Why some web projects take too long

The project starts with good intentions. The scope is defined. The timeline looks reasonable. And then, somewhere around week eight or ten, things begin to slip. 

Deadlines get pushed. Stakeholders ask for changes. The original brief turns out to have been missing a few critical decisions. The go-live date moves, and then moves again. 

This is not a story about bad vendors or difficult clients. It is a story about how most CMS projects are structured, and why that structure almost always creates friction. 

The real reasons projects run late 

The most common culprits are not technical. They are structural and organisational.

Scope is agreed before decisions are made. Many projects begin with a scope of work that looks complete but is actually full of deferred choices. What templates are needed? How will content be structured? Who approves what? These questions get pushed into the project itself, and each one creates a decision point that can stall progress.

Stakeholder alignment is assumed, not built. A CMS touches marketing, IT, communications, and often the executive team. When their expectations diverge mid-project, which they almost always do, it costs time to realign. That realignment rarely happens quickly.

The platform is treated as the solution, not the tool. Organisations sometimes invest heavily in selecting a platform and then expect the platform itself to solve problems that are actually about process, governance, or content strategy. It doesn't. The platform is only as effective as the decisions made around it. 

Signs your CMS project is set up to run late

• Scope signed off before templates and content decisions were made
• Stakeholder alignment assumed, not tested
• Platform selected before governance or content strategy existed
• Post-launch training treated as an afterthought

A lot of projects treat launch like the end of the story, but what happens afterward is just as important. If the team that will run the site wasn’t involved in shaping it or trained to manage it, the months after go‑live can feel just as tough as the build.

A different way to think about it

The organisations that get to launch fastest, and stay happy after launch, tend to share a few things in common.

They scope tightly and add later. Rather than trying to build everything in one project, they identify the smallest useful version of the site and deliver that well. Extensions, integrations, and additional functionality are scoped as follow-on work, not crammed into the initial delivery.

They make decisions before the project starts. Content model, template structure, governance, these are worked out in a discovery phase, not improvised mid-build. When the build begins, the team is building to a clear brief rather than discovering it as they go.

They treat the transition into day‑to‑day management as part of the project. Documentation, training, and a clear post-launch support plan are built into the scope from the beginning. The internal team is ready to manage the platform on day one.

This is the thinking behind how Zeroseven structures every CMS engagement. As a recognised Kentico Accelerator Partner, we work within a delivery framework that builds these principles in from the start: decisions made before the build begins, a scope that doesn't sprawl, and a handover that leaves your team actually ready to run the platform. It's not a methodology we landed on recently. It's the pattern we kept seeing in the projects that went well.

What fast CMS projects do differently

• Scope the smallest useful version first
• Make content and template decisions before the build starts
• Involve the internal team early
• Build post-launch support into the original scope

If your last website redevelopment or CMS project ran longer than it should have, it’s helpful to look at which of these patterns contributed. And if you are planning one, it is worth asking how you would avoid them.