Do you manage any web projects? If you said “yes,” you’ll probably agree with us that it’s one of the most stressful, especially since so many companies now let their workers work from home. But managing the projects that go into making a website shouldn’t keep you up at night if you know how to do it well.
By following the best project management practices in your field, you can make it more likely that your project will be successful. You will find that reading this article will help you manage web projects in a big way.
What is Project Management?
When we talk about project management, we mean the use of techniques, methods, skills, knowledge, and experience to reach certain project goals in line with project acceptance criteria while staying within agreed-upon parameters. Deliverables at the end of a project must stick to a strict schedule and budget to be considered a success.
Unlike management, which is an ongoing process, project management ends with a tangible result after a certain amount of time. This is one of the most important things that makes project management different from other kinds of management. Because of this, project managers need technical, people management, and business abilities.
What is Website Project Management?
When websites are being managed, the different needs of internal (or external) team members are broken down into specific tasks and subtasks, which are then dealt with in a cooperative way.
The goal of website project management is to create a more efficient workflow. This is done by giving teams more information about the tasks they are responsible for.
A good plan for managing website projects makes it easier for everyone to finish things. They include building new sites, redesigning landing pages, and moving sites. This can be done by setting clear deadlines or “milestones” for the project.
There are a lot of moving parts in these roles that need help from other teams. Those in charge of design, content, development operations, or search engine optimization are among them. Almost always, a team works together to manage a website project. This is one of the things that makes this group different from others.
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Things to Note for Web Project Management
Website projects can be successful or fail depending on how well they are managed. Keeping things running smoothly can be done with the help of good project management. The right website project management software also aids in this. On the other hand, not following the right steps can lead to 404 errors, buggy designs, unhappy customers, and more.
This section will walk you through the steps you need to take to manage website projects effectively.
Essential Tips
We will tell you everything you need to focus on regarding managing website projects in this section. The tips here are relevant to how to plan, build, optimize, finish, and launch your product or service better.
Describing Your Goals And Aims
Everyone working on the project will know where you want to go when they look at the goals. Some of your goals might be to sell your products online, help your customers, and build relationships with investors. Make a decision based on what you know, and write down as much as you can about it.
Find the most important success criteria. These are the things that, at the end of the project, will tell you if you were successful or not. Make sure you can measure them so you can tell if you’ve reached them. For example, by the end of the year, online sales should go up by 25% because the website is getting bigger.
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Stakeholder Analysis
A “stakeholder” is someone who has a personal stake in how your project turns out (or failure). Find out who they are and whether they will support your idea or not. Do an analysis of the stakeholders by putting them into groups and giving each one a high or low score. These scores will be based on how much they want to help (or stop) your project and how much power they have (high or low).
Your allies are people who are on your side and have a lot of power. Try to get as much help from them as you can. Try to make less of an impact on people who have a lot of power but are against your initiative. What these people do could hurt the success of your project.
As you do your analysis of the stakeholders, make plans for how you will interact with the different groups.
Define Deliverables
Deliverables are the results of successfully managing a website project. Discussing the deliverables with the main stakeholders is a good place to start. Will the programming team be able to use the web page layouts and sitemap that your website design makes? What kind of information is included on each page? Write everything down.
The key stakeholders are required to assess the deliverables. They are there also to reach consensus on what they expect to be delivered.
The Planning of Projects
Give details about how you want to reach your goals while managing the website project. To do this, you need to make a plan for how much money, resources, and people you will need. If you want to handle delivery internally, you should figure out what kinds of activities are needed.
You might, for instance, choose that a web designer will be responsible for developing page layouts and navigation diagrams. In addition, you might think that the marketing staff will give you all the information and photos about the product. You and your finance manager also might agree that the finance manager will set up merchant and payment gateway accounts on your website to allow ecommerce transactions. When you hire someone else to do work for you, be very clear about what you want them to do.
Make a realistic schedule and budget based on your estimates of how much time and work each activity will take. Make sure that the most important people have looked over the plan and budget and agreed to it.
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How Communication is Planned
To get things going, you should get the team together and talk about the plan. Make sure everyone knows the whole agenda and what they need to do.
For example, the web designer needs to know what the marketing manager needs. He needs to know when he plans to start and when he plans to finish.
Your project’s communication plan would be helpful to the team. This should include specifics regarding the report templates, the frequency of reporting and meetings. In addition, the resolution of any issues between different teams is also crucial.
Tracking
It is necessary to maintain a continuous monitoring of the differences between the actual costs, projected schedules, and actual scope. If there are variations, important stakeholders should be informed, and corrective actions should be taken if necessary. While managing the website project it, you will need to balance the budget, scope, and timeline to get it back on the right track.
Imagine if your programmer runs across some technical difficulties that could cause the project to be delayed. You might be able to reclaim some time by reorganizing the remaining chores or cutting them down. If that is not an option, you may increase the budget so that you may hire another programmer. In addition, you may want to think about narrowing the project’s focus in some other areas.
Be conscious of the fact that the quality of the deliverables could be negatively impacted by any changes you make to the plan. If you have to increase the budget, you need to ask the sponsor of the project’s permission first.
Change Management
Once they are underway, all initiatives undergo transitions. Together with the main stakeholders, decide on a straightforward transformation strategy. This could be a committee that decides whether modifications should be accepted or rejected. Said committee will be made up of you and one or more other essential stakeholders.
Evaluate the effects of each modification on the project’s scope, budget, and timeline. Choose whether you will comply with the change or not. The more changes you agree to implement, the lower your chances become of finishing the project on time and within budget. This is the case unless you limit the scope of the work in some of the other areas.
Let’s say that the marketing manager wants to add a pop-up window so that full-size photos of products can be displayed. Consider the repercussions of making this adjustment. It is possible that you may need to eliminate some of the remaining tasks in order to incorporate this modification while maintaining the current budget. Alternatively, it may be impossible to incorporate the change without substantially raising either the cost or the duration of the project.
If you accept modifications without first determining their significance, your project will run longer than expected.
FURTHER READING: |
| 1. How to Manage Time Effectively for Assignments? |
| 2. 4 Best Web Scraping Projects To Automate Your Work & Life In 2023 |
Risk Management
The potential occurrence of events that pose a threat to the achievement of the project’s goals is referred to as a risk. Early risk assessment is essential for managing a website project. Consider the likelihood of each danger occurring and make a decision. Determine how significant an influence it will have on the project.
The most severe risks are those that both have a high probability of occurring and a significant potential effect. A medium danger can be posed by an event with either high impact but unlikely hazards or low impact but likely risks. The least dangerous types of dangers are those that are both unlikely and have a modest impact.
Develop a plan that details the steps that must be taken to mitigate the impact of the risk in the event that it materializes. First address the most severe dangers, then move on to the ones that are more manageable. Examine the dangers on a regular basis. If new ones come up, add them to the list.
Imagine that the marketing manager is at a loss as to what he wants the website to provide for him. It is impossible for the team to deliver a website that will live up to the marketing manager’s standards if they do not know what he wants. According to your analysis, the likelihood of this risk materializing and its associated severity are both high. It’s possible that your contingency plan will involve the web designer creating page layouts that will be checked over by the management early on in the project.
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Website Project Management Methodologies
Before you start working on website projects for clients, you and the other people on your agency’s team should talk about how you plan to do the job. It is best to choose a style of project management that fits both the needs of your teams and the needs of your clients. This will make things easier for everyone.
Below are 3 of the best methods for managing website projects.
Waterfall
One of the most common and time-tested ways to plan and build a website is to use the Waterfall method. This method sets up the different steps of a project in order, with the idea that each step will be finished before moving on to the next.
Website project management businesses that utilize this way of managing website projects do their responsibilities to the best of their abilities before passing them on. When a project or task enters a new phase, the team reviews and commits previous changes. Project management works best for clients that know what they want and how to get there. Before starting the project, the agency and client agree on a timeframe and budget that will be followed as closely as feasible.
Agile
The fact that projects are broken up into iterative periods called “sprints” is one reason why the Agile method is so popular. This lets development leads plan complicated launches by separating the different stages of a project’s life cycle while taking on a good amount of new work at the same time.
Agile methodology breaks down every part of a project into smaller tasks, like research and wireframes, instead of focusing on reaching important milestones, like those for building a website. The project’s progress can be tracked from the very beginning to the very end because each of these steps represents a milestone.
Instead of delivering a single, finished product before it is released to the public, agile software development focuses on giving the customer value quickly and improving the product over time. This method of project management makes it possible for teams to create up-to-date information in a timely manner and stay relevant even as market needs change. A sprint could last anywhere from two weeks to one month. If you’re used to working on website projects that take six months to a year or more, this way of managing projects may sound crazy to you.
Scrum
The Scrum method is another affective way of managing website projects. It puts a lot of emphasis on sprints and cycles. To use this method to manage a project well, you will need a leader, who is also called a “Scrum Master” Tasks from a backlog will be put into “sprints,” that won’t last longer than two weeks each.
During each sprint, everyone working on the project does a Daily Scrum, which is a daily check-in, and gives the project manager an update. They do this by telling the manager what they plan to do today, what they finished yesterday, and what, if anything, is slowing them down.
After each sprint, the project manager will evaluate the team’s progress and make any necessary changes before starting the next iteration. This usually happens during a meeting to look back or at the end of a sprint. After that, the process is done again and again until the project is done.
Conclusion
Even though they don’t have the title “project managers,” almost anyone can and does run projects. Have you ever planned an event? In that case, you were in charge of getting that project done with a group of people, and being able to lead people well is an important life skill. The same is true for managing projects that have to do with websites.
Even though companies can hire the best developers who have the best ideas and plans for building a website to work on different projects, the development process can be made more efficient by using the right guidelines and methods. This is exactly how our article can be useful.
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