9 Best Practices for Implementing a CMS

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9 Best Practices for Implementing a CMS

9/26/2007

By Dian Schaffhauser

The most successful pilots have been those that lasted a week or two. What fits into that category? Perhaps a new section on the website or an existing department or section of the site that includes some highly visible pages. "Bring those into the trial," said Merker, "and test it out with different subject matter experts who are going to be involved with those pages."

5. Develop your change management plan upfront and then work it.

Getting people to change their work practices is one of the biggest challenges to success in most CMS initiatives. "There are far more implementation failures caused by lack of use than some system level incompatibility," said Merker. "If end users are not willing partners in this, they won't participate. The distributed content editing model, which is the promise of CMS, will ultimately break down and not succeed."

In the case of one four-year public institution on the West Coast, the leaders, who worked within the library department, created the role of evangelist to lead the charge. One evangelist, a "huge squeaky wheel," according to Merker, was recruited to do all of the training for the CMS. "Rather than coming in and apologizing for fact that [people] were going to have to learn a new system, they had this cheerleader out there, who was so excited about it, she embodied the enthusiasm of all of the best that the CMS could be," he said.

Another school, this one in New York, ran parallel site redesign and CMS selection projects, each kept on its own track so as not to influence the other. "By training their users to use a CMS on their existing website, they actually used it as a proving ground ... for hundreds of people," said Merker.

Once the new site was rolled out, these same people handled the migration work, which shortened the process to a couple of weeks. "In the end, they had these very experienced people who took accountability for this new content," said Merker, "because they had actually made it happen."

6. Prioritize who will get trained and how.

Training needs will vary depending on the level of work being performed by the individual. A CMS will typically only take a few hours to learn if the user only needs to know how to enter new content into the system, whereas an administrator may require several days of training.

On the user front, plan to hold several training sessions for end users, and spread those out over time, not back to back or one day after another. Merker suggested training the most enthusiastic people first. "Then they come out singing the praises of being empowered and help get more people signed up."

Beyond that, consider what types of pages people will be working on to prioritize training. One East coast Ivy League college took the approach of training the people responsible for the most important tier-two pages first. This excluded those who worked on the home page or pages that garnered the biggest amounts of traffic. Next trained were those responsible for keeping tier-three pages updated. This school reserved the top end for last, said Merker. "They knew that was the least changeable and the most potentially damaging should it be changed incorrectly."