Aldermere Group: Programme Planning & Stakeholder Management
Contents
RACI: decision rights across the engagement
Why programme planning is senior content strategy work
Aldermere Group is a constructed worked example, built to demonstrate senior content strategy practice end-to-end across a composable CMS transformation. The client name and programme specifics are fictitious. The planning methodology, stakeholder design, and artefacts are drawn from real engagements across enterprise content strategy, digital transformation, and agile delivery.
The brief
Aldermere Group is a UK-headquartered enterprise retail and lifestyle group: four sub-brands, ten markets across Europe, and approximately thirty digital properties running on a fragmented estate of legacy Sitecore instances, a bespoke CMS, and Shopify.
The target: Contentful as a unified composable content layer, with a single shared content model feeding all brands and markets via API, with brand and market context applied at the presentation layer.
The engagement: a 12-month strategic content programme delivered through an international digital consultancy. Three phases of approximately four months each. Senior Content Strategist with an end-to-end mandate, reporting to the consultancy engagement director with a dotted line to the Aldermere group digital director.
A programme of this scope, four sub-brands, ten markets, end-to-end from discovery to handover, is not a fast migration. It is a sustained strategic engagement, and the 12-month timeline reflects the complexity being managed rather than the pace of delivery.
Programme structure
A 12-month engagement of this complexity requires clear phase gates, parallel workstreams, explicit dependency management, and a governance structure that spans the consultancy team and the client organisation. Five workstreams run in parallel within each phase, each with defined activities, dependencies, artefacts, and ownership.
Each phase ends with a formal closeout and commencement brief: deliverables reviewed, sign-offs confirmed, dependencies into the next phase locked, and any open issues carried forward explicitly rather than assumed resolved.
Stakeholder design
An engagement spanning four sub-brands, ten markets, a platform engineering team, and a consultancy delivery team requires a stakeholder map that is honest about complexity rather than flattening it.
Eight stakeholder groups were mapped across four dimensions: influence (high to low), interest (high to low), decision authority (what each group can approve, veto, or must be consulted on), and engagement mode (1:1 interviews, working groups, workshops, written review).
The key stakeholder groups
Aldermere group digital director: programme sponsor, key decision-maker on architecture and governance, final approver on all major deliverables
Brand directors (four): owners of sub-brand voice and editorial direction, final approvers on brand-level decisions, consulted throughout modelling and taxonomy
Regional marketing leads (ten): owners of market-specific content, consulted on taxonomy and governance, primary audience for handover
Aldermere platform engineering: build partners, co-owners of the technical architecture, consulted on content model and migration decisions
Consultancy delivery team: engagement director, UX lead, IA lead, design lead, content design specialists, project manager
Content authors and editors: end users of the model and governance system, consulted throughout, primary audience for training and handover
The stakeholder map was used to design the engagement governance: which decisions go to which groups, what the escalation route is when groups disagree, and how the consultancy exits cleanly without leaving a governance vacuum.
RACI: decision rights across the engagement
The RACI was designed at decision level, not activity level. That distinction matters: an activity-level RACI tells you who does the work. A decision-level RACI tells you who can sign off, who must be consulted before a decision is made, and who gets told after. For a multi-brand, multi-market engagement, the latter is what prevents the programme from stalling at every gate.
An extract from the engagement RACI, covering the ten most significant decisions:
Note on dual accountability: two A entries on one row indicate joint accountability between the consultancy engagement director and the Aldermere group digital director. In strict RACI practice there is one Accountable. In real enterprise engagements, joint sign-off between consultancy and client is common for high-stakes gates and is recorded here as such.
Artefact index
25 artefacts were produced across the engagement. Each is named, phased, owned, and reviewed by a defined set of stakeholders. The artefact index also records which documents are reusable as templates for future engagements.
The index is available in full in the project plan download. A summary of artefact categories:
Stakeholder and governance artefacts: stakeholder map, RACI v1 and v2, governance framework v1 and v2, measurement framework, taxonomy governance terms of reference
Discovery and strategy artefacts: discovery interview synthesis, content inventory, five-question audit synthesis, content architecture strategy
Modelling artefacts: initial content model, production content model, field-level specifications, component library
Taxonomy artefacts: taxonomy framework v1 and v2, taxonomy governance terms of reference
Migration artefacts: migration strategy and wave plan, migration mapping documents, pilot migration report, wave migration reports
Handover artefacts: editor experience guidelines, training materials, operating model handover pack, post-engagement roadmap, closeout report
Why programme planning is senior content strategy work
Programme planning and stakeholder management are sometimes treated as project management responsibilities sitting alongside content strategy rather than inside it. On a composable content transformation of this scale, they are the same work.
The content strategist who designs the content model also has to design the stakeholder consultation process that validates it. The same person who produces the governance framework has to design the governance group that will sustain it. The same person who writes the migration strategy has to sequence the wave plan against brand priorities, engineering capacity, and regulatory go-live dates.
Upstream content strategy without programme discipline is a strategy document. With it, it is a transformation.
The Aldermere project plan is the evidence that senior content strategy work holds the programme together, not just the deliverables within it. The 25-artefact index, the phase gate structure, the decision-level RACI, and the stakeholder map are the infrastructure that makes the content model, the taxonomy, the governance, and the migration viable at enterprise scale.
