Lessons learned

Returning to the office after a wonderful Memorial Day weekend, I see a note reminding me of a deadline for article submission to the Best Practices Newsletter. Since I can’t (or just don’t know how) to attached an article to my blog, I going to summarize below my 10 lessons learned for getting an organization to embrace CMS.

Lesson 1 – Changing technology is easy compared to people and processes.
Lesson 2 – Changing culture takes time, a lot of it.
Lesson 3 – Entropy and the vision, the vision of the project shifts over time and must be managed.
Lesson 4 – Keep your eye on the target, each possible solution has the potential of shifting the goal of a project.
Lesson 5 – The voice from outside lends credibility and is essential for instigating change.
Lesson 6 – There are never enough champions.
Lesson 7 – Design first, buy software second to ensure that the product purchased meets your needs and has organization buy-in.
Lesson 8 – Address common misconceptions
Lesson 9 – Start small and be successful by breaking implementation into small well defined tasks. Nothing changes the culture more than success.
Lesson 10 – The need to distinguish between design tasks and policy issues.

The paper has much more detail on each of these items and is bound to be a fascinating read.