CMS change management best practices for seamless enterprise implementation

Highlights

You’ll learn about change management guidelines for headless CMS deployment in enterprise environments.

• Assess readiness: Review current workflows, tools, and skills gaps
• Align with goals: Connect CMS features to the long-term business objectives
• Secure sponsorship: Engage executives early for buy-in and sponsorship
• Adopt in phases: Start small, test, and expand gradually
• Support users: Provide training and learning resources, and reward early adopters

Apply these guidelines to ensure adoption, reduce resistance, and achieve measurable ROI.

Imagine investing months and thousands of dollars into a CMS migration, only to watch employees revert to old tools, customers face broken experiences, and you fail to hit your ROI targets. That is what can happen when you roll out a new CMS without a solid CMS change management plan. Most times, you are left with painfully slow adoption, disjointed content experiences, and frustrated teams and customers.

Why CMS change management is mission-critical in enterprise B2B

Reports from this survey show that only about 1 out of 8 poorly managed change projects succeed. This shows that management standards influence the success of any technology initiative. A structured change management plan ensures that teams adopt and continue to use the CMS, making it part of their daily workflow.

Also, by employing change management practices when rolling out a new CMS, you can seamlessly scale content delivery to new channels. Given that you need to coordinate multiple teams with different priorities, things can quickly become complex. However, with change management strategies, you can:

• Highlight the benefits of the CMS to the organization’s long-term goals
• Address the complexities of B2B workflows through a unified strategy
• Align teams and content types on governance and compliance standards
• Track the CMS adoption, measure results, and sustain ROI

Laying the groundwork with organizational readiness

Like regular change management, there needs to be a goal — why are you transitioning to a new CMS? This should be communicated. Beyond that, map the current content workflow and gather user feedback to understand how a headless CMS can offer value. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Assess organizational readiness

Try to understand the current content workflow, approval process, publishing timelines, and other details. 

• Review current workflows: Use visual aids to outline the current workflow processes and check for documented guides. Get employee feedback and compare it to the guides to spot gaps and inefficiencies.
• Audit existing tools: List content creation tools and their functions, and identify any overlaps or missing capabilities. Identify employee challenges with current tools and verify their interoperability.
• Assess skills: Outline the skills staff need to operate the new CMS. Assess employees' ability to utilize low-code tools and APIs. Evaluate their comfort level with digital processes and note the skills gap. 

2. Align with wider business goals

Identify the features of the CMS and connect it to company goals to secure buy-in. For example, if your B2B firm aims to improve customer experience, you can use the CMS to enhance delivery speed, translations, and personalized content delivery. Also, for operational efficiency, the CMS can automate processes and tasks within the current workflow, making it faster and less prone to human errors.

3. Secure stakeholder buy-in and executive sponsorship

Research shows that organizations that involve stakeholders in digital initiatives experience higher success rates. Here are tips to drive stakeholders’ interest:

• Host discovery workshops to engage stakeholders from the start
• Seek input from executives when creating approval channels and assigning roles
• Build a strong business case to convince leaders to support and fund the project
• Send regular updates on the CMS initiative and establish feedback loops

By taking the three steps outlined above, you can prepare the organization for change and increase the adoption of the new CMS when it eventually goes live.

Adopting a phased CMS implementation strategy

Migrating content and workflows to a new high-performance CMS in one launch can be costly and overwhelming for teams and users. It can result in downtimes that may cause data loss. 

To prevent that, roll out the CMS in phases, starting from areas of high priority and impact before spreading it across functions. This allows the team to adapt to the new CMS before it scales. Here is what a phased implementation looks like.

• Start with the most critical business needs to quickly demonstrate its value
• Set an implementation timeline and KPIs for each phase
• Launch the CMS with a small team — monitor usage, collect feedback, and fix issues before scaling
• Increase the use case to cover more content types and teams, and more activities within the content supply chain
• Provide ongoing training to familiarize the employees with the features of the CMS

Building user adoption through training and support

It goes without saying, but users are more likely to adopt a new technology when they are confident of their ability to use it. This is where training and support come into play.

• Design role-specific training: Design training based on which CMS features content creators, marketers, and technical teams need the most. Use real scenarios to train staff at beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels. Use a mixture of training formats and set tests to evaluate their skill.
• Provide ongoing support: Provide training support and documentation that captures the CMS features. Use how-to guides and resources from the CMS vendor. Note recurring issues and address them in refresher training sessions. 
• Recognize early adopters: Celebrate employees who quickly adopt and explore the CMS. Reward their efforts, as this will motivate other employees.

Governance, compliance, and continuous optimization

After launching an enterprise CMS, set up checks and governance to ensure responsible usage. Assign content creation, editing, approval, and publishing roles and establish workflow paths. Also, authorize access to staff based on their roles. Beyond that, ensure the CMS platform offers robust security to safeguard customer and business data.

Update the CMS periodically. Ensure that data collection and usage, including published content, meet regulatory requirements, such as GDPR and CCPA.

Continuously track adoption, content performance, and overall ROI. Integrate business intelligence, analytics, and reporting tools in the CMS to gain real-time insight into how CMS KPIs advance company goals. That way, you get adequate insights to refine processes and make adjustments.

Case studies

iFIT

iFIT struggled to implement a multi-channel strategy across its fitness brands. That prompted them to engage Contentstack, leverage our pioneer headless CMS to replace the legacy system.

The new CMS implementation enabled faster updates across web, mobile, and smart devices. This improved page load speed by 31% and led to faster web launch times.

“As well as adding new features to the product, such as rolling out new tools for things like personalization, it’s great to have a partner who is willing to go the extra mile.” Wade Nielson said.

Read the full case study here.

Chronodrive

Chronodrive’s off-site legacy CMS was too complicated to use, requiring maintenance with a second tool. This was time-consuming and tedious. 

Switching to Contentstack streamlined its workflows. Now, content creators can update and publish content without developer reliance. With a 360-degree view of content and a CMS that supports seamless integration, mobile app traffic increased by 16.41% and campaign launch time is now faster by 100%.

“Today, Contentstack's headless, centralized, real-time CMS solution offers everyone a business-oriented experience, specific to everyone's needs and role, with a real advantage in terms of overall performance.” Bertrand Laville said.

Read the full case study of Chronodrive’s CMS implementation here.

FAQ section

Why do enterprise CMS projects need change management?

CMS change management aligns technology with business goals and helps employees to adjust to new tools, technologies, and systems. Without that, CMS projects may face low adoption, which will then create other problems, such as a disjointed workflow and poor customer experiences.

How can you get and maintain executive sponsorship for CMS implementation?

Map the benefits of the CMS benefits to business priorities like cost efficiency, improved agility, and customer experience. Highlight success metrics like adoption rate and ROI, and engage leaders with progress updates. 

What are effective tactics for driving user adoption?

Communicate the need for a modern CMS and how it simplifies the content workflow and provides value. Provide usage guides, adequate training and technical support. Also, reward those who adopt it early to motivate others to follow suit.

What are specific ways to measure change management success in CMS rollouts?

Set KPIs before the rollout. Use engagement metrics to measure adoption and track efficiency by comparing content production times. Monitor user experience by measuring metrics like task completion and adoption rates. Also, track other metrics, such as digital engagement, lead conversions, or reduced costs to prove ROI.

Learn more

Using change management principles to guide CMS implementation improves the success rate. By targeting areas that can lead to slow adoption, you address the fears of the users. CMS change management strategies help you obtain executive support before implementation. It also ensures that team members can maximize the value of the new content management system.

By assessing organizational readiness and using a phased implementation, you can reduce resistance and make the most of a new, modern CMS. 

With Contentstack, you get a partner for your digital journey. You get the best enterprise headless CMS in the market. Beyond that, you also enjoy 24/7 support, rich documentation, and an academy with learning materials to help you through the process. Talk to us today to discover how you can power your digital change with our future-proof headless CMS.