The Natural Irrationality of

Implementing CMSWhat our clients do wrong, how their

expectations are unrealistic, and what we can do to help.

I’m Deane.

@gadgetopia

We build mental models.

We build positive mental models of successful scenarios.

We constantly and subconsciously compare situations to those positive

mental models.

We learn to “smell” a bad situation.

How do we identify accurate mental models of a good client relationship?

________________?

The Baggage We Bring to Software Projects and What To Do About It

What We’re Going to Discuss

1. What baggage clients bring with them

2. What we can do about this baggage

The Baggage

• The Phantom Menace

• “I Know It When I See It”

• Majoring in the Minors

• Deus Ex Machina

• Irrational Uniformity

#1The Phantom Menace

Clients know what they’re doing.

They have a very limited and slanted view of what other people are doing.

Case Study Syndrome

• “I read this in a case study, so clearly everyone is doing it.”

• People don’t write case studies about things that didn’t happen.

• Form of Survivor Bias.

• No one writes case studies about the 99% of companies that aren’t doing anything interesting

CMS can be like sex in high school

Everyone talks about it…

No one knows how to do it…

Still, everyone is convinced everyone else is doing it…

So everyone wants to do it themselves…

But in the end, no one is actually doing it.

Clients can have a completely inaccurate picture of their current

state or what their end goal should be.

The Phantom Menace is all the things your client is convinced they should

be doing.

#2“I’ll Know It When I See

It”

There are often no metrics for project evaluation.

Your client knows what a successful project is…but they can’t tell you

what this is.

How Projects Fail

• AbortiveFails to launch

• QuantitativeFails to make project numbers

• Qualitative / ROIDoesn’t bring about desired change

• Expectations“It just doesn’t feel like I thought it would.”(This is the thing that never gets said out loud…)

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand

to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion

picture involved in this case is not that.”

- Potter Stewart, Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964)

“Do I feel good about this?”

“I’ll know it when I see feel it.”

#3Majoring in the Minors

If you don’t know the goal, you don’t know the steps to get there.

Clients often want effort put into things that don’t provide any

measurable value.

There’s some amount of fixation on signals that they associate with a

“good” project.

Things like…

• Workflow

• Dashboards

• Multi-site management

• Digital Asset Management

• Exhaustive management

What actually provides value?

“Return on Management”

#4Deus Ex Machina

Syndrome

We want a perfect, instant resolution.

The Truth

• There’s a good chance their problems originated external to the CMS

• They tend not to look to people, training, or process, because those things existed prior to the CMS

• If they could have been fixed without the implementation, why weren’t they?

• A CMS implementation goes from nothing to something. It’s easy to say, “things will be better because we’ll have something we didn’t have before.”

#5Irrational Uniformity

Going outside a CMS platform is considered a failure at some level.

Better As Integrations

• Analytics

• Marketing Automation

• Email Distribution

• Ecommerce

The future of content management might be distributed, in terms of both

content creation and channels.

What We Can Do

Before you get too impressed with yourselves…

• “The Smartest People in the Room”

• “All I Have Is This Hammer”

• “Just Another Project”

• “Castles in the Sky”

• “The Appearance Package”

#1Find The Client’s Success

Model

Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could get a set of quantifiable metrics?

“Six months after this site launches, what needs to happen for you to

think that it was all worth it?”

Questions to Ask

• Who is the ultimate stakeholder?

• How far up the org chart can we consult about goals?

• What other projects are you using as a metric for this one?• Competitor projects

• Internal projects

• What perception made these other projects successful?

#2Approach the

Implementation Holistically

Non-Construction Tasks

• Deciding to move

• Developing floor plans

• Buying a lot

• Budgeting for construction

• Preparing to move

• Actually moving

• Redecorating

• Buying new stuff

• Learning how to use new stuff

• Planning new services

• Planning new commute

• Changing schools

• Changing vehicles

• Sending address changes

How many non-development items are in your project plan?

Stuff Outside Our Boundaries

• Governance planning

• Training• Re-training

• Internal Marketing

• Post-Occupancy Evaluations

• Content Migration/Operations

• Documentation

• QA

• Political/Organizational Disputes

• Post-Launch Revisions

• Staff Turnover/Continuity

• Content Creation Planning

#3Prepare to Put Rough Edges in Perspective

Vendors and integrators are in an arms race of promises.

Factors to Determine ROM

• Velocity of the change• How often does it occur?

• Lead time of the change• How far will we be able to see it coming?

• Proximity to the development team• Can we reasonably code-source something to save budget?

Have honest, direct conversations about budget/polish trade-off.

#4Position the CMS as an

Integration Platform

Seeking functionality outside the CMS should be considered a strength, not

a failure.

We should evaluate a CMS based on its ability to integrate.

Things we should be prepared to do…• Source content from outside the CMS

• Why does content creation have to be within the CMS?

• Editorial aggregation systems are starting to tip

• Deliver content to alternate channels

• Implement client-side marketing tools

• Use external search tools

#5Prepare the Client for

Evolutionary Improvement

Actually make “Phase 1.1” project happen….

The Truth

• A percentage of what you implement won’t work• It won’t fit the client’s content/marketing model

• They won’t be able to staff it

• Existing staff will turnover

• Their plans will change over time

• Prepare them for the idea that this is a process, not a moment

Tactics

• Define expectations for relationship post launch• Will it continue?

• Is the client taking over development?

• Try to identify a 3-year budget

• Structure the budget to allow for annual improvement allowances

• Do the build on 60%-70% of that, and stagger the rest over years two and three?

• Actively plan a staged launch

AdvocacyHonestyRealism

@gadgetopia

deane@blendinteractive.com