Project Management

5 Steps to Managing your Website Development Project

5 Steps to Managing your Website Development Project

1. Define Objectives

You’d think this would be obvious but in a lot of situations this critical part of any project is often overlooked. Writing down your objectives is crucial to a healthy development process. Are your objectives to provide better customer support, find investors, or sell your product on a mobile app?

Decide what will define the success of your project, so in the end, you can see if it was a success or still requires improvement. For example: "After completing this project, we will see a 25% increase in site traffic."

2. Who is your Stakeholder?

The stakeholder is someone highly influential in the success or failure of your project. Defining who this person is and understanding how motivated they are in helping or blocking your success is what sets the tone for the partnership. Motivated and highly supportive stakeholders are important and you should quickly gain their trust and work closely together. If the person is highly influencial and is against your project, try to reduce their influence so they don’t damage the end result.

3. Planning

How will you reach your goals? Define and document the budget, resources, and timeline. Will the marketing team supply the photographs and logos? How much of the budget is allocated to images? Is the designer working on wireframes and prototypes?

Documenting a realistic schedule for each activity should allow you to come up with a honest budget. It is important that your stakeholder reviews and approves your budget. It is also important to define a communication plan, such as frequency of reporting and meetings. Once the schedule, communication plan, and budget are set, hold a kick off meeting to review them with the team.

4. Tracking

Constantly monitoring the variations between actual and budgeted costs, and also keeping a close eye on scope, should be priorities. Report any changes immediately to stakeholders.

When variations occur, such as a technical problem, you could recover time by altering some remaining tasks, or increasing the budget. Keep in mind, any adjustments will affect other areas of your project, such as quality of deliverables.

Maintaining an open and honest communication with the stakeholder or project lead is key.

5. Risks

Best case scenario is to identify risks early in a project. What will happen? Is it likely or unlikely to occur? Document if this risk will impact the project on a major scale or not. Create a plan on how to handle these risks in case they do occur. First, deal with the most severe risks and then make your way to the lower impact ones.

Summary

The key to any project is clear communication and thorough documentation. Keep your team updated and make sure they know what is expected of them.

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