Its interesting to see that many on this list think that its not correct to base a CMS implementation on typical application development phases.
Typically we see CMS implementation as 1. Content Development 2. Content Production 3. Content Delivery Here is a white paper from Rational site ( http://www.rational.com/products/whitepapers/content_management.jsp ) that maps these three phases to Rational unified process. The end result is, there are activities to be carried out in each of the above mentioned areas that have been mapped to Project phases i.e. Inception, Elaboration, Construction and Transition (which incorporate consulting phase, development phase, implementation phase, testing phase etc. in some flavor) While there can be some deviations here and there, I do over all agree with the above approach. One may not require to carryout all the activities, depending on the scope of the CMS, but for medium to large implementation this definitely sounds valid. Coming from an application development background I find it hard to imagine how else I would be able get a handle on the project. Even if I consider that the CMS project as pure integration (assuming that all the functionalities are out of the box ) I would need to be able to break my project in to various activities, place them on the time line and then start the project. What do you think ? Apart from comments on the white paper, it will be helpful if others post their methodologies/approaches to CMS implementation with example. Regards Rakesh -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Nuno Lopes Sent: Sunday, November 24, 2002 5:39 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [cms-list] sales/implementation cycle of a CMS system It only came across to me that you probably wanted to include the sales scheduled time within the implementation schedule which I've not for obvious reasons. For the scheduled time for a sales can be varies from 1 to 8 months, but I concur with Lennard Regebro that in normal conditions can go at most to 5 months. I'm including the slack phase here just because a sales IMO is done when at least the customer has paid 0.5 of the overall project cost (product + consulting) and that rarely happens before the project actually starts. As a safe guard, inline with Lennard Regebro I'm estimating passed time not man/work hours. Nevertheless this is still vague because I'm not including human resources, location etc, etc. But I believe that I can rely on this at least as a priori estimate. Barton wrote: > consulting phase, development phase, implementation phase, testing > phase Lennart wrote: >I think it's a mistake to split the implementation into these phases. I also concur with Lennart on this one. This could most probably result in a disaster if stages and estimates were done and serialized in this manner for projects that are more then simple. Nevertheless this is something that appears quite often in vendor/consultant proposals irrespective of CM project complexity. Best regards, Nuno Lopes Independent Consultant. -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma. -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
