Document Purpose
This article is designed to assist a consultant in defining a WCM workshop agenda to discuss the requirements for designing a web site and the implementation of an infrastructure to support that web site.
It provides examples of issues and questions that should be considered during the requirements phase for a lotus web content management (wcm) solution. This is specifically targeted at a technical audience who are familiar with web content management terminology and have a good understanding of both software and infrastructure.
Generating Specific Workshop Agendas
When developing an agenda for a specific workshop, the consultant will need to his/her existing knowledge of the environment and the user requirements to determine which areas of content within each section of the potential agenda modules in the next section will be relevant and important.
The timing should be given for each agenda module in the next section and will be based on the customer either already having the required information to hand or actions being generated for people to research the information off-line rather than lengthy discussions taking place during the workshops.
One way to use these modules would be to spend a couple of hours with the key customer contact explaining what could be covered in each section of a workshop and discussing who within the customer organization might have the required information or would require consultation on decisions made. This should help to identify the likely attendees for the workshops.
If specific sections have very distinct attendee lists, this also may lead to a decision to split the agenda into more than one workshop so that attendees do not get bored sitting through agenda sections in which they do not have an interest.
Requirements workshops:
Typical requirements workshops can be 2 – 4 days. For large implementations, they can be split into logical chunks such as Content Life Cycle, Presentation (Look and Feel) and Infrastructure.
Participants for the requirements workshops could comprise: authors, web master, content governance representatives, graphic designers, WCM architect, infrastructure architect, business analyst. Some participants will be required to attend all workshops, but some such as the graphic designers do not.
Technical design workshops:
A similar 2 – 4 days (if not more) will also be required for the technical design workshops. Based on the information gathered during the requirements workshops, construct a series of usage scenarios and authoring scenarios. Modify the list of questions to suit your particular requirements. Use these scenarios in a series of walk-through against the modified questions during the design workshops.
Participants are: business analyst, web masters, graphic designers, WCM architect, infrastructure architect, security specialist (optional).
Modules are defined in the attached document
Related Content
Redbook: Information Architecture and Site Design
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