The Challenge of Web Project Management

Project management is an art and soft science that has had hundreds—if not thousands—of years to emerge. The process—whether it be for huge industrial construction projects, humanitarian endeavors, or even the day-to-day management and workflow of a fast-food restaurant—of managing a given task from fruition through to completion has been undertaken hundreds of millions of times.

So why does managing Web projects seem to be particularly challenging? There are unique difficulties in terms of how various personalities interact within Web teams.

Some of the problems can be narrowed down into three main issues:

• There is no specific structure when it comes to Web teams.
• There is no industry-wide standard for Web project management.
• There are disparities in the way various members of a given team think.

Toward Consistent Organizational Structure

In the early days of the Web, it appeared that the individual Web designer could address most site needs. There was no call at that time for complex database integration or e-commerce. In fact, most of the technologies now used to manage those complicated tasks didn’t even begin to emerge until 1995.
Prior to 1995, most Web sites were small and relatively easy to maintain by one person. But once theWeb hit the desktops of consumers, a dramatic shift occurred. Sites needed a lot more to run securely, effectively, and required updating and managing more frequently. This took more hands, and it’s where the concept of Web teams really emerged.

The economic shakeups in recent years forced a lot of design firms to close completely, or to reduce staff significantly. This has resulted in great differences in how Web projects are dealt with in various companies, government agencies, and education environments. As with many issues inWeb design, there is no real "onesize- fits-all" model, and the likelihood is that there won’t ever be, at least not in our lifetimes.

So how do you manage? The secret is to find the sweet spot in the individual project circumstances.

Creating Industry-Wide Standards for Web Project Management

Another challenge is that currently no industry-wide standards exist for Web project management. While some techniques have emerged over the years, such as Rapid Application Development (RAD), Rational Unified Process (RUP), and the concept of Extreme Programming—a means of fast-cycling software projects— the fact is these techniques exist in the programming sector, and while they may be used for Web-related applications development or database integration, they are rarely applied to the overall Web development and design processes themselves. In fact, there are very few standards for the business side of Web design, and it’s only been through convention, past experience, and drawing from other models that any form of consistent management practices have emerged.
This is not to say that there aren’t emerging books and resources available to help those who are given the job of managing a Web project. This chapter provides as many resources for you as possible, but the reality is that as aWeb project manager, you must be a very resourceful individual capable of setting project standards and guidelines appropriate for the team and/or project at hand.

Fixing Disparities in Problem-solving Approaches

A widely discussed topic in managing Web projects is the disparity in personality and subject matter expertise. All of us have, at one time or another, been party to such personality differences within our fields.

The programmer often thinks in abstract but linear chunks of information, whereas a designer might only focus on the visual and creative feel of a project. Marketing departments have their own lingo, as do the financial folks. InWeb teams, you end up with not only disparate points of view, but also differences in language use and expression.

While ideally all people working on the Web would at some point be exposed to effective communication skills (often referred to as soft skills in the corporate world), the reality is that most people focus their energies on what pays the bills and what interests them specifically, without a lot of encouragement to be more integrated in their thinking and language. This is not a fault, but it does point to the fact that no educational or professional standards have emerged just yet for those of us in the field. As a result, most of what you pick up you learn by the bootstrap method, from colleagues and friends, and on your own via books and Web sites. As a result, effectively communicating across the subfields within the industry becomes a significant challenge. When working on team-driven projects, this challenge can surface into real problems.

A great project manager can solve this by effectively identifying roles, responsibilities, and goals, and organizing the project in such a way that respects the diverse nature of individuals within a team, while also getting that team to work in tandem toward a common, clear goal.

Selecting the Project Manager

The job of the project manager is a tough one. He or she has to perform such complex tasks as the following.

• Organizing and defining roles of team members
• Defining audience, company, and client needs
• Finding symbiosis between those often divergent needs
• Creating the overall project workflow plan
• Ensuring the workflow is followed and any problems are dealt with efficiently
• Determining and staying within the project budget
• Coordinating communications between all parties involved with the project
• Keeping the peace

From a knowledge standpoint, project managers should have a minimum of some knowledge regarding every topic that the project will touch. Does this mean that the project manager has to know how to set up and maintain a Web server? Not necessarily, but understanding the broad issues and jargon involved should be part of his or her knowledge base.

In terms of skills, the most important one a project manager can have is the skill of effective communication. The project manager is the hub in the wheel—all spokes are joined at the hub. It is the project manager’sjob to keep the wheel rolling along.

Defining the Budget

No matter what a project’s scope is or the number of individuals involved with its life cycle, budget is going to play an enormous role in how the project is run. Effective budgetary administration of a project means the following:

• Gaining a full understanding of the project’s scope
• Budgeting for human resources according to real cost
• Purchasing hardware, software, or related items falls within the project budget
• Restricting spending on unnecessary steps

Of course, "time is money" so a critical aspect of effective budget management is effective use of time.

Identifying Goals

If the topic of this secret seems rather basic, let me assure you that while not difficult, it is the most often overlooked or rushed-through part of the planning process. It’s also the primary reason that projects wind up with problems.

Specific goals must be defined prior to any project. They include the following:

• Client goals. These goals are those that the client hopes to achieve.
• Audience needs. Perhaps the most overlooked issue within an overlooked issue, the audience must be taken into consideration at all steps of the project.
• Site intent. This is the reason the site is being developed in the first place. Interestingly, many people don’t really realize why they’re creating Web sites, and many failures come about from having an unclear idea of what the site is intended for.

While many planning software packages can help you identify some of these critical issues, nothing beats a pen and paper. Sit down and make lists, as detailed as possible, of each of these goal areas.

Determining the Stakeholders

In the corporate world, the term stakeholder has taken on some interesting connotations. Originally a term used to describe the individual who would hold the prize during betting, the word now tends to refer to anyone within an organization who holds power. In terms of a Web project, a stakeholder would be anyone who makes final decisions.

One of the greatest challenges in today’sWeb design is to sort out who really has power in any given situation. A major secret to successfulWeb project management means figuring out exactly who is holding the power within the organization in terms of final decision making. Typically, this is a job the project manager should undertake, although anyone providing administrative assistance can help work it out.

In analyzing the circumstances, you might very well find that there are numerous stakeholders.

Some general guidelines for clarifying stakeholders follow:

• Always determine who has the last word. This person should go on top of your hierarchy and should always be the final go-to person if problems arise.
• Determine secondary stakeholders. These are the individuals who will make decisions for specific portions of a project, such as the Marketing Manager, IT Manager, or Art Director. It’s helpful if you can make notes about the type of relationship they have with the primary stakeholder—good relationships between a secondary and primary stakeholder can in fact be used to the project manager’s advantage should disputes arise during the project.
• Try to get agreement ahead of a project that the primary stakeholder (or someone he or she designates) will have the final word in any dispute.
• Consider drawing up a hierarchy so the chain of command is clearly understood.

Determining Market Needs

Once you’ve got an idea of the project, the basic needs of the client, site intent, and audience, it’s time to determine whether the market will bear out a site of the nature you’re trying to develop. This is specific to public Web sites, but even private intranets may be improved by asking similar questions.

The goals of determining market needs include the following:

• Understanding the market size for the product or service, which you’ll be representing
• Preparing to manage any economic or other challenging factors within the market in question
• Knowing the market players and examining their methods for success or stumbling blocks
• Identifying potential competitors for long-range tracking
• Identifying potential collaborators for long-term, mutually beneficial relationships

At this stage of the game, it’s very helpful for the project manager to sit down and do serious research to answer the following questions:

• Who are the existing market players?
• How are they using their sites effectively (or not)?
• Who is their targeted demographic and is it different from the one defined by this project?
• Is there any current measure of customer satisfaction?

Of course, the real work comes in once you’ve got this information. By studying market players, economics, demographics, and current satisfaction levels, you will be best able to position your project effectively in the current market.

Identifying Roles and Responsibilities

The next step is to identify your team. Have a decent idea of who you have and what they are capable of doing. Even if you are working solo, identifying your role and what aspects of the project you are fully confident that you can be responsible for, helps you determine aspects of the projects for which you’ll require outsourcing.

Getting this information organized early on in the game is essential to a project’s success.

For both group and individual projects, use the checklist sample shown in Table below as a guideline for auditing and organizing your role and responsibilities for a project.

Sample Chart for Web Team Roles and Responsibilities

Creating a Project Workflow

Okay, your team is in place, you know who the stakeholders are, and you understand the general goals of your project and the constraints of your budget. It’stime to put a workflow in place.

Even though project management is as old as the hills, that doesn’t mean anyone has come up with the perfect workflow recipe. A lot of information has to be gathered first, including defining specific tasks. However, for this secret the emphasis is on understanding the overarching event cycle.

General project life cycle and which tasks are associated with each aspect of the project.

Listing Creative Tasks

In order to flesh out the workflow plan, separating out tasks by type will enable assignments to be made in an organized fashion. Clarifying the creative tasks for a given project includes identifying all the design and brand-related tasks.
Examples of creative tasks include:

• Content. What is the voice of the site? How will content be arranged,written, and presented?
• Design. How will the site look and feel? Which company colors, logos, and other identifiers need to be collected and produced?
• Multimedia. Will the site require multimedia? If so, which technologies will be used?

Project managers can work with their design team member(s) to come up with a comprehensive list of creative tasks appropriate to your project’s needs.

Clarifying Technical Tasks

Along with creative tasks, technical tasks must be defined and slotted into the scope of the project.

Technical tasks include the following:

• Identification of any client-side markup and scripting needs (HTML,XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript)
• Determination of whether application languages will be required, and if so, which language and platform
• Discovery of whether database functionality is required for this project, and if so, what kind of database is optimal
• Server administration (will the server be purchased, co-located, or hosted with an ISP?)

Listing Marketing Tasks

Another area where potential issues arise in team dynamics is in marketing. The goals of marketing and the goals of creating an excellent product are sometimes at odds with one another. Defining the tasks before setting project milestones can help shake these issues loose early on in the project process and may well assist the project manager in preventing delays due to warring factions of the team.

Marketing tasks can consist of the following:

• Analysis of demographic
• Research of best marketing options for product or service (ad-based marketing, ranking on search engines, cross-promotional events, and reciprocal links on collaborative sites)
• Organization of press events, including writing and delivery of press releases, and preparation and scheduling of any special events for launch
• Long-term evaluation of market needs, including scheduling of follow-ups past the site’s launch and post production, as needed

Addressing Quality Assurance Concerns

Once a site enters the production phase and everyone is happily at work, attention shifts to managing your project effectively by putting quality assurance (QA) and testing phases in place. If a project manager fails to identify quality assurance issues early in the project and is unable to schedule them accordingly, significant workflow issues can ensue.

Some of the issues examined during the QA phase include the following:

• Validation of markup and CSS
• Testing of all programming features
• Load-bearing tests (especially if the site is expected to be very heavily
• trafficked)
• Multibrowser and platform testing
• Accessibility testing
• Usability testing
• Editorial review of all content

You measure QA differently depending upon the project, its scope, and its contents. For example, if the site is required to be Section 508-compliant, you must be prepared to test for that compliancy, or time can be lost. Similarly, testing for usability must be assessed, and the methods by which you’re going to test will make a huge difference in how the project proceeds. If you’re outsourcing to a usability lab, for example, preparing for possible delays within the initial workflow milestones is a helpful way to avoid project slippage.

Setting Milestones

Once you’ve got all your research in order, your tasks defined, and your team is chomping at the bit to go, it’s time to make the schedule and set specific by-date and project-percentage milestones. Remember the following three points:

• You have to set milestones! Not doing so at the outset could cause catastrophic problems that become unmanageable later on.
• Pad the time. Figure out a probability for the length of each phase and add at least one-fifth of that time to the schedule.
• Always be willing to change them. If you see a slip coming, try to readjust the schedule without having to affect the bottom line.

Getting Signoff Throughout the Process

Signoff in this case can refer to any number of steps within the project, but usually has to do with administrative (budget, team structure), technical (use of a specific technology), or creative (approval of design).

The effective project manager will, at this point, have added very specific milestones according to the needs of the project to the master schedule that include getting stakeholder signoff more than once throughout a project process. In a hierarchical stakeholder model such as that described earlier, this likely means getting secondary stakeholder signoff for part of the project, and primary stakeholder signoff at least a few times during the process.

Encouraging Collaboration

As mentioned earlier, some experts believe that encouraging collaboration isn’t a very good idea. The argument is this: If disparate personalities are allowed to collaborate, it will take far more time to reach the goal.

While this is often true, and your unique project situations will dictate how much or how little collaborative efforts can be built-in to the project, the highly effective project manager should easily be able to include brainstorming sessions in the project timeline.

Without collaboration, a wide range of problems can occur. It’s essential to figure out a good strategy for encouraging effective, collaborative meetings. Some tips for running effective collaborative meetings include the following:

Set a specific goal for the meeting, such as "By the end of this meeting, we’ll determine which browsers the Web site must support."

• Make sure everyone gets an agenda prior to the meeting, outlining the topics, goals, and start and end times.
• Ask attendees to prepare for the meeting in advance. The designer could be asked to provide mockups of how the site will look in a variety of Web browsers; the server administrator could be asked to collect log data showing browsers using a current (or similar) project site; and the marketing person could bring in demographic information of the current and projected site visitor base.
• Allot time for each individual to discuss his or her materials, for open discussion, and for closing the meeting.
• Always walk away from a meeting with a specific action/results item, such as "Team determined that backward compatibility with Netscape 4.x browsers is not relevant to our audience. However, since it is simple enough to at least provide readable content to these users, we will incorporate those practices into the project."

To manage a team efficiently (even if you’re a "solo" Web designer using outside resources), helping everyone on your team get involved with a given project and to feel a personal relationship with the success of a project helps the individual to be at his or her best, which in turn results in a better project. If you do decide to encourage collaboration, it’sessential to work those brainstorming meetings into the project workflow, and for the project manager to take a strong but diplomatic approach.

You can find some very helpful resources online to aid you in organizing and running meetings more effectively.

Managing Scope Creep

Scope creep is the slipping of your project from the schedule that you built. If you have to, you’ll add time to the project, but this is always, always a last resort. Of course, scope creep occurs frequently, even with very good managers and teams at the helm.

So what do you do if you see dates slipping away? Sit down and reevaluate.

• Isolate the problem(s).
• Work with relevant team members to get a hold of the problem in a timely and sensible fashion without sacrificing important tasks.
• Consider adding resources (human or technical) if you believe doing so will assist the scope creep rather than adding concerns.
• If a situation becomes seemingly unmanageable, consider bringing in an external manager or moderator to help solve problems.

There are still so many emerging factors in Web design and development that it’s hard to identify risks withinWeb projects. The best project managers do everything within their knowledge and skill base to prevent scope creep, but the cost of quality must always be measured against the time and money factors, too.