Key Points:
Do you have concerns about your upcoming website migration? Do you feel that you need to better communicate these concerns? I suggest following these steps (you can also download the flowchart as a one-pager):
1. Communicate impacts and alternatives
The first step is to communicate two things:
- The impact of the current plan
- Alternatives
Sometimes all that's needed is to clearly articulate an alternative approach. So for example let's say that you are concerned that migrating all your old magazine articles is going to take way too much time. In addition to communicating (1) that you think it will take, let's say 3 person-months, you also need to communicate that (2) it would take only 2 person-weeks if you only brought in the last three years' articles or only 1 person-month if you brought in all the articles but only retagged that last six months. See more about communicating impacts.
2. Make sure everyone understands the impacts
The next part is to dive a little deeper so that everyone understands in a bit more detail what they (and the site visitors) are getting into with the current plan. To estimate the manual migration effort (or to confirm that you can use automation if that's what you're shooting for), use the six steps of content handling. Hand-in-hand with that, look at the quality levels you are assuming (for example, how you are handling images that are currently unmanaged but embedded in textual content) to ensure everyone sees that assumption as well. Furthermore, illustrate the risks of the current plan. Regardless of your approach, attempt to run trial runs to really make sure people see what the migration is going to mean.
3. Take actions based on stakeholder feedback
If you don't do all the above, then you haven't sufficiently communicated your concerns. But let's assume you have done all of the above. Stakeholders (and, more specifically, decision makers) still may not be swayed, and you may have to go forward with making the most of an ill-conceived approach. In this case, make sure you rigorously prioritize the content (or sites) that need to be moved — that way you can let the less important content either get dropped or moved at lower quality when push gets to shove. Of course this is far from an optimal approach. The preferable approach is to revise the plan to make it more reasonable, and this is the way to go if you can convince people that the current plan is insufficient. To revise the plan, tweak the control knobs of quality, quantity, and distance.
