2. Get management on board
Understanding the business needs helps you pave the path for justifying the investment and "pre-sell" senior management on the project. The buy-in from the management will help you drive the change. Remember that the broader you deploy, the bigger the benefits will be.
3. Get expert help
If you don't have ECM expertise in-house, hire an ECM expert or someone with the ECM project implementation experience, or an independent consultant who is not vendor biased, to help you with the strategy and roadmap definition.
4. Go sightseeing
Get your feedback from real people and users and organise a site visit with a current ECM user. You will gain a better understanding of the benefits, and the way the operation changed - both the good and the bad.
5. Divide tasks and competencies
This project is about delivering policies, tools and technologies to improve the business, security, and help manage risks - a solution for the business, not for the IT department. So before you begin, clearly define and separate the roles of IT and the business so that IT operates like a vendor (internal or external) and the business sets the priorities and the strategy of what gets managed.
6. Make sure everyone is on the same page
Make sure everyone involved understands what an ECM is - the technologies, the steps of a project, the benefits that you could obtain and mainly the changes and impacts resulting from the implementation.
7. Good onboarding = great adoption
Focus on the user experience and training. Don't assume your users know how to use the technology tools they have been given. There will be a huge learning curve for everyone. Companies that omit training suffer from a general lack of basic skills in using tools that are in place to support the business. Just getting the project done without proper user onboarding will ultimately discourage adoption. Schedule bi-weekly lunch and learns - an opportunity to raise questions and ideas as users begin "playing" with the system. This will help identify any training issues.
8. Garbage in = garbage out
If you are replacing a legacy system, beware of poor information quality! Garbage in equals garbage out. If the information is bad, you will lose the support of the business even if the system is great. Remeber that not all content should be migrated to the new system. Gscan Service can help you effortlessly migrate large archives from one system to another. GScan Service also improves the quality of images, compresses them up to 100x, indexes data and exports full-text searchable documents. Learn more here.
9. Make sure you can capture email
Consider the importance of capturing email! Don't fall into the trap of dealing with "documents" first and leaving email perhaps for some future phase. Remember that in many cases email is used as both repository and workflow system. It should be included in the initial scope. GScan Service supports automated email processing. It monitors the inbox and automatically extracts emails and attachments (for example invoices or orders), files are then processed, enriched with related source metadata, and stored. Learn more here.
10. Vendor follow up
Schedule follow-up meetings post-implementation between the ECM vendor and the customer. The vendor should follow up at 30 days, 90 days, 6 months after implementation to make sure the new tools are used as intended. Service calls and end-user frustration will be better manageable that way.
