Top Ten Mistakes When Selecting a CMS

by James Robertson
Selecting a content management system (CMS) can be a complex task, and organizations often run into pitfalls with processes, politics, and understanding the CMS environment. James Robertson outlines a common-sense approach to avoiding the most common mistakes.
This article is reprinted with permission. It was written by James Robertson, Managing Director of Step Two Designs, a vendor-neutral content management consultancy located in Sydney, Australia. For more articles like this, please visit www.steptwo.com.au

Organizations often make the selection of a CMS much harder than it needs to be. They do this by running into common pitfalls that impact not just on the selection process, but on the overall success of the CMS project.
Over the past ten years, we have worked with many organizations on content management systems, and have seen a huge number of Request for Proposals (RFPs) released to the marketplace.
Across these projects, the same issues are seen again and again. These most often relate to how the requirements are documented, or how the overall RFP is structured.
They may also arise from a lack of clear scope for the CMS project, or from the limited understanding of content management issues and the CMS marketplace.
With the aim of tackling some of these issues, this article lists the top ten mistakes commonly seen when attempting to select a CMS.
At their heart, these are all simple issues to resolve, primarily by taking a common-sense approach to the selection process.
It is easy to get caught up in the detail of the requirements and the CMS project, losing sight of the overall objectives and process. The starting point is therefore to step back and to evaluate where the project is at, and how it will proceed.
By reviewing the project against the 'top 10' in this article, it should be possible to chart a rapid (but careful) path through the selection process, to the final deployment of a CMS that works well for authors, site administrators and the wider organization.

1) Not understanding the problem to be solved
All too often, organizations rush into purchasing a new piece of technology before fully understanding the problem to be solved.
For example, CMS selection may unfortunately be done before:
• determining the business needs and overall business goals
• identifying the underlying website design or management issues
• creating an overall website or intranet strategy
• identifying what functionality will be delivered by the site (rather than the CMS)
• choosing which sites will be in scope for the CMS project
Without understanding what will be done to the actual website or intranet, there is no meaningful basis on which to select a CMS solution.
The starting point must therefore be to conduct a needs analysis process within the organization.
Note that this should not involve asking what people want in terms of CMS functionality, as the business probably has little CMS knowledge on which to base their input.
Instead, this needs analysis should focus on building an understanding of the business needs, which are then mapped by the project team to actual CMS requirements.
So the starting point is therefore to first understand the site, before trying to understand the CMS requirements.

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