One of the other opportunities presented by a migration is the chance to review policies for users, guidelines, processes, etc. In our case, I took the opportunity to actually write some. I don’t know how other organizations do things, but we’ve had a seat of the pants approach up to this point. There are good problems that come with growth and a reputation for getting things done – you start to find more people want to take advantage of the services you provide. At some point, the old way of doing things isn’t acceptable anymore – you have to start managing your processes correctly or you lose control.
Hence the decision to try and get something on paper that justifies the limits that have to be placed on the site and the content managers. It’s not that I want to limit anyone’s creativity or lock people into a rigid process; but the only way to beat back the hordes of people demanding complicated flash pages and hyper-customized webparts is to develop rules of the road. Getting processes and design guidelines down on paper, and presenting them to your content managers BEFORE their sites are developed is preventive medecine. It’s a way to preserve the look you want for your site, a way to settle arguments before they begin, and a way to rein in the occasional overkill instincts of clients.
It’s also a valuable thought exercise for the team that owns the portal – what are we trying to accomplish? How do we want to organize and manage these sprawling buckets of information (bad metaphor, I know)? How do we balance the desires of our clients with the need to maintain consistency throughout the larger site? Perhaps most importantly, do we have an orderly process for developing and maintaining content, or does each site get created in a haphazard vacuum?
It’s a delicate task in some ways – you want to encourage creativity while still maintaining a look and controlling the workload so everything gets done. I don’t know that we’ve settled all the issues in the draft we’re working on now, but you have to start somewhere, and these documents are meant to be living, changing things that adjust to new conditions.
0 Responses to “Policies and Procedures”