Managing your website development -- eight easy steps to project management
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Simon Buehring October 04, 2006
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Simon Buehring |
Simon Buehring is a project manager, consultant and trainer and has
extensive experience within the IT industry in the UK and in Asia. He
works for KnowledgeTrain which offers project management training
courses in the UK and overseas. He can be contacted via the
KnowledgeTrain project management training website.
knowledgetrain.co.uk
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Simon Buehring
has written 1 articles for JavaScriptSearch. |
View all articles by Simon Buehring... |
Managing your website development need not cause you sleepless
nights providing you learn the secrets of successful project
management. Perform the best practices in project management and give
your project the best chance of success.
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.
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