Rolling out a Global Website Presents a World of Challenges

Developing any business-critical website for a Fortune 50 company presents myriad challenges – from strategic alignment to IT involvement to harmonizing competing power centers and interests. And when that website has to serve customers across dozens of countries and languages, well, then your challenges become exponentially more challenging.

Managing an end-to-end strategic digital initiative involves coordinating overlapping workstreams. Deliverables typically have dependencies, span across development phases and require the efforts of multiple internal teams and agency partners. With a global rollout, there are simply more deliverables, more workstreams and more people and partners to stay on top of.

And no, it doesn’t always go exactly as planned.

Having managed the development and launch of a number of global websites for enterprise clients in finance, insurance and healthcare, we’ve learned some valuable lessons along the way. We share them here in the hope of saving you some time and trouble should you be contemplating a similar undertaking.

In a complex global effort, teams need to work together to deliver, and if it sounds like we’re repeating ourselves, well, it’s because this bears repeating: Your single most critical task is defining and communicating which teams or individuals are responsible, accountable, consulted and informed (RACI) at every phase of the project.

The RACI matrix provides clarity and focuses the team – and helps cut down on finger-pointing when challenges inevitably arise. Establishing it should be your first order of
business.

Okay, you’ve made your matrix, now, as in “The Matrix,” you need to find The One. In your case, this will be the person who’ll keep everyone on track towards the overarching goal – one individual authorized to make decisions, escalate issues and ensure day-to-day progress. In other words, a leader.

The product owner is responsible for managing the entire breadth of the project plan and typically is marked across the board as “Responsible” and “Accountable” on the RACI.

Given the vast complexities of a multiple-geography, multiple-language rollout, it’s easy to forget one little point: content is important. Really important. So, start with some
questions:

• Who’ll be viewing your content?

• How will people access your content?

• How will they consume it?

• What do your analytics say about your content?

• Who develops your content?

• What commonalities exist among users across business units and geographies

Honestly, you can never ask enough questions about content. After all, if your users can’t find or access the content they need, then everything else will fail. So, begin with a content audit and develop a content strategy; doing so forces you to consider your users first and prioritize their needs.

So content is king, but the user rightly belongs at the center of your universe. So you need to think through how the user interacts with your content and what additional features and functionality can support the experience. All of this should happen before you move on to visual (i.e., graphic) design.

By first designing the experience (content strategy and UX ), you’ll create efficiencies (and save heartache down the road) by getting stakeholder alignment on strategy and UX before launching your creative team on the visual design. By proceeding in the logical order, you reduce the risk of losing time, having resources become available and having to redo “completed” work. Plus, you get yelled at less.

Hope this doesn’t blow your mind: The website you’re building isn’t just a website. It’s a collection of components. And this being the digital age, those components may have value outside of your website – in social media, for example, or on another web property, or elsewhere in the marketing mix. If you design and build using components – think of them as Legos, if that helps – you can greatly reduce the effort involved in executing other projects.

Simply put, a component-based system promotes reusability and flexibility – not to mention, consistency – across the globe. So, as you design and build, don’t focus on a single use-case. Instead, think about how you can use components to create the bigger picture.

With many contributors heads-down on the global website rollout, people understandably are narrowly focused on their own work. And too often, no one is thinking about what happens when the project is complete.

At launch, the content will have been loaded into the CMS (content management system) – but once the site is live, someone needs to be in charge of management and maintenance of the site. So, before you start development, develop the site map, taxonomy and data model to support content managers post-launch – along with a component or template strategy that makes it easy for marketing teams to jump into the platform and take over.

A beautiful design is useless if it can’t be built. And a technically sound build doesn’t help if it doesn’t support the intent of the design. This may sound self-evident, but with all the works streams flowing and multiple parties rolling on and off, the obvious benefits of collaboration can get lost in the day to day fray.

If the design isn’t clear, if the functional requirements aren’t documented, if the handoff is not documented, it is guaranteed you’ll run into a number of issues. Inconveniently, they tend to turn up when it may be too late to recover easily.

By ensuring that your teams are working together throughout the design and development process, you’ll ease friction and deliver a better end-product. There might even be hugs.

Chances are you’re a bright, creative person. And you work with other bright, creative people. You’re all brimming with ideas. And somehow, all of those find their way into the requirements document. It’s like ordering too much food at a restaurant: You can’t finish it all.

The concept of the MVP – minimum viable product – is designed to force prioritization by dividing all content and functionality into two categories: what’s essential and what isn’t. So you can streamline development and focus your teams on what has to happen to get to launch, rather than be distracted by what ifs and nice to haves. You’re not throwing anything away, just pushing it further along your product roadmap.

Development is wrapping up and you’re getting ready to handoff your website – great news! Just one thing: Do you have a test and rollout plan? You need to document who is responsible for reviewing the design, functionality and content, providing feedback and making game time calls on showstopper issues. And of course, besides having the plan, you also need to make sure the responsible individuals are bought into the plan.

As you’re working through testing, use a tracker tool like JIRA or Trello where you can assign tasks, status and individuals in an automated way to expedite the testing process – it will organize and simplify your life.

Congratulations, you’re done – except digital means never having to say you’re finished. After launch, you’ll be studying site analytics to understand user behavior and site performance, so you can improve the content, experience and design over time.

Learn these ten lessons well, and don’t worry – you’ll still have plenty of chances to learn your own hard-earned lessons as well.