People, process & platform: Why they're important to digital success

If you want to achieve success with your web development project, you should understand and pay attention to the three P's: People, Process and Platform. At Oshyn's Tech Mornings: Content Management event, FILTER's Kristine Stebbins covers the three P's and what they mean to your project.

Video Transcript:

Jose Caballer, The Skool: “And Kristine, you have an interesting point of view about that.  You come in to see clients a year later after they implemented a content management system and what happens?”

Kristine Stebbins, Filter:  “Well, just to speak to what Christian is saying, I was smiling a bit cause I feel like we are in the business of left behind because we do work with a lot of clients on a variety of content management platforms and we see exactly that.  We have 5 active clients right at this moment that we are consulting with where they went through an implementation, many of them maybe 12 to 16 months ago on various content management systems, by the way, and they are just like, ‘you know, we can’t…this thing doesn’t work, it’s not working for us!’ And you know, one of the things, one of the dynamics that play here is that through the implementation process the IT folks are obviously involved. Typically, they lead an implementation. The business folks are kind of sitting there, they are kind of hanging out, they are providing the requirements, and they are engaged at different levels of activity. And then all of a sudden, when you flip the switch, IT is pretty much ready to kind of be done with it. And one of the things that we found is that they, the IT folks, do not want to be in the business of content management. And the business folks don’t understand that when you put a system like this into play in your enterprise, there is a fundamental shift in terms of ownership and responsibility for how things get done and that shift is typically not understood or well understood in the implementation process. So we go in and we work with our clients to start to sit down, calm everyone down, and say, ‘ok, let’s look at the 3 P’s, we keep it pretty simple: people, process and platforms. You have a platform. The platform is not your problem. You either have an issue around your processes or you may have too few people or too many people or you don’t have the right skill to task match.’ So it changes, literally changes what people do and it’s not evident. It’s kind of like, you can tell a kid, ‘don’t do that you are going to hurt yourself’ but it’s not until they hurt themselves that they are like, ‘oh I don’t need to do that anymore’. And that’s part of the issue. The kind of realization that I’ve seen big enterprises go through so we go in and we start to pull apart this problem and work on organizational alignment, on organizational design, and actually defining processes that previously have never been defined in some cases. Or if they had been defined, they are going to change pretty drastically as you get different content management systems in because they are very powerful tools but you have to be very thoughtful with regards to how you use them, if that makes sense.”