Web Operations Management
If you’ve ever tuned into a show about a couple preparing for marriage, you’ve probably been watching a show about the wedding itself. These shows, which proliferate cable television, are inevitably build-ups to the wedding itself, with little or no discussion of what happens after The Big Day. There is generally tension over the venue, the budget, the food and the guest list, but it’s all resolved by the end of the show, with the bride a pretty picture walking down the aisle. Thinking about what happens afterwards, when the couple is in workaday mode, fighting over their finances, their responsibilities, and taking out the trash, is conveniently not covered, leaving a savvy viewer to wonder how bumpy the road will be, or how long the relationship will last, as the two parties get used to operating in their partnership.
This sounds a lot like content management projects. The focus of discussions on content management forums, listservs, and related communities tends to be on the implementation project, leading up to The Big Day. All the big preparations are leading up to the launch date, when everyone is supposed to breathe that sigh of relief and get used to being hitched to the new CMS.
But if that’s just the wedding, what about the actual marriage? Just as the reality shows conveniently ignore the post-wedding challenges of staying married, Web content management projects often ignore the post-implementation operations aspect. And, as a reality show viewer may wonder about the longevity of a wedding-show marriage, skeptics may wonder about the viability of a shotgun marriage between a CMS and its human partners. After all, when the celebratory hoopla is over, and the ongoing work of using the new relationship to do business becomes the main focus, the road to strife can be swift, and the threat of separation can loom large.
The best way to combat the post-implementation blues is to deal with the operational aspects before system implementation. In fact, Web Operations Management (WOM) should not be a reactive activity at all. Instead, WOM should be an integral part of the planning process that ultimately influences which system is chosen, the accompanying change management – not the simpler side of change scheduling, but the deeper aspects of behavioral change and resistance to it, process control, and system governance.
WOM, in its purest form, is the implementation of the strategic vision. A corporation’s vision generally focuses on, at a high level, enhancing brand experience, solving operational problems, or a combination of both. The web strategy is a component of the strategy, and its implementation is often entrusted to a team whose task is to turn the vision into reality. Unfortunately, too often this becomes slanted toward a technology tool – a CMS – as if this solution will be the entire fix. One US-based firm that specializes in WOM is Welchman Pierpoint, whose approach recognizes that, as the saying goes, the devil is in the details. They’ve shown that, in the transitions between strategy to governance to execution to measurement, having a web operations management plan dramatically increases the likelihood of a web implementation’s long-term success. It’s expected that the plan with change; after all, as operations change, technologies change, business needs also change. However, creating a WOM framework lays some ground rules for how the changes will be made, and prevents the devolvement of common sense into chaos.
By transposing WOM into a personal social context, it makes complete sense to spend more of the allotted project engagement deciding on what life will look like on a day-to-day basis, instead of focusing on getting to the implementation date. It’s surprising how many organizations don’t have such a plan on their radar, or have allotted a disproportionately small amount of resources toward figuring out their WOM strategy, or decided to cut this aspect from their project when they decide to trim the budget. It would be an interesting study to compare the outcomes of organizations that have adopted sound WOM practices with those that haven’t, to get some metrics around successes, and to see what gets compromised by that lack of commitment to the long-term relationship.
