Workshop approach

Organizations planning an IBM Lotus Web Content Management project should conduct information architecture workshops with business representatives of each of the process areas over the first period. This section outlines some recommendations for preparing and conducting workshops.

Workshop preparation

Information architecture workshops require preparation in order to be effective. Prior to conducting any workshops, we recommend that organizations develop a test site with IBM Lotus Web Content Management to gain hands-on experience with the product and to develop an understanding of the capabilities of the tool. This training helps the team to connect user requirements or wishes with the capability of the tool to support them. With that understanding, stakeholder requests that are not technically feasible can be identified immediately, so that expectations can be set correctly. Alternatives can be discussed on the spot.

After a workshop is scheduled with the stakeholders of a process area, the organizations team should thoroughly review that area of the site. Site areas and a sampling of specific pieces of content should be identified and documented. Separate documented notes by content type or site area but make no additional marking on them prior to the workshop.

To reach a high acceptance, we recommend a professional preparation. Because the workshop topics can get quite challenging, you do not want to spend any time discussing topics that are related to future topics. We recommend setting up the conference room for the workshop prior to its start (for example, draw a couple of page layout grids on a whiteboard and include some of the page elements that are persistent throughout the site.

The workshop

Unlike a workshop with the technical team, workshops with business stakeholders should avoid technical terminology or a discussion about how the IBM Lotus Web Content Management tool functions. A suggested approach includes:

• Introduce the goals and objectives of the workshop, and the overall IBM Lotus Web Content Management project.
• Identify basic terms (grid, banner, header, navigator, and menu) that will be used to produce a work product for this process area.
• Have the business stakeholders validate the site areas and content that was identified in the preparation.
• Use notes to group like content types, and place the notes on the whiteboard within the grid.
• Use a system of dots to identify site levels (one dot for the top, two for the next, and so forth).
• Capture the raw output of the workshop on digital camera.
  

Work products

The workshop outputs should include:

• A map of the process site area hierarchy, usually developed in Visio®.
• Wireframes of the page layouts, usually drilling down two to three levels and normally developed in PowerPoint®.  (See Analysis of wireframe diagrams. )

Based on the wireframes from RiverBend, here is how our site turned out.

Homepage -

One of the pages illustrating content and a specialized campaign on the right side