Reducing project costs
Advocating for a content management system
Tools
Writing business cases
Organizational research
Static site generators
Protyping
Skip to:
The problem
- Help content was being coded by the development team which reduced their available time for building new features and fixing bugs.
- As a consequence, help content had to be planned far in advance making it very difficult to react promptly to customer feedback or make simple corrections.
My role
- Before joining the project, I had researched how other platforms at the organization hosted their support content.
- I discovered that many sites were using a custom CMS which could be maintained separately from the platforms they supported
- After joining the project, and securing the agreement of the Product Owner, I worked to make the idea a reality
The goal
- To move support content to a CMS that didn’t require any developer time to maintain
- To reduce the time required to publish or change support content
- To do this at little to no cost
My process
- I submitted a business case for a separate Content Management System (CMS) using organizational criteria
- I worked with internal technology partners to understand possible solutions and the processes for developing them
- I proactively prototyped possible solutions using static support sites
- Despite encountering administrative and business obstacles, I continued to keep exploring ways to take the project forward
The outcomes
- The project eventually received approval to use the existing CMS, and went on to develop it as their solution for support content
What I learned
- A better understanding of enterprise technology processes
- Experience building static support sites
- The value of polite persistance and the importance of building good relationships