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Managing your website development - eight easy steps to project management
Define objectives
Objectives guide everyone on the project to your final goals.
Are your objectives to sell your product online, to provide
customer support, to promote investor relations? Carefully
decide and clearly document your objectives.
Decide the critical success factors - the things at the end of
the project which tell you if you've been successful. Make them
measurable so you know if you've achieved them. For example, the
website development should result in an increase in online sales
of 25% by year end.
Stakeholder analysis
A stakeholder is someone with an interest in your project's
success (or failure). Decide who they are and whether they
support your project. Perform stakeholder analysis by
classifying them (high or low) according to how motivated they
are in helping (or blocking) your project and how influential
(high or low) they are.
Highly influential and supportive people are your allies. Gain
their support whenever you can. Aim to reduce the influence of
people who are both highly influential and against your project
as these people could act to damage your project.
During your stakeholder analysis, draw up strategies for dealing
with each group of stakeholders.
Define deliverables
Deliverables are tangible things produced during the project.
Talk with key stakeholders to help define deliverables. Will
your website design include web page layouts and sitemap for use
by the programming team? What is the content for each page?
Write all this down.
Key stakeholders must review and agree the deliverables
accurately reflect what they expect to be delivered.
Project planning
Define how you will arrive at your objectives. This involves
planning how many people, resources and budget are required. If
delivering this in house, decide what activities are required to
produce each deliverable.
For example, you might decide a web designer will develop page
layouts and navigation diagrams. You might decide the marketing
team will supply all product details and photographs. You might
decide the finance manager will set up merchant and payment
gateway accounts to enable e-commerce transactions via your
website. If outsourcing work, specify exactly what the
sub-contractor should deliver.
Estimate the time and effort required for each activity and
decide realistic schedules and budget. Ensure key stakeholders
review and agree the plan and budget.
Communication planning
Hold a kick off meeting with the team and explain the plan.
Ensure everyone knows exactly what the schedule is, and what is
expected of them.
For example, the web designer needs to know that he is to
produce page layouts and navigation diagrams based upon the
marketing manager's requirements. He needs to know his expected
start and end times.
Share your project communication plan with the team. This should
include details of report templates, frequency of reporting and
meetings, and details of how conflicts between teams and their
members will be resolved.
Project tracking
Constant monitoring of variations between actual and planned
cost, schedule and scope is required. Report variations to key
stakeholders and take corrective actions if variations occur. To
get a project back on track you will need to juggle cost, scope
and schedule.
Suppose your programmer hits technical problems which threaten
to delay the project. You might recover time by re-organising or
shortening remaining tasks. If that's not possible, you might
consider increasing the budget to employ an additional
programmer, or consider reducing the scope in other areas.
Be aware that any adjustments you make to the plan might affect
the quality of deliverables. If you need to increase the budget,
seek approval from the project sponsor.
Change management
Once started, all projects change. Decide a simple change
strategy with key stakeholders. This could be a committee which
decides to accept or reject changes which comprises of you and
one or more key stakeholders.
Assess the impact of each change on scope, cost and schedule.
Decide to accept or reject the change. Be aware that the more
changes you accept the less chance you have of completing the
project on time and within budget unless you reduce scope in
other areas.
Suppose the marketing manager wants to add a popup window to
display full size photographs of products. Assess the impact of
this change. You might need to remove some remaining tasks to
include this change and stay within budget. Or, it might be
impossible to include the change without increasing the budget
or schedule.
Don't blindly accept changes without assessing the impact or
your project will overrun.
Risk management
Risks are events which can adversely affect the success of the
project. Identify risks to a project early. Decide if each risk
is likely or unlikely to occur. Decide if its impact on the
project is high or low.
Risks that are likely to occur and have high impact are the
severest risks. High impact but unlikely risks, or low impact
but likely risks pose a medium threat. Unlikely and low impact
risks pose the least threat.
Create a mitigation plan of the actions necessary to reduce the
impact if the risk occurs. Start with the severest risks first,
then deal with the medium risks. Regularly review risks. Add new
ones if they occur.
Suppose the marketing manager cannot decide what he wants from
the website. Without knowing what the marketing manager wants,
the team cannot deliver a website to meet his expectations. You
assess this risk as highly likely to occur and having high
impact. Your mitigation plan might be that the web designer
develops page layouts to be reviewed by the manager early in the
project.
Summary
Performing best practices in project management will give your
website development project the best chance of success.
About the author:
Simon Buehring is a project manager, consultant and trainer and
has extensive experience within the IT industry in the UK and
Asia. He works for KnowledgeTrain which offers project management
training courses in the UK and overseas.