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Con­tent man­age­ment efforts are justly infa­mous for exceed­ing bud­gets and time­lines, despite mak­ing con­sid­er­able accom­plish­ments. Exag­ger­ated expec­ta­tions for tool capa­bil­i­ties (ven­dors promise a world of automagic sim­plic­ity, but don’t believe the hype) and the poten­tial value of cost and effi­ciency improve­ments from man­ag­ing con­tent cre­ation and dis­tri­b­u­tion play a sub­stan­tial part in this. But unre­al­is­tic esti­mates of the scope of the con­tent to be man­aged make a more impor­tant con­tri­bu­tion to most cost and time over­runs.

Scope in this sense is a com­bi­na­tion of the quan­tity and the qual­ity of con­tent; smaller amounts of very com­plex con­tent sub­stan­tially increase the over­all scope of needs a CM solu­tion must man­age effec­tively. By anal­ogy, imag­ine build­ing an assem­bly line for toy cars, then decid­ing it has to han­dle the assem­bly of just a few full size auto­mo­biles at the same time.

Early and inac­cu­rate esti­mates of con­tent scope have a cas­cad­ing effect, decreas­ing the accu­racy of bud­gets, time­lines, and resource fore­casts for all the activ­i­ties that fol­low.

In a typ­i­cal con­tent man­age­ment engage­ment, the activ­i­ties affected include:

• tak­ing a con­tent inventory
• defin­ing con­tent models
• choos­ing a new con­tent man­age­ment system
• design­ing con­tent struc­tures, work­flows, and metadata
• migrat­ing con­tent from one sys­tem to another
• refresh­ing and updat­ing content
• estab­lish­ing sound gov­er­nance mechanisms

The Root of the Prob­lem
Two mis­con­cep­tions — and two com­mon but unhealthy prac­tices, dis­cussed below — drive most con­tent scope esti­mates. First: the scope of con­tent is know­able in advance. Sec­ond, and more mis­lead­ing, scope remains fixed once defined. Nei­ther of these assump­tions is valid: iden­ti­fy­ing the scope of con­tent with accu­racy is unlikely with­out a com­pre­hen­sive audit, and con­tent scope (ini­tial, revised, actual) changes con­sid­er­ably over the course of the CM effort.

Together, these assump­tions make it very dif­fi­cult for pro­gram direc­tors, project man­agers, and busi­ness spon­sors to set accu­rate and detailed bud­get and time­line expec­ta­tions. The uncer­tain or shift­ing scope of most CM efforts con­flicts directly with busi­ness imper­a­tives to care­fully man­age of IT cap­i­tal invest­ment and spend­ing, a neces­sity in most fund­ing processes, and espe­cially at the enter­prise level. Instead of esti­mat­ing spe­cific num­bers long in advance of real­ity (as with the Iraq war bud­get), a bet­ter approach is to embrace flu­id­ity, and plan to refine scope esti­mates at punc­tu­ated inter­vals, accord­ing to the nat­ural cycle of con­tent scope change.

Under­stand­ing the Con­tent Scope Cycle
Con­tent scope changes accord­ing to a pre­dictable cycle that is largely inde­pen­dent of the specifics of a project, sys­tem, orga­ni­za­tional set­ting, and scale. This cycle seems con­sis­tent at the level of local CM efforts for a sin­gle busi­ness unit or iso­lated process, and at the level of enter­prise scale con­tent man­age­ment efforts. Under­stand­ing the cycle makes it pos­si­ble to pre­pare for shifts in a qual­i­ta­tive sense, account­ing for the kind of vari­a­tion to expect while plan­ning and set­ting expec­ta­tions with stake­hold­ers, solu­tion users, spon­sors, and con­sumers of the man­aged con­tent.

The Con­tent Scope Cycle

The high peak and ele­vated moun­tain val­ley shape in this illus­tra­tion tell the story of scope changes through the course of most con­tent man­age­ment efforts. From the ini­tial inac­cu­rate esti­mate, scope climbs con­sis­tently and steeply dur­ing the dis­cov­ery phase, peak­ing in poten­tial after all dis­cov­ery activ­i­ties con­clude. Scope then declines quickly, but not to the orig­i­nal level, as assess­ments cull unneeded con­tent. Scope lev­els out dur­ing sys­tem / solu­tion / infra­struc­ture cre­ation, and climbs mod­estly dur­ing revi­sion and replace­ment activ­i­ties. At this point, the actual scope is known. Mea­sured increases dri­ven by the incor­po­ra­tion of sup­ple­men­tal mate­r­ial then increase scope in stages.

Local and Enter­prise Cycles

Apply­ing the context-independent view of the cycle to a local level reveals a close match with the activ­i­ties and mile­stones for a con­tent man­age­ment effort for a small body of con­tent, a sin­gle busi­ness unit of a larger orga­ni­za­tion, or a self-contained busi­ness process.

Local Con­tent Man­age­ment Scope Cycle

At the enter­prise level, the cycle is the same. This illus­tra­tion shows activ­i­ties and mile­stones for a con­tent man­age­ment effort for a large and diverse body of con­tent, mul­ti­ple busi­ness units of a larger orga­ni­za­tion, or mul­ti­ple and inter­con­nected busi­ness process.

Enter­prise Con­tent Man­age­ment Scope Cycle

Scope Cycle Changes

This graph shows the amount of scope change at each mile­stone, ver­sus its pre­de­ces­sor. Look­ing at the changes for any pat­terns of clus­ter­ing and fre­quency, it’s easy to see the cycle breaks down into three major phases: an ini­tial period of dynamic insta­bil­ity, a sta­tic and sta­ble phase, and a con­clud­ing (and ongo­ing, if the effort is suc­cess­ful) phase of dynamic sta­bil­ity.

Scope Cycle Phases

Where does the extra scope come from? In other words, what’s the source of the unex­pected quan­tity and com­plex­ity of con­tent behind the spikes and drops in expected scope in the first two phases? And why dri­ves the shifts from one phase to another?

Bad CM Habits

Two com­mon approaches account for a major­ity of the dra­matic shifts in con­tent scope. Most sig­nif­i­cantly, those peo­ple with imme­di­ate knowl­edge of the con­tent quan­tity and com­plex­ity rarely have direct voice in set­ting the scope and time­line expec­ta­tions.

Too often, stake hold­ers with exper­tise in other areas (IT, enter­prise archi­tec­ture, appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment) frame the prob­lem and the solu­tion far in advance. The con­tent cre­ators, pub­lish­ers, dis­trib­u­tors, and con­sumers are not involved early enough.
Sec­ondly, those who frame the prob­lem make assump­tions about quan­tity and com­plex­ity that trend low. (This is in com­pan­ion to the exag­ger­a­tion of tool capa­bil­i­ties.) Each new busi­ness unit, con­tent owner, and sys­tem administrator’s items included in the effort will increase the scope of the con­tent in quan­tity, com­plex­ity, or both. Ongo­ing iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of new or unknown types of con­tent, work flows, busi­ness rules, usage con­texts, stor­age modes, appli­ca­tions, for­mats, syn­di­ca­tion instances, sys­tems, and repos­i­to­ries will con­tinue to increase the scope until all rel­e­vant par­ties (cre­ators, con­sumers, admin­is­tra­tors, etc.) are engaged, and their needs and con­tent col­lec­tions fully under­stood.
The result is clear: a series of sub­stan­tial scope errors of both under and over-estimatio, in com­par­i­son to the actual scope, con­cen­trated in the first phase of the scope cycle.
Scope Errors

Smart Scop­ing
The scope cycle seems to be a fun­da­men­tal pat­tern; likely an emer­gent aspect of the envi­ron­ments and sys­tems under­ly­ing it, but that’s another dis­cus­sion entirely. Fail­ing to allow for the nat­ural changes in scope over the course of a con­tent man­age­ment effort ties your suc­cess to inac­cu­rate esti­mates, and this false expec­ta­tions.
Smart scop­ing means allow­ing for and antic­i­pat­ing the inher­ent mar­gins of error when set­ting expec­ta­tions and mak­ing esti­mates. The most straight­for­ward way to put this into prac­tice and account for the likely mar­gins of error is to adjust the tim­ing of a scope esti­mate to the nec­es­sary level of accu­racy.

Rel­a­tive Scope Esti­mate Accu­racy

Scop­ing and Bud­get­ing
Esti­ma­tion prac­tices that respond to the con­tent scope cycle can still sat­isfy busi­ness needs. At the enter­prise CM level, IT spend­ing plans and invest­ment frame­works (often part of enter­prise archi­tec­ture plan­ning processes) should allow for nat­ural cycles by defin­ing classes or kinds of esti­mates based on com­par­a­tive degree of accu­racy, and the estimator’s lee­way for meet­ing or exceed­ing implied com­mit­ments. Enter­prise frame­works will iden­tify when more or less accu­rate esti­mates are needed to move through fund­ing and approval gate­ways, based on each organization’s invest­ment prac­tices.

And at the local CM level, project plan­ning and resource fore­cast­ing meth­ods should allow for incre­men­tal allo­ca­tion of resources to meet task and activ­ity needs. Tak­ing a con­tent inven­tory is a sub­stan­tial labor on its own, for exam­ple. The same is true of migrat­ing a body of con­tent from one or more sources to a new CM solu­tion that incor­po­rates changed con­tent struc­tures such as work flows and infor­ma­tion archi­tec­tures. The archi­tec­tural, tech­ni­cal, and orga­ni­za­tional capa­bil­i­ties and staff needed for inven­to­ry­ing and migrat­ing con­tent can often be met by rely­ing on con­tent own­ers and stake hold­ers, or hir­ing con­trac­tors for short and medium-term assis­tance.

Par­al­lels To CM Spend­ing Pat­terns
The con­tent scope cycle strongly par­al­lels the spend­ing pat­terns dur­ing CMS imple­men­ta­tion James Robert­son iden­ti­fied in June of 2005. I think the scope cycle cor­re­lates with the spend­ing pat­tern James found, and it may even be a dri­ving fac­tor.
Scop­ing and Matu­rity

Unre­al­is­tic scope esti­ma­tion that does not take the con­tent scope cycle into account is typ­i­cal of orga­ni­za­tions under­tak­ing a first con­tent man­age­ment effort. It is also com­mon in orga­ni­za­tions with con­tent man­age­ment expe­ri­ence, but low lev­els of con­tent man­age­ment matu­rity.

Two (infor­mal) sur­veys of CMS prac­ti­tion­ers span­ning the past three years show the preva­lence of scop­ing prob­lems. In 2004, Vic­tor Lom­bardi reported: “Of all tasks in a con­tent man­age­ment project, the cre­ation, edit­ing, and migra­tion of con­tent are prob­a­bly the most fre­quently under­es­ti­mated on the project plan.” [in Man­ag­ing the Com­plex­ity of Con­tent Man­age­ment].

And two weeks ago, Rita War­ren of CMSWire shared the results of a recent sur­vey on chal­lenges in con­tent man­age­ment (Things That Go Bump In Your CMS).

The top 5 chal­lenges (most often ranked #1) were:

1. Clar­i­fy­ing busi­ness goals
2. Gain­ing and main­tain­ing exec­u­tive support
3. Redesigning/optimizing busi­ness processes
4. Gain­ing con­sen­sus among stakeholders
5. Prop­erly scop­ing the project

…“Prop­erly scop­ing the project” was actu­ally the most pop­u­lar answer, show­ing up in the top 5 most often.

Accu­rate scop­ing is much eas­ier for orga­ni­za­tions with high lev­els of con­tent man­age­ment matu­rity. As the error mar­gins inher­ent in early and inac­cu­rate scope esti­mates demon­strate, there is con­sid­er­able ben­e­fit in cre­at­ing mech­a­nisms and tools for effec­tively under­stand­ing the quan­tity and qual­ity of con­tent requir­ing man­age­ment, as well as the larger busi­ness con­text, solu­tion gov­er­nance, and orga­ni­za­tional cul­ture concerns.

Setting good expectations for the outcomes of a taxonomy design effort is often difficult. It can be especially if any of the following are true:

• The goal is to create an initial taxonomy, and no reference exists
• The solution environment the taxonomy will “live in” is in flux (owners, tools, governance…)
• The business scope which the taxonomy will address is not well defined
• Organizational awareness of taxonomy concepts and is low
• Organizational maturity and experience with managing information architectures and metadata is low

When dealing with situations like these, consider changing the emphasis and goals of the effort to a “taxonomy pilot”. This will shift the expectations you need to meet from creating a production-ready taxonomy that can stand on its own something more reasonable, such as an interim taxonomy that effectively solves a limited scope problem, while setting in motion a well balanced taxonomy effort likely to be successful in the longer term.
The objectives of a taxonomy pilot effort that balances short and long term business needs in this way could be:

The project plan for a pilot taxonomy effort aiming to achieve the objectives above should further a culture of learning, rather than scope of accomplishment. This kind of plan would:

• Establish frequent checkpoints that bring all interested parties together to discuss the process itself, in addition to accomplishments and milestones
• Create regular forums where taxonomy designers and business sponsors make decisions on tools and standards with guidance from qualified experts
• Incorporate multiple iterations or cycles of user driven review and revision of in-progress taxonomies
• Include time for the creation of “next time” recommendations for what to do differently or the same as a group

Of course, it’s not always possible to change expectations, especially after funding and timelines are set. When expectations are unreasonable and set stone, take shelter in the inevitable “next version” and frame the taxonomy you’re designing as an initial effort that will require subsequent revision…