Service: Content Plans for Redesigns and Platform Migrations

These are the some of the questions that should be answered in a migration plan:

• What can be automated and what must be manual?
• What content (and sites) is moving and what is either being deleted or staying where it is now?
• How will a new taxonomy be applied to migrated content?
• What is the effort level for the bits that need to be handled manually?
• What is the resulting quality we are attempting?
• The overall sequencing and process of migration, including how the migration fits within other activities.

Redesigns and platform migrations are complex. Working with me isn't. 

My goal is to simplify your complex project, and I am flexible in my approach. That said, I have found the following two approaches particularly useful: 

• Migration Estimation and Impact Analysis. This is a one day workshop to help jumpstart the process, and this is described separately. 
• Migration Plan. This is developing a full plan for a migration, and is described more fully below. 

Objectives of a strong content plan

Migrations frequently fail and usually achieve far lower content quality than is possible. Good migration and rollout plans reduce those risks by doing the following:

• Optimizing quality migration while being efficient with resources
• Reducing surprises and setting expectations
• Reducing migration time later (by doing groundwork now)
• Increasing the quality of a high quality website or intranet over the long term

David Hobbs Consulting accomplishes this with the following four cornerstones. 

Cornerstone 1: We place you at the control knobs of your migration

Organizations have far more control over a migration than is immediately obvious, especially in terms of: quantity (how much content is moving and what is its complexity), quality (how high quality will the resulting content appear on the new intranet or web presence), and distance (how different will the digital presence be than it is now).

Control weight, distance, and quality when planning big changes.

Fundamentally, organizations should figure out what is important rather than what is easy to accomplish in the migration. Most migration planning, if there is any at all, either concentrates on the easy part (for instance the elements that can easily be automated) or completely tosses the problem to content teams to manually execute themselves — both of these cases mean in the end that mostly the easy stuff gets done, sometimes overlooking the entire objective of the project (such as improved emphasis of certain aspects of a site).

Cornerstone 2: We help you gain traction on what you are moving *to* 

We can't get too far into defining how content will be moved and/or created without either understanding the target or setting some expectations about the where you will wind up. And this isn't just the "skin" of the site but also the "bones." For example, to better optimize quality of your site over time (post-launch), you may want templates that build in best practices rather than each page being built completely custom. This will radically change how the migration needs to occur. DHC quickly dives into these structural issues. Note: making a difference on the bones of your site usually requires early involvement. 

Cornerstone 3: We provide a *dynamic* inventory to understand where are are coming *from*

We need to understand where we are starting from in order to define how we are getting to where we want to be. To do this, DHC develops dynamic inventories which can facilitate exploration. We don't want inventories to be mind-numbing — we want them to be able to answer business questions. We may not know all the questions until we start iterating on an inventory. 

Cornerstone 4: We consider the six steps of (potentially) handling content during a migration

We certainly don't want to create unnecessary steps, but too often organizations are blindsided by the steps required to move content. So DHC content plans consider the steps of content handling in order to avoid these surprises, increase quality, and be more efficient.
 

CONSIDER each step when planning but SKIP steps where possible.

David Hobbs Consulting's process of developing a content plan

Developing a content plan for redesigns and platform migrations usually takes the following steps:

1. Kickoff: a) Review existing planning documents and any existing inventory, and b) a “guided walkthrough” by the client demonstrating current pain points.
2. Develop a exploratory inventory (allowing the team to interactively dig into the inventory, rather than simply generating Excel reports for example).
3. Work with the client to develop an initial manual effort estimate, and document quality assumptions.
4. Draft content plan.
5. Final content plan, based on client feedback on the draft content plan.

What the content plan looks like

The content plan is delivered as a slide deck around 40 pages long, defining: a) how content will be bucketed, b) dispositions (how different content buckets will be handled), c) overall process / sequencing of the migration, and d) quality assumptions. In addition, the content inventory will be delivered, usually as a Zoho Report database.