Doculabs

I work with a lot of clients who are just getting started on the long road of growing ECM into a strategic, enterprise capability. For maybe 40 percent of them, they’ve partnered with Doculabs for very tactical reasons: help us build an information architecture for SharePoint for our product development teams, give us feedback on our existing records management policy and draft an improved version, lead us through a portfolio rationalization exercise for our ECM technologies, and so on.

The other 60 percent, however, have more strategic aspirations. These organizations have decided that it’s worth their while to spend time planning their approach to ECM, whether that means performing a current state gap analysis, developing a 3-year strategy, building an ECM road map, coming up with a detailed business case, or some combination of any or all of these.

When I work on strategy projects with clients, they are almost universally surprised to find that, in order for the strategy to have a chance of succeeding, fully 50 to 60 percent of our time as a project team will be spent figuring out how to convert the strategy into action.

And they’re even more surprised to find out that this effort begins during the project kickoff. So, once the project managers have done their thing (made sure we’ve agreed upon the project plan and milestones, discussed the communication plan, blocked out expected on-site dates, and so on), I take over the meeting and begin the process of discovering the critical-path activities for making a decision to pursue ECM at the organization, and what it will take to navigate them successfully.

This process is long, delicate, fraught with difficulties and pitfalls, and has a very good chance of failing even if the project team does everything right. And while it’s definitely a buzz kill to bring all this up during the kick-off – a bit like talking about how 60 percent of marriages end in divorce while on your honeymoon in the south of France – it’s important for the team to know upfront what the challenges around ECM are. And it’s my job as engagement manager to make them aware of these challenges from the very start and to get them focused on overcoming them; otherwise, I’m falling down on my duty to serve their best interests.

To surface the challenges of executing on ECM strategy, I make sure to cover the following topic areas:

1. Who are the decision makers? How are they related? In other words, what is the decision ecosystem? Make sure to identify both people and committees in this.
2. What is the decision-making lifecycle for ECM? What are the key dates, meetings, milestones, etc.? Be sure to map these to the decision ecosystem charted in #1.
3. What are the strategic initiatives or directions in play at the larger organization? Be sure to also think about any changes coming on the horizon if you’re in the middle of an enterprise planning cycle.
4. What are the political fault lines around ECM or the areas it touches? Make sure to consider the following kinds of fault lines:

• Departments/functional areas who own content management capabilities – e.g. the Corporate Communications group responsible for web content publishing, the HR team running the corporate intranet portal, or the LOB tasked with system-generated customer letters
• Applications/systems and their owners – e.g. scanning operations, imaging systems, SharePoint, shared drives, storage, LOB systems
• Other enterprise initiatives – e.g. corporate transformation, outsourcing, ERP implementations, operational consolidation
• Executive-level pet peeves/hot buttons – e.g. enabling the mobile workforce, cloud computing (for or against), social media and collaboration, customer experience

I said this earlier, but it can’t be said enough: The process of discovering these challenges and coming up with a plan for overcoming them must begin DAY ONE and must continue, day in and day out, for the duration of the project. Not a day should go by on the project where the team is not discussing these challenges and making headway against them. Otherwise, the strategy is at serious risk of becoming a strategy to nowhere—and as a consultant, you’re ultimately not serving your client’s best interests.

So that’s the 50 to 60 percent of the project devoted to making sure the strategy has a chance of being executed: what kind of strategy can you build with only half (or less than half) of the project effort? That’s the subject of the next post.

For those of you interested in a crisp, actionable, and insightful framework for surfacing organizational decisionmakers and the decision-making process, check out Mahan Khalsa’s Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play. One of the best reads on the subject.

And check back for future posts in which I’ll discuss creating an ECM strategy that has agility, and how to push mid-level management thinking on ECM closer to executive-level management thinking.