Bringing in a Component Content Management System (CCMS) and moving to a reuse-driven content strategy is no small undertaking, with new tools to learn, new processes to develop, and new strategies to implement, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start small.
In sales and marketing, this is often called a “land and expand” approach, and it’s a great strategy for teams looking to get started quickly with any new platform or initiative.
While there are a lot of moving parts to a CCMS implementation — regardless of whether you’re migrating from another platform or undertaking a new implementation from scratch — that doesn’t mean you can’t start small, build a foundation, and then expand to additional teams and departments, refining as you go.
Our Proven Approach to Getting Started Quickly:
1. Bring Stakeholders Together to Agree on Business Goals
Identify Immediate Needs & Map Current / Future States
Adopting a platform such as a CCMS may seem like a no brainer to you or your content teams that struggle with producing content quickly and managing libraries of information, but it isn’t always as obvious to other groups or leaders in an organization.
The reality is, with today’s demands, it is no longer about just producing content. It’s about producing content in various formats, delivering it at the time of need, and personalizing for different audiences, roles, regions or products. Producing and managing content efficiently at this level is all but impossible without a CCMS, especially at scale — we call this the Content Explosion Problem.
You’ll want to get key stakeholders on board, even just from a high level, to set your project up for success. You’ll want to discuss immediate business needs and drivers to make sure you understand how success will be measured, and what your priorities should be throughout the process.
With key stakeholders on board, you’ll need to start mapping out your “current state” content processes — this can be an eye-opening process, often revealing unexpected redundancies, duplicated content, design and branding inconsistencies, and other inefficiencies.
“When we started working with Xyleme, we discovered that we had 14 different versions of a single procedure. We thought our processes were efficient, but boy, were we wrong.”
Once you’ve mapped your “current state,” it’s time to decide what you want your “future state” to look like. You’ll likely want to think about evolving your content strategy into one that will allow your organization to be more proactive and strategic over the long term.
2. Select Your Core Team & Start Building Your Strategy
Centralize Existing Content & Prioritize for Reuse
Whenever possible, we recommend starting with a small, core team that is excited and engaged in the process. Ideally, this core team will help train other team members as you expand your new content strategy across the organization, so having buy-in from the beginning can be a major driver in the long-term success of the initiative.
Before you start creating content, the first step is to centralize the content you already have — this is where Xyleme comes in. Once content is centralized, it’s easier to find, and your team will immediately eliminate time wasted searching for specific content and unnecessarily recreating content that already exists.
“Being able to easily search and find all our content in Xyleme has been a huge benefit and time savings to us.”
With your existing content centralized in Xyleme, you’re ready to start building content for reuse.
A CCMS like Xyleme allows content teams to begin to treat content as individual assets — content building blocks, if you will — that can be stacked, reordered, and used in any number of configurations, or as stand-alone pieces of content, across any output or publication type.
As your Core Team begins working through the process of aligning corporate language and taxonomy and developing a reuse strategy that makes sense for your organization, they will build the foundations that you will ultimately refine as you expand to the wider organization. Once a baseline process and strategy is established, it’s much easier to bring in additional teams and content sets, make adjustments as needed, and continue expanding throughout the department or organization.
Keep in mind that none of your new plans, processes or strategies are set in stone — you’ll inevitably end up making changes and modifications as you go, so do your best to set a solid foundation, then dive in!
Xyleme’s Customer Services & Support Team works with each team to tailor the onboarding processes around their specific goals and priorities, so you can hit the ground running in the right direction.
3. Expand to Additional Groups, Updating Processes as Needed
Roll-Out to More Teams & Iterate as You Grow
Once your Core Team has worked through the initial onboarding and has established baseline content and reuse strategies, it’s time to start expanding the scope of the initiative to additional teams and content sets.
We recommend prioritizing these in order of impact, focusing on prolific teams and high-use content first to maximize value as quickly as possible.
As you bring on new teams and content sets, you will inevitably have to make adjustments to processes and strategies as you go — this will allow you to ultimately build strategies and processes that will be effective over the long term, so take your time to work through new needs and use cases as they arise. Over time, this will prevent your processes from becoming static and allow you to continue to drive improvement.
Xyleme’s customer onboarding team will work with you to prioritize your onboarding process and build a plan that will address your unique business drivers and goals and allow you to get up and running as efficiently as possible.
“A major key to our success is our vendor relationship with Xyleme. Together, we were able to move mountains.”
We’re proud to be the industry-leading provider of enterprise content management solutions, but we know that success goes far beyond technology. Each of our customers is assigned a dedicated Relationship Manager (who is also a platform expert). Relationship Managers meet with each partner weekly to ensure success from implementation throughout the life of the partnership.
