The DAM ordeal

In the Hero’s Journey, one of the key stages of the story is The Ordeal. This is perhaps the most intense part of the story in which the hero has a life or death experiences that tests their readiness for the final stages of the story. If we read, watch or play a hero’s story that doesn’t require at least one ordeal, then it cannot help but feel like a pale shadow of a story. For without consequences, there’s no threat.

During an implementation, everything becomes secondary to the go live date. We need to meet deadline after deadline to ensure that when the big day arrives, everything is good to go so the business can start using the system. When that day comes, there’s a feeling of accomplishment paired with a sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Shouldn’t something be happening? Should I be getting feedback? Praise? Complaints? What am I supposed to do?

Having passed through The Ordeal, it’s difficult to readjust to business as usual where the speed of life can safely start to drop. Now, we need to change gear so that we can move into a new cycle of correct, support and enhance.

Correct

The implementation may have been demanding, even exhausting. There were a million things to do and all the time the drumbeat of Go Live Day was being beaten. It’s likely that you were required to make decisions with incomplete information or with not enough time to fully consider the outcomes. As Go Live Day approached your time became more valuable and the amount of work you had increased. Every instinct you had towards strategising may have been overwhelmed because every time you did five more tasks landed on your desk. And through it all, you may well have become stressed, anxious and exhausted. If there’s anything that’s going to undermine you, in life not just work, its exhaustion.

So now we’ve passed through the ordeal. It’s the morning after. What to do? Remember: it’s not Go Live Day with big, capitalised words, it’s go live day. Where we start the morning after is not where we’ll be forever. Now, we have some space to breathe and address what needs to be corrected. What is it that we understand now that we didn’t even have time to understand before? Are some of the user permissions out of place? Do some issues with the taxonomy need to be corrected? Have assets lost metadata in the migration? There can be a real spectrum of issues to look at. Now, at last, we have the opportunity to do so afresh. Now, we have time to get things right rather than merely get things done.

Key takeaway: you only have so much time and you’re only one person. Have some mercy for yourself. Now, you have a great gift: the opportunity to correct everything that’s out of place without the constant drumbeat of go live day. Tally up all the problems and start resolving them.

Support

With so much to do, it’s easy to get overwhelmed in the pressure to reach go live day. The closer we get, the more tempting it is to focus on the technicalities that need to get done. But there’s something else that needs attention too: the users. If there’s something that isn’t well understood about DAM before such programmes begin, it’s the extent of the influence that they can have upon how people work. I increasingly think of DAM as a business process tool precisely for this reason. Yes, as DAM managers we can become cynical or jaded about users, but the impact is still real for them. They may overstate the impact or pretend that everything was perfect before, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no impact. Now the drumbeat has stopped we can start spending more time with users to support them through the changes that the company is requiring them to go through.

Key takeaway: look at the feedback you’re getting and understand whether there are commonalities. Are users struggling with simple tasks? Are there technical issues with the system? If users are struggling with functions, set-up some training sessions on them. If there’s a technical issue, can you duplicate by using functionality to impersonate users? Following a migration, the system change makes it easy to assume that everything is a bug. Resist this temptation and check first.

Enhance

As time passes, you’ll resolve more and more issues in the ‘Correct’ phase. As these diminish, and as your system’s users become more familiar with the system through the ‘Support’ phase, you’ll have more time to think about improvements that can be made. This is where you shift roles from programme manager to product owner. Now, all of those ideas for improving the system that you’ve had throughout the migration can start to be assessed for their viability and be prioritised.

So, what are the issues that have come to your attention throughout? Perhaps there are opportunities to optimise a workflow so that work can pass through the different stages quicker. Are key user groups looking for assets in a specific format? If so, can you configure the renditions so that the system automatically meets this need removing any requirement for this to be done internally by users (faster) or externally by an agency (faster and cheaper)? If the system had a new function or if an existing function were extended, would it resolve problems for your company?

Key takeaway: make sure you’re organised. Have a clear board that will enable you to prioritise your tasks and backlog. With it, try to estimate the effort involved in making each task happen. This will help you manage your time so that you don’t take on too many big challenges at once. If the migration was revolution, this is iteration.

Response

How these three stages will play out will depend upon a whole series of situationally specific factors spanning the support you had, metadata completeness prior to migration, support from the vendor, your capability to understand and gain traction on problems as they arose, and many more. If there were more problems than anticipated, then more weight will need to be placed upon ‘Correct’ with ‘Enhance’ needing to be deprioritised. But whatever the case, how we structure our next steps will likely resemble:

Original illustration by Craig Laurence Stevens

Over time, the correct stage should become smaller or quicker to pass through. The direction of travel is back towards the stability of business as usual and now it becomes your responsibility to shepherd the system in that direction.

Painful lessons

No true Hero’s Journey sees the hero emerge from The Ordeal without scars. Luke Skywalker loses his hand, his mentors and his father. Harry Potter similarly loses Sirius, Lupin, Dumbledore, and Moody. Frodo Baggins loses a finger, suffers a lingering wound and is so scarred spiritually that he has to leave Middle-Earth behind.

If you’re a newcomer to DAM or to a new level of responsibility for a DAM system, the migration window will likely be challenging at best, traumatic at worst. Unless you can grow the team, get more support or push out the timeline for the migration, then I’m afraid that your options are limited. Intense organisation and focus will help as migrations inevitably pull you this way and that.

If you’ve ever done a Big Five personality test which has revealed that you score high in agreeableness and/or negative emotion (often technically termed neuroticism) then I’m sorry. Not only will the load fall on your shoulders, it will be particularly painful for you to bear. You’re likely psychologically wired in such a way as to make you more sensitive to the challenges that are inevitable during a migration. So alongside your work, try to take good care of yourself. Take time every day to get off your screens. Eat healthily. Sleep regularly. Ask less of yourself outside of work the closer you get to the go live date.

But at some point we all have to pass through The Ordeal. It’s important that we do. We all understand that each role is an opportunity to learn more about DAM, an ambiguous field to say the least. What we can be slower to appreciate is the extent to which each role is an opportunity to learn more about ourselves. The internal journey through the ordeal of the migration is one of learning more about the issues that can arise. How to do it better in the future. Whether we should ever take on such a role again. Put simply, we can only learn by doing and this is an opportunity to learn whether we need to correct course to take us to a better place in the future.

And if we emerge with scars, then we’re in fine company.

Image courtesy of Home is Behind, The World Ahead