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In my previous post (Part 1) I estimated that for the typical ECM strategy project, fully 50 to 60 percent of the project team’s time will be spent figuring out how to sell the strategy to the larger organization, from the kick-off to the final presentation (and beyond). I closed with the obvious question: What kind of strategy can you build with only half (or less than half) of the project effort?

The smart-alecky answer, of course, is “A successful one,” but that’s not very helpful (although it’s true).

A more helpful answer is that a successful strategy needs to strike the right balance between generality and detail: Get too general about something your audience expects details for, and you’ve come up short; get too detailed about something your audience isn’t concerned with, and you put them to sleep.

The first step to striking this balance is to accept that getting every last detail “right” isn’t necessary, because a successful ECM strategy operates at a much broader level. It’s a provisional plan, a work in progress that will be revisited at least quarterly in light of new developments as the ECM program unfolds. The key is to settle on the directionally correct first steps, get the funding and organizational support to take those steps, and then see what happens: How accurate were our assumptions about ROI, risk, constraints, costs, and scheduling? Does the next 3- to 6-month chunk of the strategy still seem right, based on what happened in the first 3 to 6 months? What needs to change based on our experience? And so on.

When you approach an ECM strategy in this way, you give it agility, because you set in stone only as much as is necessary to move forward and nothing more. The rest is sketched in broad strokes (if at all), and everyone admits that these sketches are only straw men — intelligent guesses made to the best of our knowledge that will be revisited and revised as that knowledge evolves. (A good example of an organization that has successfully adopted this agile approach to planning and strategy is 37signals.)

Ultimately, the precise balance of detail and generality will be different for each organization and for each ECM strategy effort. But there is one “universal truth” of a successful ECM strategy: Where you should never provide detail is in how precisely the moving parts of ECM will hook together, the specific functionality you’ll provide, etc. IT is concerned with this, but no one else cares.

In contrast, where you absolutely must spend time getting every detail right, no matter what, is in terms of the business case: i.e. the ways ECM will impact the organization in a material way for the lines of business. How will ECM deliver tangible business value? How will ECM help transform the business activities of the organization? How will ECM impact the core mission, values, or corporate strategic directions and priorities of the organization? And so on.

In my next post (Part 3), I’ll take a look at some real-world examples of how to push past the sorts of details that a project team find compelling to find the sorts of details that executive leadership finds compelling (and for which they ultimately will write a check).