignored, just don’t use them as a critical success factor.
Using more detailed KPIs can be used as performance management and also as a carrot for the project participants. Week by week, month by month, progress can be measured and based on this informed actions be taken to further advance and improve the success of the project.
Examples of content management KPIs could be:
- reduced publishing and marketing costs
- faster production cycles
- increase in customer satisfaction
- fewer calls to call centers
- easier customer and partner access to critical information
- increase in average order size
Ideally try to search for KPIs that can be rolled up into overall organizational KPIs. This makes your project more interesting and easier for senior management to understand and get involved in.
Finally ensure to thoroughly consider the connection between what you measure and your content management initiative and always remember: What can't be measured, can't be managed!
Anchor ownership in the business unit
If you are going to meet your KPIs, then a commercial project owner that resides in the business will need to take ownership of the project.
This runs counter to operational standards in many enterprises where IT owns CMS projects. I think multiple good reasons exist why IT should not own the project:
- Content management is not only a technology project. While the project might be technically focused initially, it is really about business processes such as building and maintaining strong editorial teams and continually creating quality content.
- Acceptance by business users (e.g. editors) is critical for any CMS project. Involving them early on and empowering them with ownership will invariably make them less hostile towards the change that CMS will bring.
- The IT department -- while essential to project success -- may have a different set of goals and incentives than the various customer-focused business units that have content management needs.
Senior management needs to have final say on both resources and overall priorities. Therefore, in the end, it will be up to management to commit the proper amount of resources and budget and also to provide essential prioritization of requirements. This may require working actively through any formal IT governance process where technology funds are appropriated to business projects, but the results will be better than simply turning the project over to IT on the grounds that is where funding for CMS resides in your company.
As part of this process, evaluate the current total cost of ownership for your CMS initiative. First of all, this will provide valuable insights to the annual budget required. More importantly, however, it will provide an indication of the true future cost-split between IT and the business. How much of the cost are actual technology costs (e.g. software, hardware, hosting, development, system administration and integration) and how much is more related to the actual process (e.g. requirements, editorial processes, content audits and migration, workshops, project planning, training, and so forth). To the extent that the latter expenses are almost surely going to exceed the former (especially in out years), the project becomes all that more of a business undertaking rather than an IT project.
One practical approach to moving project ownership into the business side is by creating a cross-functional competency center which would contain team members from all relevant business units, including IT. A "content management competency center" is a centralized project management and development organization wherein a team is dedicated to owning, maintaining, developing, and supporting the technology, processes, and web sites/applications. The team becomes a knowledge base, utilizing established best practices, documentation, consistent communications, and standardization.
Define Terms
Work to establish a common project vocabulary. It will save you much time and confusion. Think about terms like CMS, workflow, template, document, content fragment, roles, and so on. For this project, what do these terms really mean? Most likely they mean something different for each project player -- and it gets worse when you include external resources like consultants and vendors. Expect outsiders to have their own and very different definition. (Consider, for example, the CMS Watch definition of workflow.)
A practical approach to defining terms is by asking a key project player to create a brief glossary with definitions of key terms early on in the process. This needs to be a living document, where terms can be added as the organization learns. The document could be kept as a part of the project office with other relevant documents (e.g. requirements, project plan). Consider using a Wiki here.
Once the glossary is established it is important to dedicate time to addressing adherence. People will invariably come and go and similarly to old-fashioned printed glossaries, terms will over time slowly change meaning. This in particular applies to high-tech and emerging terms. In addition to regular updates, make it a standard exercise to review the glossary at given intervals, e.g. every 6 months.
Know Your People (Because Your Vendor Does Not)
Some solutions might come across as easy-to-use in a product demonstration. The reality is that usability is generally only applied to demonstration sites. Among other things, usability means more than easy-to-use for editors, but for the entire team.
Using personas and scenarios specific to your organization will give a clear indication of the differences between key roles in a CMS project. Some examples could be:
- Editors, focused on easy creation and publishing of content. They are frequent users.
- Administrators, focused on administrating the CMS, e.g. managing users and roles.
- Developers; focused on creating templates. Want this to be well documented and easy to learn.
- Occasional user, wants a CMS to employ standard constructs so that everything is intuitive and easy to re-learn after having not used the system for a while.
- Super user: Wants to be able to do as much as possible from a single dashboard with few clicks.
As with most software companies CMS vendors have a strong understanding of their own product, but less understanding of implementation planning. They deliver product-oriented technical documentation, which can be helpful for developers and administrators, but less actionable for information architects, project managers, trainers, and others.
Each and every CMS project has a set of questions that the business user needs to answer. What types of content will be managed? What roles exist? What are the rules behind workflow? What should happen to archived content? The detailed answers to be used for the initial implementation will depend on the capabilities of the CMS, but ultimately they are business questions that need to be answered by your businesspeople, and not a vendor implementation team looking for a quick site launch.
Exchange experience with others
In more mature markets (e.g. ERP & CRM), it is not unusual for users to meet at a local level with other companies -- independent of any system or vendor -- to exchange experiences.
Of course, CMS vendors have created global or international user groups, some more useful than others. In my experience vendor-driven user group meetings can be valuable for product-specific and technical knowledge, but IT professionals, business users and senior management may find greater value in meeting with other local users who play similar roles, but don't necessarily use the same CMS.
Content Management Professionals (CM Pros) is a global membership organization that seeks to improve and mature content management. It is a new and ambitious organization, which already has many of the leading minds in this field as members. Many initial members of CM Pros are consultants and it will be interesting to follow the initiative in the future.
On a local level many organizations exist that foster exchange of best practices. An example of this is the Danish Content Management Forum, which lists many local businesses and government organizations as members. Members use many different CMS products and meet 4 times yearly to exchange lessons learned and valuable experiences.
Similar local initiatives, some more open than others, are developing across Europe, Australia, and North America. With this article, I've tried to deliver some practical ideas; more good advice could be closer than you think.