Why Do AEM Implementations Fail and How to Prevent It

Adobe CQ5/AEM is arguably the industry-leading WEM platform. Implementing Adobe CMS requires careful planning and masterful execution. The process, from planning to launching Adobe Experience Manager, might encounter several obstacles like any other implementation. These problems may have the potentiality to derail the implementation process with increased costs and performance issues, if not carefully executed.

Implementing Adobe Experience Manager (to that fact, any CMS), involves careful planning, involving all stakeholders in the project, in defining project goals and requirements. A project can fail for various reasons, most notably communication gaps among key stakeholders. Engaging all stakeholders including marketing teams, IT teams, infrastructure team is the key for AEM implementation success. Below are some of the factors that may lead project implementation to failure if there is no proper alignment among your teams.

• Gathering project requirements: This is the first phase of a CQ5 implementation project where certain fundamentals like schedule, budget, and quality are defined. For this, all the teams should be involved and their opinions should be taken into consideration before starting the project. Creating a unified user experience instead of breaking down into multiple silos is critical for marketing teams to understand the complete user behavior and to offer a better user experience.
• Understanding size and complexity: Before implementing a CQ5 project, understanding the size, complexity and capabilities of the system will help an organization to define the scope of the project. So, every member involved in the implementation should understand the scope of the project to avoid confusion and incorrect assumptions, which may lead to project failure. Remember that complex projects like Adobe CQ5 implementations may tend to have changes even after the launch.
• Divergent strategies: When an organization plans to implement a project, say using CQ5, opinions of all the teams (marketing, IT, and more) should be taken into consideration. Each team has its own strategy based on their area of expertise and will differ with other teams. The outcome of this will be undefined project requirements, inadequate strategies and more, which leads to project failure.
• Disorganized roles/responsibilities: Allocating project roles to in-house teams is a key factor in defining business requirements for the project. These roles should be defined clearly and ensure they are known to everyone in the project. And each member of the project must understand their responsibilities in the project to avoid confusion. If these roles/responsibilities are not organized properly, then a member or team involved in the project can be the reason for project failure.
• Theory vs Reality: While implementing a project, an organization should consider the environment in which the end solution will be run and the end users who will use it. This will help organizations to determine the requirements for the project and to launch it as per the schedule. Projects that are implemented without any of these requirements will tend to fail in reality.
• Engaging a right partner is the key: It is quite impossible to hire all FTEs for the project implementation, especially when it is a new implementation. It may take time to build the expertise internally and build the team. While you do that, engage a qualified Adobe partner who is small but nimble to gain maximum efficiency in the deliverables.

Why engage an outside partner for implementations?
Do you have enough talent in-house? That should be the first question to ask yourselves. When it is a new implementation, I bet you may not have much talent in-house. While you breed your talent, you can’t put the project on hold, rather engage an Adobe implementation partner like NextRow to implement your CQ5 project. NextRow can bring in a different perspective to your team that will enable you to think outside the box to achieve best results.

NextRow will be a perfect partner for your outsourcing projects because we can guide you with our unique CQ5 services from strategic consulting and implementation to deploying the platform and offering training. As an Adobe solution partner, NextRow has Adobe certified CQ5 developers/architects to implement your Adobe Experience Manager projects leveraging their deep experience in working with the platform. To ensure strong relationship with our clients, we offer flexible business models including Fixed Price Model, Time and Material Model and Hybrid Business Model.

As a trusted service provider, we also offer our clients maintenance and support services (fixed development hours and L1/L2/L3 support) for your Adobe Experience Manager platforms. According to Adobe, a CQ5 platform must respond to 70% of the requests in less than 100ms; 25% requests in less than 100ms-300ms; and no page should take less than 1 second. So to monitor your CQ5 instances, NextRow has developed a tool, Remote Monitoring Center (RMC). This cloud-based solution will monitor your CQ5 platforms in multiple servers and notifies you of any issues in the platform before your audience notice them.

Figure2: A screenshot of NextRow’s RMC tool dashboard monitoring a CQ5 platform