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Your Web Content Management System is not a Washing Machine - Investing in Ongoing Product Management

Over the past 10 years, I've had the great opportunity to run a company that performs a range of services around implementation of content management systems including: business and functional analysis, information architecture, project management, development and integration services. I've met some remarkable customers who 'get it' with regard to ongoing investments that need to be made when enhancing their content management platforms to meet changing business needs.

It remains a truism that stagnant companies eventually lose market share and eventually die. All successful organizations grow and respond to the ever-changing marketplace of economic downturns, new competition and technologies and unprecedented business opportunities to capitalize upon. Smart companies look at their content management investments as 'works-in-progress.' Others sometimes equate these systems with their home appliances - having the thought process that the software must ostensibly continue to operate exactly the same as when first installed.

When a new Web content management system is implemented with custom functionality, the platform is essentially tailor-made for a company's brand. However, a corporate Website is not only the representation of the brand. If backed by a customized content management system, the Website is also a custom software 'product.'

Rarely does a company install a Web content management system without customizations. At minimum, companies customize their user interfaces, navigations, taxonomies and user controls/groups. Companies will also develop original 'out of box' modules to meet their needs. And of course, companies are increasingly building completely custom modules and functionalities, or integrating modules with novel functionality from third parties.

The result is a complex platform, often containing up to tens of thousands of lines of custom code, which interoperates to 'seamlessly' present the organization's brand to the world.

A company can run into difficulty when management views the Web content management platform as monolithic - like an appliance. Software development takes time and must follow a reliable sequence of events known as a ‘product management lifecycle.' Professionals who are trained in these processes and have a firm knowledge of the implemented Web content management software platform must plan and run this course of action. A business executive unfamiliar with these necessary investments may not understand why some new function can't be enabled by the next day, or why so much effort and resources have to go into quality assurance and regression testing immediately after new features or functions are added.

Software product management can be a mystery to the uninitiated, and this is a problem in our industry. As consultants and software vendors, we need to do a better job explaining what the overall work effort and resource commitments need to be once a new CMS is put in place.

For example, if a company does a great job implementing a state-of-the-art Web content management system, it should theoretically be able to rapidly deploy new modules, changes to the site architecture and so forth. However, this creates a Catch 22 situation since being able to deploy functionality on an ongoing basis is not necessarily a great idea. Companies that add features when updating their Websites, but don't do the necessary regression testing that should go along with the additions, run the risk of breaking parts of the site, or worse, corrupting data. If companies would look to the software industry, they would see that most software publishers have product lifecycles in which upgrades are released on a periodic basis - anywhere from a year to 18 months, or even as long as several years (often to the dismay of customers).

I'm not suggesting that organizations need to wait a year to update their Websites. However, doing periodic feature/upgrade meetings at your company, documenting them, applying the business model litmus test (how is this going to help us build our brand? make money? save the world? etc.) and finally approving or rejecting those features on the list makes good sense. Then, all those new features can be built, integration-tested and promoted to a test server where rigorous regression testing can be done by a professional quality assurance team. Conducting this process on a weekly basis, organizations can actually reduce their overall testing costs by doing incremental upgrades. This would also lessen the risk of a bad upgrade with the potential to majorly disrupt normal operations of the Web content management platform.

I am always amazed when companies cut their QA budgets or neglect to even think about this particular step - almost viewing the quality aspect of software upgrades as somehow automatic. We should think carefully about Web content management platforms as customized software products. Unquestionably, each software product needs a documented product management lifecycle system, professional product management and quality assurance. This must be done to mitigate and eliminate the risks of system disruptions or failures.

The good news is the number of people we meet at customers who are familiar with the demands of the product management lifecycle is growing. Their investments in the aforementioned processes and the resources needed to wage them will also continue. In these past few months alone, I've had a chance to make initial visits to companies that are increasingly savvy about investments in product management around their Web content management systems. Those companies make smart customers. And that's undeniably encouraging indeed.

Posted at 02:57 pm by Joseph Bachana

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Your Web Content Management System is not a Washing Machine - Investing in Ongoing Product Management