by Janus Boye
The art and science of selecting the right tool is something we’ve covered on these pages for almost 20 years. It remains hard to navigate the marketplace and the list of potential bidders is long, so how do you approach it? What should you know before getting started?
In a helpful new book, Deane Barker has shared his 25 lessons learned about buying content technology and services. The book covers helpful advice specific to the market and it's filled with important lessons for selecting content technology. Also, unlike a few other business books, it tries not to make the wrong assumptions.
In a CMS Expert group member call, he shared insights from the book and we co-created 3 more lessons learned.
What’s in the book?
One of the things, I personally enjoyed about the book, is the fact that while much has been said and written about CMS selection, Deane has identified lessons learned that are more or less specific to the marketplace.
You can find general purpose advice on procurement in many other places. Helpful tips like:
Understanding what you really want
Being clear about how to evaluate and make decisions
How to do scoring
Is not really a part of the book. Instead you’ll find 25 valuable lessons learned that are more specific to CMS selection, like lesson #11 on the importance of the vendor eco-system.
Other lessons include:
Being prepared to share your budget
It’s easy to get excited about something new
Open-source software often has no representation
3 more things you should know
During the call, we co-created these 3 additional lessons. Perhaps they’ll make it into a future edition of the book?
Lesson #26: Use references to gain insights. Jeff Cram from PK introduced this and Deane shared his scepticism about references. How do you find the references who are not overwhelmingly positive or even compensated to be a positive reference? Jeff has previously published a post on this on the CMS Myth: Why Customer References Are A Gigantic Missed Opportunity In Selecting A CMS. Deane also has a section on references in the Web Project Guide with a mention of Starbucks gift cards.
Lesson #27: An RFP and functional spec is not the same thing. Paul Savage from Core dna alongside Laura Stringer contributed to this one. As Laura said: “RFPs tend to be aspirational, whereas a functional spec is (hopefully) more grounded in the client's reality.”
Lesson #28: Using agile and external professional services can be hard to reconcile. This was mostly raised by Mark Marsiglio from Contextual Code. Mark shared this as a follow up to elaborate: “While true agile is rare with external professional services it can be reconciled if the client is willing to negotiate the minor details of each part of the scope during implementation. Establish a fixed budget, prioritize the key scope elements and tackle the most important ones first. When the budget runs out, the least important items that weren't completed are added to the backlog for the next phase. There is a lot of flexibility in CMS customization work and often what seems important at the contracting stage is deemed less important once the project has started.”
Learn more about selecting the right tool
You can view the recording from the highly interactive session below. No slides, just a brief intro to the book and then co-creating and discussion around 3 additional lessons.
For some market trends, read:
A New Grand Compromise In Content Management featuring Preston So
The Future Might Be Distributed written by Deane in February 2019
If you subscribe to Deane’s acclaimed Squirrel Notes newsletter, you’ll get notified of potential future editions and it’s also a good way to stay on top of the fast moving market.
Finally, as part of the book launch, Episerver surprised Deane Barker with this video greeting: