When content is king

Document and content management projects are tricky but demand is growing

Document management integrator and reseller Invu is targeting project failures and dissatisfaction in the market with the release of a checklist aimed at helping customers assess their needs at any stage of the process.

The checklist, downloadable from the company's website, is based on a set of three new vendor-agnostic white papers by Invu aimed at educating customers before they invest in costly document management or content management systems that do not meet their needs.

Mark Palmer, director of product management and marketing at Blisworth-based Invu, said that document and content management systems can be hugely beneficial and demand is growing for such applications across both large and small organisations.
However, there is a common perception that documentation and content management projects are prone to failure.

"A bad salesman will rely on ambiguity," said Palmer. "The original logic around this is that we were quite frequently finding ourselves in situations where people had an inkling about what they expected from the project but no preparation or understanding of what the commitment was, or what was actually needed."

Making the right investment
Customers - and tech providers - need to know how to make the right investment and how to make it work, and those answers are not so dependent on the technology or the products and services selected as on processes and project management. Invu's new checklist should help all parties avoid making expensive mistakes, he said.

The checklist and foundation white papers, while they would not necessarily result in actual sales for Invu, should be beneficial to its brand over time, and would certainly benefit the whole market because most white papers he had seen on the subject were all about promoting a particular product, Palmer said.

"It is completely vendor-agnostic," he said. "Most of it is just about good honest commitment. Our approach uses standard PRINCE2 methodology, and we have got a very generic product. So we said ‘let's have a look at what we know not to do'."

Palmer said the checklist should prove relevant to all industry sectors, covering the three main stages of any project - before, during and after -in some 60 specific recommendations. It was all based on best practice and experience.

‘Before' covers the pre-sales stage -- up until a decision is made about buying some software. ‘During' covers the time between purchase and the new system going live. ‘After' covers post-deployment activity.

"Whether your [customer] organisation is large or small, these stages will all need to be considered. The extent to which you action them will be a factor of size and complexity. Some items will not be relevant to the small business. However, it is recommended that you take your own view on this," Palmer said.

The checklist notes, among other things, that it is critical to figure out the exact business need for the project, as well as establish terms of reference and ownership of the project at each point. At any and every point, stakeholders must be prepared to challenge the viability of anything being done, and whether it is really needed and working well so far.

Palmer notes that flexibility is key to successful content and document management projects, but at the same time they cannot be permitted to expand or change indefinitely, using up all available resources into the bargain. Finding the right balance is crucial, and this can only happen by careful progress from before the start of the project until after it is finished.

All stakeholders, including IT staff and those who will actually use the system, should be involved. Automation where possible should also be a given, he said.

For medium to large companies considering document and content management system projects, project directors and organisation leaders should also ensure they adopt a thorough solution selection process, investigating multiple avenues for references and testimonials.

IT and budgetary implications must always be taken into account, but customers must also ensure they can be flexible enough in those areas - before committing to a project - to ensure they can actually complete and achieve the goals previously set out.

"You may often find you have a great project, but at the end people ask ‘was it worth it?'," Palmer said. "Define what is meant by success, and try to pin that down."

Julian Holmes, co-founder of Agile software development consultancy UPMentors, said customers and their providers about to embark on any software project need to avoid simply engaging in "speculation" about what they want and how they will achieve it.

"You are looking for them to get a clear vision early on what a project is trying to deliver. Also, there has to be an element of trust between the supplier and the customer, and the supplier has to be able to demonstrate that they are trustworthy. Then you can get a better working relationship and people are more confident," Holmes said.

Vicious cycle Holmes added that project failures have meant that a kind of vicious cycle has developed, with suppliers insisting on a fixed price, with a fixed time to deliver. Many suppliers may want customers to outline exactly what they want before they start a project - the trouble being that it is only when people start delving deeper into a project that they start to really work out what is needed. Suppliers and customers must work much more closely together, he said.

Secrets of your software success>> www.channelweb.co.uk/1885169