Yesterday I presented a 4 hour workshop on selecting a CMS at the Gilbane Conference. I was pleased with the attendance and the audience’s level of engagement. People were asking questions and making comments right to the end. Here are the slides.
I wish I could have stayed at the conference longer. So many colleagues/friends were in town and I could only see a couple of them before I had to shoot off to a client.
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Seth,
I’m constantly amazed of the amount of rubbish I see in the “How to select a CMS” presentations. That said I think you have many, many good points, the focus on transparency being a great point. Creating a level of transparency between all parties, including vendors and purchasers is very important. Two comments and a question… First, one thing I try and explain to CMS purchasers and I didn’t see in your slides, is the “Rome wasn’t built in a day” or “slow and steady wins the race†idea. I know you only had 4 hours for the presentation but keeping a moderate pace with moderate durations is more effective than a high pace for short durations because of the change management components of CMS projects. Secondly, on slide 77 you mentioned “I voted†with further explanation a couple of follow on slides. I’ve recently had a tough time getting the decision makers to accept the vote because the vote can tilt to a vendor that no one highly favored. I think this has to do with such minor differences in the short listed CMS vendor’s. How do you find yourself managing these sometimes too close to call decisions or how does Apache deal with it?
Best Regards,
-Travis
Thanks for the feedback! I use the Apache voting to get final alignment around the final choice. The good thing about Apache voting is that you can get alignment without necessarily needing total consensus. In Apache voting, anyone can veto something that they feel very strongly against but you don’t have to love a choice to go along with it.
@Travis: Good points. Slow and steady wins the race — totally agree. The questions is what pace should the clients (CMS users) should the users expect? In other words, what’s the timeline from selection to install to site launch? 6 months, a year? Longer? From my experience, that’s been the most glaring ommission — setting stakeholders expectations that this is going to take a long, LONG time and it will seem like very little is getting done.
That said, if I were the CEO and my technology team told me that, I would not green light the project. Who would?