On the 4th day of Christmas my true love gave to me, a never-ending portal strategy.  A portal strategy is a good thing, right?  Well, not if it never ends.

What Happened

I worked with a major insurance company that spent 3 months putting together an amazing 2 year portal strategy.  The strategy covered architecture, development, content management, release management, security, and just about anything technical you could think of when it comes to WebSphere Portal.  They then spent the next 8 months developing a moderately complex external portal which was primarily content based.  The problem was the release of this portal was tied to another project and since that project was already a year behind schedule, the content portal was never turned on although it was complete.  So, this company focused on an intranet instead and spent the next 8 months consolidating departmental intranets into a single portal.  The new intranet was weeks from production when a merger was announced and this company instantly cut all non essential projects and of course, the portal program was cut at this point.  Almost 2 years of effort went down the drain with little to show for it.

What Should Have Happened

Choosing a Global Software Development Partner to Accelerate Your Digital Strategy

To be successful and outpace the competition, you need a software development partner that excels in exactly the type of digital projects you are now faced with accelerating, and in the most cost effective and optimized way possible.

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A portal strategy is of course a good thing but it doesn’t have to be this overarching approach that assumes everything must be perfect in order to launch.  Instead, a 2-4 week roadmap can be put together which lays down and prioritizes a direction on architecture, content, governance, security, development, search, etc.  Part of this roadmap should be to identify a candidate project(s) to deploy on portal which can provide high value in a short time as well as lay the framework for future portal based solutions.  When taking this approach, it is important to have the following:

• Buy in and support from the business.  Business driven projects tend to have a higher rate of success and better buy-in than IT driven projects.
• If you do not have the right technical team, obtain the right skillset for a portal project.
• Manage your dependencies.  Portal is all about integration and it usually involves aligning many teams.  Managing dependencies and timelines is critical.

Additionally IBM has several offerings (which Perficient can deliver) that can really increase speed to market and deploy a solution in weeks.  These are:

• Portal NOW
• Forms NOW
• WCM Now

Portal technology and methodology have matured significantly over the years.  An organization doesn’t have to spend months or years to bring significant business value to production in a short time.

Previous Installments

1. Where’s My Homepage?!?
2. The Business Asked for It
3. Methodology for Methodology’s Sake

Join us this month on Wed, June 29th for our Perficient Perspectives webinar in which we explore the 12 Things You Shouldn’t Do on a Portal Project in depth.  More Info / Register