Your brand-new content management system has arrived. As you may expect, your company isn't ready for this new CMS straight out of the box, you need to read the manual first. Implementing it requires your whole team or whoever will be working with the system to do their daily tasks. We've come up with 6 tips to get you and your team acquainted with this new architecture.
1. Pick a good CMS match
Every business has at least one unique requirement from a CMS. Before choosing a CMS, ensure it's the right fit for your business. Establish why you need a CMS in the first place and what improvements this will bring for the company as a whole. If you already have a CMS and plan to switch providers, ask about the implementation process specific to their service. Check out this blog for the questions you need to be answered by your prospective CMS providers before investing.
2. Assess your team’s bandwidth
Successful CMS implementations require a full team of key staff. Clearly define everyone’s role and responsibilities, including IT staff, editors, writers, management, and other positions relevant to CMS usage. Once the air is cleared on everyone’s position, implement the CMS with a small collaborative project. As you work out the kinks, scale the CMS up with the rest of your team.
3. Train your staff
Think ahead by planning for training you’ll need to give your team such as advanced courses, conferences, or group meetings you will want your employees to attend. Training is critical to a successful CMS transition especially if some team members are apprehensive about using the CMS, familiarizing them with the system could alleviate that skepticism. With training unique to your CMS vendor in the early stages, your team can better understand what they need to do with the new system.
4. Delegate wisely
Make sure your role assignments are appropriate and correlate to the person’s level of experience and expertise. It will be less stressful for everyone if the right people are taking on the right tasks and willing to adjust to a new system.
5. Flesh out the details
Start developing your new workflow according to the CMS functionalities. Once everyone is familiar with their roles in the CMS implementation, decide who will maintain what content and create a list of guidelines for the writers and editors to upkeep.
6. Gather, migrate, & centralize
A major point for adopting a CMS into your content framework is to have everything your company needs in every department in one place. Decide how your team will gather all of the company data from multiple sources to establish a single source of truth in your CMS. Moving all data and content into the CMS will ensure its use case as your business’s primary hub. You'll need to start carrying out a content migration to turn your blank slate CMS into your own digital space. Use this blog as a guide on migrating your content over.
