Managing content – go with the flow!

Workflow can help you control your content - photo by muha...

When managing many sites and many webmasters it is important to maintain control of your content. At the FCO we have over 250 websites and 300 webmasters. It is impossible to keep track of all these sites and webmasters ourselves but workflow allows us to control access to creating and publishing content.

Wikipedia provides a good definition of workflow – “A workflow is a depiction of a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person, a group of persons, an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms.”

When combined with user access restrictions, workflow can give you peace of mind that content is being created, edited, reviewed and published by the right groups of people.

Here are my golden rules for designing a web workflow…

1. Workflow is an interpretation of the required business processes. You must fully understand the business processes required before you attempt to interpret them into a technical workflow solution.
2. Keep it as simple as possible – editors and managers need to understand how it works.
3. Make it adaptable – a single workflow should be able to adapt to all required editorial processes.

In my experience a simple 4 step workflow can cover almost any combination of business processes

This is a circular workflow from new through to archived and then back to new.

New – This is the status at which content is created and edited. Members of this group are able to create new content and pass to review status.

Review – At this status a manager can review the content and either pass it through to published status or reject it back to the new status.

Published – At this stage content is live on the website. From this status content can be pushed to archived status, this will remove the content from the live site. Alternatively, an editor can move the content back to new status. This means the content will remain live on the site while changes are made.  The page is then passed back through workflow to published therefore replacing the original content.

Archived – Once moved to this stage content is removed from the website. This content can then be edited and pushed back through workflow to published status.

Hopefully this will give you a bit or a head start when planning access to your content.

Comments welcome!

Migrating websites – top tips

Wildebeest migration by daretothink

As Transition manager for the FCOWeb project at the Foreign Office I was responsible for migrating and re-launching over 230 websites from our old CMS web platform to the new CMS platform. These websites were distributed globally and there were over 200 webmasters spread across the globe.

This was a complicated, painful, and time consuming process for all involved.

During this process I learnt several valuable lessons I think are useful to pass on….

Migrate as little as possible – In any migration the approach should always be to migrate the minimum amount of content possible. Why migrate content that is not required? When talking to content owners or webmasters always question why content should be migrated. Editors tend to assume all of their content is vital and therefore should be migrated. Website migration is an opportunity to streamline content and tidy up bloated websites.

If a site is small or out of date, do not migrate it at all. Don’t assume all sites need to be migrated, it will often be a longer, more painful process to map, migrate, and tidy up a site for re-launch than it would be to just build the site from scratch on the new platform. Create a list of sites and content within scope and stick to it.

It’s not just content – Migrating websites is not just about the content. If you have subscribers to your sites you need to consider whether you need to migrate these subscribers to the new platform and how. If you have CMS user accounts consider whether they need to be migrated too (I would advise against that!)

Make the process repeatable – Design the migration process so that it is repeatable. Ideally the extract – transform – load process should be repeatable so that is can be applied to any given site.

Make webmasters part of the process – Website migration is reliant on many stakeholders. Of those, site webmasters are the most important because you are reliant on them to identify content to be migrated, map old content to the new information architecture, and tidy up the migrated site for launch. You must involve these stakeholders in the migration process as early as possible and keep them engaged throughout the process. Let them know what is required from them, the timetable, and make them feel ownership for the migration of their website. Without these people on your side you stand little chance of hitting your migration deadlines.

Make the mapping process as simple as possible – Website migration usually involves mapping content from the old website onto the new IA to be used by the new site. This process can be confusing for webmasters and content owners. Make the mapping process simple by using a familiar application such as MS Excel and macros to automate the process as much as possible. If you can pre-populate any of the mapping then all the better.

It is likely to be far easier and quicker to migrate pages into “buckets” of pages on the destination server than try and fully build the new website structure automatically as part of the migration. It is then a simple task for webmasters to rebuild the site structure and move pages to the correct attach points.

Get the right team - Website migration boils down to a complicated technical task of transferring data between databases. Ensure you have a strong technical team that understand your content at a technical level, understand the destination content structure, and have experience of migrating content from one platform to another.

It is also vital you have good communicators who can keep key individuals informed and maintain the flow of information back to you in the centre.

Minimise parallel running – Once a website is migrated from one platform to another there will be a period of parallel running before the new site is launched. During this period a webmaster needs to check and tidy up the migrated site before launch and maintain the old website which is still live. This period is resource intensive and should be kept to a minimum.

Be strong with the timetable – It is vital that you stick to the timetable as closely as possible. It can take weeks or months to tidy up and launch migrated websites, if you let your timetable slip at an early stage you will never make up the lost time and a domino effect will cause further delays. If those involved meet their deadlines you have a good chance of meeting yours. As well as working with content owners, it is important to identify a senior responsible owner (SRO) for each site you are migrating. If deadlines are missed or work not completed the issues can be escalated to the SRO who can then put pressure on their own staff.

Migrating multiple sites is a complicated and time consuming business. Careful planning, the right people, and a realistic timetable can minimise the pain for all involved.

Good luck!

Improving your web content owners: good cop, bad cop

Sometimes you have to play a bit of good cop, bad cop with your content owners if you want great content

This post looks at ways to change your relationship with under-performing content owners and devolved editors to end the days of outdated, poor quality web content that does more harm than good.

Shifting the balance of power back to the web team

Web teams are commonly seen as little more than publishing teams, a role many web teams regrettably play up to. Such an unhealthy deference to the rest of the organisation is what allows 200 page PDFs to be chucked on the site without anyone saying “boo”.

This is crazy. We are web professionals, brought in and paid for our expertise on web content and communication.

Look at it another way: what would the Finance dept do if you didn’t follow their process for claiming expenses? They’d tell you to do it again, properly. And you would because you know you won’t get your money until you do it their way.

So what’s the difference? You run the website. You are the web expert. You could switch it all off right now if you wanted to. You have control. So use it.

Sounds like fighting talk. Yes, but threatening to switch off content doesn’t actually fix the problem. You [the web team] need to build a positive and relatively equal working relationship with content owners to ensure your site has good quality content at all times.

Good cop, bad cop

In my experience of working with content owners and devolved editors I’ve found a combination of these techniques can win round the most distant devolved editors:

Show them your face – you must, must, must build a strong working relationship with all your devolved editors. Email does not count. You need to get out your chair and go and meet them – I always try to go to their office to show willing and to see what their world is like.

Commitment – show them you want to dedicate your time, skill and expertise to helping them get the most from their content – let them see you believe it’s a valuable use of your time. You need to make them feel a bit grateful to have you on board and interested in them.

Understand what drives them – ask them what they are trying to achieve? What issues do they face? Who are their key audiences? What messages are they trying to get out? How much resource do they have for the web? Do their bosses value the web? Be empathetic.

Credible – don’t be shy to ‘present your credentials’ – they need to be impressed enough that you really know what you are doing to take you seriously. Shamelessly refer to previous experience and successes to leave them in no doubt that they are in good hands.

Inspire – the web can make the dullest things exciting. You need to get this across to the devolved editors. Take examples (always visual) of how others are doing great things with the web and make the connection to their needs. Be enthusiastic and optimistic.

Shame – find the worst bit of content they have, the really out of date, inaccurate, misleading bit. Take a screen shot. Find out how many visitors it’s had in recent months. Spell out that connection: this content is being read by real people, and you must see this is not good enough. But show them the light out!

Jealous – play them off against your star devolved editors. Wave some screen shots in front of them and explain how you’ve already helped others in their position do some great stuff which is showing real benefit. Tell them you are prepared to do the same with them. Make them feel thankful for that.

Way forward – before you meet the devolved editor/s breakdown what needs to be done and then tell them how it is going to be – you have to take the lead or it won’t happen. My previous post Improving your devolved editors – where to begin? has some advice on how to identify and prioritise problems.

Tough talk – you have shown them what’s wrong, you have shown them how good it could/should be, you have offered your expertise and resource, and most importantly you have offered them a way forward. You now need to be clear what will be happen if things don’t start to improve. Now that will vary but you need to be consistent. At a minimum you should make it clear you will switch off their content if it is out of date or inaccurate. That’s hardly unreasonable.

I bet you are thinking: “easier said than done”. Well no actually, I’ve done it, I really have… and you know what happened… they came to our office within the hour and asked what it would take to get their pages back up. We, the little old web team, were now calling the shots.

Now your turn

Pick a particularly switched-off content owner and arrange to meet them to start applying some of the techniques above. I’d suggest doing it with the Devolved editor tracker I featured in Improving your devolved editors – where to begin?.

Let me know how you get on.

Liam

Improving your devolved editors – where to begin?

Devolved editors can be a bit of a handful! Image: freefotouk

I’ve worked on several websites that have devolved editors (contributors who aren’t part of the central web team).

In my experience this can be a mixed blessing. What you gain in extra content from subject experts around the organisation you can lose in quality. Maybe you know the feeling.

So many devolved editors, such little time

When I worked for the UK Foreign Office web team I was responsible for the policy channel of the site (climate change, human rights, that sort of thing).

The content for each policy was owned by the policy desks and it was my job to help them produce good quality content that was audience and message focussed.

The problem was dedicating enough time to them to continue improving their web content – there was probably about 25+ groups of devolved editors.

I needed to get my head around the scale of the challenge and identify where to spend my limited time.

Devolved editor ‘Tracker’

At a glance you can see what's going well or not so well with your devolved editors!

So I came up with a matrix thing. I’ll call it a tracker to make myself feel clever.

1. Each team got a row on the sheet.

2. Each factor / step required for devolved editor nirvana got a column. Example: ‘in devolved editor’s job description’, ‘CMS trained’, ‘clear on target audience’…

3. I went through each team and scored them in each column: -10 terrible, -5 need to address, 0 ok, +5 doing well, +10 happy days (kind of thing!), with a corresponding background colour to reflect positive or negative… red for the -10 scores, green for the +10 scores.

4. Quick sum formula at the end of each column and row to total overall status for each team and factor.

I could then see just how well (or not!) each set of devolved editors was doing. I could see some teams had lots of red – I had to address these teams first.

Have a go yourself

In 30 mins you will have quantified the status of devolved editorship on your site.

1. Feel free to copy and modify the Google Docs Devolved Editor Tracker I’ve quickly set-up.

2. Add the things that are important to your organisation, web site or role in the columns (you can always add more in the future).

3. Add the distinctive areas of your organisation that have devolved editors in the rows.

4. Score them (be honest with yourself!).

5. Take a step back and let your eye settle on the patches of red – that’s your priority.

6. Think about setting targets – you can now quantify improvement. At least aim to get zero or above in all boxes.

Let me know how you get on!