Oktoberfest – the largest party in the world is currently being held in Munich. As a project manager, I would love to see the project plan details for preparing and hosting a party attended by 7 million people and dealing with the drunken patrons locally called “Bierleichen” (German for beer corpses).
It would also be interesting to see what the original project plan looked like back in 1810 when Oktoberfest first started as a celebration of the wedding of Prince Ludwig. Imagine how much historians and anthropologists would learn if they were able to review and compare project plans for historical events such as Oktoberfest? Think about how the Oktoberfest project planning requirements have changed over time to reflect new technologies such as electricity, refrigeration, transportation or how regulations related to health, sanitation, crowd control, and security issues have been integrated into the project requirements.
ECM project may take years for enterprise deployment and start out as departmental solutions – with the first CM project typically implemented to address the business concerns of a high volume content area such as Legal, AP, Contracts, or Human Resources. Later CM projects are added (hopefully) over time as budget and resources are available until eventually there is a true ECM system within the organization.
How have your subsequent CM project plans changed over time after the first rollout? Underlying this question is the assumption that your organization has a central governance structure responsible for information assets to insure that subsequent CM projects maintain corporate standards for content or records management. Additionally does each of your CM project plans include standards reviews to reflect business, legal, compliance and audit standards? Just as the planners for Oktoberfest revise their plans every year, do you continually revise each CM project plan
• To include new content sources and document types
• To reflect new information requirements imposed by enterprise/federated search
• To address new BI or reporting tools implemented within the organization
• To leverage new technologies such as cloud storage
• To optimize content retrieval from new sources such as smart phones and pad devices
Prior to the next CM rollout project phase – spend some time upfront thinking about what has changed within your organization since the last rollout – and how those changes may present opportunities (or risks) to your upcoming endeavor.
Prior to refrigeration – beer was not produced in the summer months in Germany and would spoil by the end of summer. To avoid such a calamity – a large party was held at the end of summer to consume the old stock of beer! As noted previously – this beer drinking party officially became Oktoberfest in 1810.
Steve Kissinger
ImageSource, Inc.
