Setting up a new CMS team

The high failure rate of new technology projects such as CMS projects (by failure i refer to user acceptance, overtime and over budget), can be attributed to poor project management and large expectations. Although a highly technical team is required (such as programmers and database administrators), other skilled people are required to create sucessful websites.

• Information architects (IA) - who go about organising content, around user requirements;
  
• User experience designers - who work with (IAers) to create an enguaging seamless experience start to end for customer task competion;
  
• Graphic designers - who create the visual appearance of a website, consistent with offline collateral;
  
• Web strategist - who look at the long term strategy of a website;
  
• Editor - have at least one person who is going to use the system in from day-one;
  

On of the challenges of innovative websites is diminishing innovation, that is the time taken to replicate innovation diminishes over time. Therefore, it is essential think of strategic incremental improvements and align these with core business strategy.

Of course some of these roles can be combined within people, however I strongly believe that emphasis on each role is essential.

So back to those technical roles. If you are purchasing an open-source CMS, you will require a highly technical team consisting of expert programmers in the relevant lanaguage eg. PHP. There could be technical supoort offered as part of the package, however much of the support will require internal staff. Even highly experienced PHP programmers will require some time to graps the complexities of a new CMS.

If you purchasing from a third party provider, there may be a chance to work closely with the vendor to customise the implementation. Commerical CMS systems are also complex, and many have a custom programming language or template lanaguage.

So in either case (open-source or commerical) training is probably well worth the effort.

Most experienced developers will have an understanding of databases, however in a large implementation having a specific person allocated to this role will ensure issues are resolved quickly. Just as in accounting speperating tasks into different roles ensures that no body fiddles with the books. By this I mean developers can sometimes take short cuts, therefore the person who creates the code should not be the person who deploys the code to your development server, and different again to the person to implements changes to the database.