A guide to Sitecore project risks for project managers
By: Antoine Rulliere
Your Sitecore project team is usually made up of any number of developers, designers and content authors, but its your project manager who will keep things on task and on budget. We’ve got the top Sitecore project risks for them to avoid:
The implementation of Sitecore, as with any project, comes with risks. Identifying and understanding those risks ahead of time is key to ensure the success of the project. Although all Sitecore implementations differ, they do share some common risks that should be addressed up front.
Education and engagement of core team
Nonlinear provides project process education right at kick-off to ensure that the core team fully understands how the project will unfold. It’s important to get the core team comfortable with the approach and steps early to facilitate their thought process. Team members work more efficiently when the next steps are known and the reason behind the approach followed understood and agreed upon.
Proper education mitigates the risk of project team members feeling lost, but it comes at a cost. A successful Sitecore implementation relies heavily on strong engagement and commitment by the core team. The early phases of the project when the information architecture, UX, design, and content are discussed and finalized put a heavy burden on the core team’s availability and require a significant amount of their time that needs to be accounted for and planned accordingly.
The availability and commitment of the core team are mandatory elements to the project success.
Concurrent internal projects and third party integration
Your company is most likely not solely deploying Sitecore; chances are this is one of many projects that is competing for attention and resources. You need to make sure that your team and the client’s core team have a good understanding of the landscape in which they are evolving. The sooner cross-project dependencies, like third-party integrations, can be identified the better they can be managed. Deadlines external to the Sitecore project might need to be taken into consideration, and lead to a need for specific re-prioritization of the steps to ensure the success of not only the Sitecore implementation, but the other projects you have running concurrently.
UX/Design
This is where you will need to walk many miles in your users’ shoes. It’s your website, so it’s understandable that you will feel strongly about the wireframes and the designs, and rightfully so, but make sure that you are putting yourself in your end users’ shoes. You are not the user of the site, you are its provider. The risk here is that you will unconsciously push the site design towards what you want instead of what your users need. To mitigate that risk, keep thinking like your user and listen to your team’s motivation and explanation when presenting their designs.
Content migration
This is the biggest risk of all. Content migration should be discussed on the very first day of the project. You should assist by providing steps and tools to facilitate the process, but at the end of the day there is a significant amount of person power that will be required to move/create/curate content, and this process needs to be started as early as possible as it will become a serious road block to going live with your new Sitecore site.
Adoption
So you’ve launched a great Sitecore site, awesome, but its real value will come from your content author’s happiness and overall adoption of the solution. You can address this by making early and regular involvement of the content authors a priority. Content authors should:
- Be part of the core team (at least a few of them)
- Attend the wireframes and design presentations
- Attend the iteration demos so they can stay in the loop and see the site taking shape
- Get Sitecore training so that they are familiar and comfortable with the platform
- Become trainers and evangelists of the new solution
Technical resoursing
The final solution will need to be supported no matter what hosting solution you opted for (in-house/cloud). Your content authors will come up with new requirements and you need to plan ahead of time for a proper resourcing solution to support them once the site is live (internal dedicated developer, external retainer, etc).
In the end
Your Sitecore implementation will be unique to you and your organization, but these all, or if you’re lucky a few, of these risks will be present during your project. Being aware of them from day one will allow you to plan accordingly and mitigate them before they become issues. This will allow you to focus on the risks that will be specific to your implementation.
