Purpose

The purpose of this project was to replatform our various and disparate global content management systems across the US, Asia and Europe regions to one system, creating a one stop digital hub. The project was set out to address legacy systems that were failing, new features that were needed, and a full global integration of our systems.

The problems we faced: we had regional and local fragmentation of digital technologies and solutions, and this led to an inconsistent and sub-optimal user experience. This was 2016 and some of our sites were not even mobile-friendly! We in the US had hit a plateau using a legacy and aging CMS that was quickly approaching toxic end-of-life (Sharepoint 2007!). Our digital experience was falling short of many standards, and those standards only continued to rise, leaving us behind. It was absolutely time to not only think about replatforming to a more capable CMS, but to create a robust digital hub that could be used globally, and redesigned shared templates that would elevate the look of our websites and provide brand consistency. Our goal: strengthen the brand and meet today’s user expectations. This required a consistently branded and personalized user experience, accessible from any device, and that’s what we set out to do.

Strategy

There were 30+ web properties in scope and the US site alone had 3500 pages. We were a very small project team that had to wear a lot of different hats in order to tackle this project, and we had several workstreams to focus on all aspects of the project on both the marketing and IT side. The workstreams I focused and co-led were Content, Design and UX, and Business Requirements. We were responsible for a content audit and assessment, content migration efforts, content strategy, testing and QA, user research, and gathering functional and business requirements, to name a few.

We in Marketing worked in an AGILE environment with daily Scrum calls with IT and developers. In those calls, we focused on sprint and project scheduling and ticket prioritization. We also discussed any issues with testing and QA work as well.

I learned more from this project than any other in my career

In the end, we completed a full replatform to Sitecore and a redesign of all of our sites to create a streamlined, harmonized and integrated look and feel. We also managed to create a rich, personalized user experience across all devices. We streamlined and freed ourselves from redundant and increasingly toxic legacy systems, and defined a global approach to meet our clients’ online needs. We aligned on processes, requirements and implementation efforts across all our regions (through many, many, many hours of strategy meetings). In the end, through a new IT platform, we helped support these globally aligned business processes and goals to achieve our vision and better position us for success.