10 vital lessons for decision makers and program managers in global digital marketing and e-commerce platform upgrades/migrations

Summary:

• Start with a clear, S.M.A.R.T. vision for the platform, considering global scalability and multi-lingual capabilities.
• Prioritise stakeholder involvement and minimise customisation to streamline integration and maintenance.
• Emphasise agile methodology, flexible investment, and thorough preparation for efficient, successful migration.

Introduction:

Upgrading to a new global digital marketing and e-commerce platform presents unique challenges and opportunities. Drawing from years of experience in managing such transitions, this article outlines 10 crucial lessons to guide decision-makers and program managers through these complex processes and opportunities. These insights, shaped from diverse projects including a significant turnaround scenario at a client’s organisation, are designed to facilitate successful, strategic migrations.

Before sharing the key lessons, it’s important to note that having a strong, experienced program manager and an experienced agency are absolute prerequisites to get the job done well.

Lesson 1: Always begin with the end in mind

Start with the end in mind. Yes, the logic of Steven Covey. I cannot explain this better than he did, the second habit for highly effective people (https://www.franklincovey.com/the-7-habits/habit-2/). Vision and strategy should drive the upgrade / migration process. Clear objectives provide a roadmap, ensuring that every decision aligns with your organisation’s long-term goals. The end in mind should be clear for all, and should always be S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound).

An example: if the plan is to make it a global platform, make sure the the platform is able to facilitate an international environment, i.e. multi-lingual, easy deployment to new markets following a global blueprint.

Lesson 2: Involve all key stakeholders

Involve and inform all stakeholders, including department heads, IT staff, and end-users. This is crucial. Their input and buy-in are essential for a successful transition. Make clear what is expected, and what they need to look out for.

An example: if you do not involve customer service from the beginning and allow them to become part of the preparations, it becomes very dreadful and annoying for the project and will create delay or poor delivery. Last minute involvements will not only lead to frustration, but also not giving them enough time to deliver the required quality, i.e. missing essential service content, FAQs, enrichment of information based on their multi-channel insights.

Lesson 3: Minimise customisations

Prioritise adapting your organisation’s existing processes and culture over extensive technological customisation. This strategy reduces complexity in system maintenance and future upgrades. Customisations should be carefully considered and justified by strong business reasons, with an assessment of their long-term impact on system flexibility and upgrade paths.

An example: The major platform providers have highly involved well-defined and well-designed content management or e-commerce processes and logic. A situation might occur that the pressure on development becomes high to not miss a launch on time, or when you do not want to waste precious development time of allocated resources. Even in such events, it is always better to evaluate customisations, the impact and assess potential risks together with your steering committee, instead of simply implementing them, or hack them as a work-around in the systems. Developers often do not mind, they would even love to find a solution, or see this as additional future work. Without strong guidance, such events can occur, respectively with good or bad intent.

Lesson 4: Properly integrate systems with middleware

Connect systems and platforms like Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Commerce, and SAP effectively using appropriate middleware, often based on API connections. This ensures seamless communication and integration between different technologies. The middleware will act as interpreter or translator, so that different legacy systems can be made clear what information is shared. For example, the middleware can help explaining that a specific value is a postal code in a pre-defined format, and is transformed into a format that can be understood by another system that would expect a different format.

An example: In case you have a very complex operational set up, with various SAP systems or even one and you want to integrate an ecommerce platform with it, tie in middleware that can make the integration easy. Such solutions will be often a lot cheaper and easy to change, with strong error monitoring, instead of trying to develop special interfaces between the two systems.

Lesson 5: Clearly define processes and responsibilities

Develop a detailed blueprint of processes, roles, and responsibilities at the project’s outset. This step is vital for ensuring clarity during the transition to the new platform. Involving all stakeholders in this process ensures that everyone understands their role, both during the migration and in the operational phase post-launch.

An example: With an international scalable platform there is often a global team, with local teams for various markets. When global content is created, this will often need to be translated and localised. An alignment needs to be in place and planned as part of the project planning. This might also bring up additional requests on automation and workflow to facilitate the translation and localisation processes.

Lesson 6: Secure a flexible investment framework

Base your investment on user stories / epics and maintain flexibility to adjust the budget as project scopes evolve or new needs emerge. One of the challenging topics of the program / project management is calculating the investment that is needed. In order to make a strong and valuable calculations, defining the required user stories and priority setting. Refer to what the platform should offer and the experience should be, as well as what will be the fit with your initial vision and objectives. Expect that initial budget could exceed and unexpected events can happen. Define the core, i.e. the ‘must-haves’, and in addition the ‘should-haves’, ‘could-haves’, and ‘won’t-haves’, or ‘not-right-nows’. Scrum/Agile or Dynamic Development working methods will support in creating a good flexible investment framework. A big advantage of this way of working is that a lot of overhead with project management, communication and testing was no longer needed. Hence, saving significant costs with stronger focus on development.

An example: For the investment proposal, the agency had outlined a detailed list of all requirements for developing the new digital platform. Initially, this list was treated as a rigid outline for the investment request, leading to a waterfall project planning approach. Once on board, the methodology was shifted to define essential user stories, prioritizing ‘must-haves’ for the platform’s core functionality, specifically focusing on key features like user interface, data integration, and scalability for multiple markets. As the project progressed, the need to onboard multiple markets simultaneously emerged, which was critical for the company’s global digital presence. To accommodate this without significantly inflating the budget, the project team reprioritized, shifting a less critical feature to a later phase. This agile approach, constantly reassessing and adjusting based on evolving requirements and feedback, ensures the project stays aligned with business goals while maintaining financial flexibility, and effectively addressing the specific challenges of digital platform migration.

Lesson 7: Embrace an agile or dynamic methodology and inclusive face-to-face collaboration

Implement an agile methodology and keep all parties involved throughout the development, testing, and launch phases fosters a collaborative and flexible project environment, as already referred to in lesson 6. This will minimise overhead, and puts focus on your ‘burn rate’, i.e. how many hours are consumed by the development of your requirements. Systems like Jira or Asana, can help in managing your developments, however people connections are as important. When executed well, for all stakeholders, all can track very clearly how much resources are actually delivering as expected. And as a bonus overhead can be diminished, as well as double-work, or late discovery of errors and issues.

An example: At some point there was a huge workforce assigned to make sure the project deadlines were met and the costs were strongly increasing surpassing budgets and planning. This had to be corrected instantly not to further increase overspending and underdelivering. With a strong product owner and ‘decimated team’, and cutting out all overhead, effectivity had grown significantly enabling the team to deliver all additional core requirements for a proper go live and closing of the project. Unfortunately with additional investment to ‘cover’ for the issues earlier in the implementation.

Lesson 8: Select a competent agency and share responsibility

Choose an agency capable of handling the complexities of the migration and make them co-responsible for addressing challenges that arise during the process. You might want to continue with your current agency, which can be a strong and valid argument. However, bear in mind that they should know what they do and can offer the right experience for your specific challenge. Challenge the knowledge of your agency and obtain market feedback from other clients they have served for similar projects, in joined effort with your agency or independently. Agency experience is crucial for swift and scalable execution. If your agency does not have the expected level and you still want to go on a journey with them, make sure they wil co-invest in the learning costs and not leave you hanging when delivery is not on par.

An example: Although there is full trust in your agency as a partner, it will absolutely not hurt to check in with two other agencies for good comparison. You will not only educate yourself and the team on practical lessons learned, but it will also bring additional experience to asking the right questions to your existing agency. This will also open up discussion for ‘what if things do not go as planned’ scenarios.

Lesson 9: Thorough preparation is key

Allocate significant time and resources to the preparatory phase, encompassing CI/CD processes, user experience design, testing strategies, content strategy, and user management systems. This preparation, constituting a substantial portion of the project’s timeline, is crucial for enhancing the quality and efficacy of the final deliverable. Rushing into development without laying this groundwork can lead to challenges later in the project.

An example: In the case with my client, it appeared to be an easy upgrade, however since it was completely impacting the overall look and feel for the users using and visiting the platform, the impact of proper User Experience development was overlooked. For each user story the journey (CX), look and feel (UX) and content has to be clearly worked through. This seemed to be more time-consuming at first, but it resulted in better definitions for developers, and causing less impact on additional overhead, i.e. communication, testing etc.

Lesson 10: Prioritise analytics setup from the start

Implement an analytics framework early in the project, ensuring it is in line with your platform’s operational goals and user experience objectives. Select appropriate analytics tools considering various factors, including operational markets and compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR. A strategic approach to analytics from the beginning facilitates effective performance tracking, optimisation of user journeys, and more informed decision-making.

An example: For my client GA3, GA4 and Matomo were being used; an unwanted legacy of course, that was clear to all. Unfortunately little time was spent on deciding how to move forward, what analytics platform to use for all markets. With the Adobe platform also Adobe Analytics was offered free within the licence. Now this will become the global analytics systems, in the end leaving one in place. Unfortunately implementation took more time to use it, due to many issues noticed with the structure of the platform, i.e. webpage names, url structure, global vs local. All the fixing of such issues took a lot more time than initially anticipated and could have been avoided if the analytics setup was thought through at the beginning.

Conclusion and Closure:

In summary, these 10 lessons form a cohesive blueprint for successfully navigating the challenges of upgrading to a global digital marketing and e-commerce platform. Starting with a clear, strategic vision and involving all key stakeholders lays a solid foundation. As we progress through defining processes, minimising customisations, integrating systems, and ensuring flexible investment and collaboration, we pave the way for an efficient and effective migration. The emphasis on selecting the right agency, thorough preparation, and prioritising analytics from the outset ensures that every aspect of the project is aligned with the overarching goals. By following these guidelines, decision-makers and program managers can steer their projects towards success, leveraging the opportunities presented by new digital platforms to enhance their organisation’s global presence and operational efficiency.