Over this last week, many of our articles focused on what to expect in the New Year and tips on making big, successful changes in your ECM or content services platforms. With these new ideas and changes, it’s important to take a step back and make sure that you’re tackling and implementing each change and improvement properly.
With a new and improved ECM strategy built specifically to meet your growing businesses goals, you may be thinking, “did I cover all of the bases?” With this thought in the back of your mind, taking the step to implement these changes can be the hardest part. Here are a few things to check before you begin to guide your strategy into the New Year.
Health Checks
Before implementing anything, you need to run a health check. Are all of your systems updated and running on the newest version that can support your initiatives? Is every process accounted for? Are all of your employees trained and ready to continue their existing processes and take on new tasks?
Health checks are essential to the start of a new strategy and throughout the entire year as you grow with it. Adding in regular health checks will help eliminate potential problems before they arise and keep your systems running smoothly.
Stay in the know
Whether you’re the CIO with a “seat at the table” or the OnBase administrator running the processes, staying in the know is important. As much as you can, it’s helpful to know what initiatives are coming down from the top so you can ensure that your new strategy meets those goals and continues to grow with them.
Growth can be a wonderful thing but if you were not prepared for it, your ECM system may not be set up to handle it as quickly as it’s expected to. Make sure that you’re in the know, your budget is aligned and your team is ready to flow with the ebbs and changes as they trickle down.
Keep your organizations goals top of mind
At the end of the day, every change should come back to what your organization’s main goals are. Sometimes it’s easy to latch onto the new, shiny addition to your ECM stack but when it doesn’t propel your company in the direction it wants to go, you may need to hold off on implementing it.
Keeping your mission at the forefront can help you prioritize updates, additions, and changes. And, if you can loop new ideas back to a larger organizational goal, getting the budget approved to implement those changes can be a whole lot easier.
Prepare your staff
Being open with your staff and anyone who uses your ECM platforms will make the transition much smoother. Not only that, but accounting for vacations, staff changes and sick days in the midst of growing your systems is essential.
When you’re in the thick of it with an implementation, the last thing you’re usually prepared for is someone not being there to keep it running. Look into options like Staff Augmentation or outsourcing some of the upgrades so that you don’t have to worry about ups and downs and instead, you can focus on training your staff and getting them geared up to run with the upgrades.
If one your 2018 initiatives this year is to upgrade your OnBase system, watch the webinar below for insider tips for running a successful upgrade!
