Am I Typical?

Continuing our recent theme of how to make the hard choices in a content management implementation, I am reminded of a customer who, during design, always asked: "Is this typical? Are we typical? What is typical?"

It's a fair question, and often, a frustrating one for customers. The most technical people seem to become psychologists before your eyes — dancing around "typical" as if you asked whether their child was "normal." The more of a "guru" you ask, the more the psycho-babble of an answer you'll get.

But as with most technical people, their precision is what kills them (or you, depending on your perspective). Ask them what "typical" is and they think "hmm, I wonder what percent is required to be typical? Can I even estimate such a percentage?" Armed with this bit of insight, however, you can ask them much more precise questions to get far better answers. Like any manager, you want to know where you are placing your risk, and where the bulk of your investment (in time and money) is going. Typical for you is a way of saying "I don't want any risk here" or "I don't want to invest a lot here, just the basics." With that in mind, here are a few more precise questions you can ask of your project lead, your consultant, vendor support, industry analysts or advisors to get the answers you need:

• Have you done this before? If so, how many times? If not, has it been done by a colleague (or this vendor) before?
• Are there other customers who have this implemented? Do they use it? What did they or their users think of it? Will any of them talk about it? (An extranet forum is a great place to go for this)
• What other things have people done to solve this problem? How long did that take? (The most cost effective thing is not necessarily the most common.)

Just as important as asking precise questions like these, is listening to the answers precisely — down to the line item if necessary. For Percussion Rhythmyx customers at least, that precision is packaged in our FastForward for WCM offering. Almost every feature or setting in FastForward has some customer experience or lesson behind it. Sometimes it won't be easy to understand why something was done a certain way, and almost every customer changes some significant parts of it. But between you and me, it's a pretty good stab at "typical" the next time someone tells you there's no such thing.