Planning. We do it in so many aspects of our lives. And while it may seem like a simple concept, it’s often the difference between a successful platform transition and one filled with potholes.
Perficient Digital recently published the guide Plan, Build, and Run: What to Expect When Migrating to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). The guide breaks down the three phases of re-platforming to AEM, starting with proper planning.
But before planning is underway, make sure you’ve nailed down your digital marketing strategy, road map, and have realistic goals in place. Not there yet? Read our pre-planning guide to make sure you have those steps covered.
“Plan” is more than an initial phase – it provides vision, oversight, and long-term checks and balances throughout your digital marketing effort. The pillars for a successful platform implementation include digital strategy, governance, program management, and change management. To ensure success, you’ll want to consider the following:
- Establish a Center of Excellence (CoE). This cross-functional team oversees the execution of the entire digital strategy and governance. The CoE addresses data and operational challenges, breaks down departmental silos, fixes disconnected processes, and establishes governance to maintain the systems, shared data resources, and processes implemented.
- Define roles and processes for governance. From a high-level perspective, digital governance establishes standards, processes, and metrics, and is overseen by your CoE. Governance is essential for creating and maintaining a customer experience that provides relevant, meaningful content in the right context.
- Apply program management. Identifying your program manager and team is vital for re-platforming success. The program manager coordinates key organizational stakeholders and communicates overall progress of production and project delivery back to your CoE. For example, a program may consist of several projects including building a web experience manager that will need to integrate with other essential systems/platforms in your organization. By facilitating the overall plans and communication for each team, the program manager ensures projects are delivered in a way that supports the larger vision of the program.
- Apply change management. This involves creating a communications plan and aligning business processes. The communications plan informs stakeholders, employees, and customers of the new digital marketing initiative to garner support. Business process alignment is the understanding of current and future state roles and responsibilities. Communications and training will ensure that business processes are aligned after implementation.
You can download the full guide below for more information. What do you consider to be most critical in planning to re-platform to AEM? Comment below with your best planning tips!
