Anyone can develop a website…
It’s true. Anyone right out of a vocational design school can develop a website.
Agencies, Designers, Consultants, Developers, Contractors, and even Students can all develop websites. Who’s right for your project?
Selecting the wrong vendor, the wrong contractor, the wrong team can not only cost you thousands of dollars, but can set you back months and months in development effort. A failed website development project can cause product launch delays, loss of market share to competition, loss of credibility in market place, and ongoing maintenance and update problems. Most websites, once developed, will be open to public criticism from employees, customers, vendors, partners, and even your competitors. You simply can’t brush a failed website deployment under the carpet and start over!
Do you know what questions to ask when interviewing candidates? Do you know the criteria to use for making the selection? Do you have a checklist for evaluating vendors?
Do you have your requirements documented? Have you led and successfully deployed an enterprise class website before? Chances are, you’ve answered “NO” to some of these questions.
Are you managing a website development project for the first time? If you answered “YES,” you’ll need help! Continue reading….
In this paper, you will learn how to plan for your project.
What is a Web Development Plan?
Eight out of ten projects that fail, fail because of lack of scoping and planning.
Follow this five-step process for creating a development plan for your website.
Document your requirements Rank your requirements on difficulty of implementation and value to organization Visually map your requirements based on your rankings Phase it out. Don’t try to do everything at once. Go for the “low hanging fruit.” Setup a Timeline for each requirement.
We will discuss each of the steps in more detail below.
Step 1: Document your Requirements
Start documenting your requirements by creating an indented outline of your
requirement. Create an outline of your site map and your organizational and technical requirements.
The Site Map is a hierarchical list of all pages on your website. The top of the hierarchy is your Home page. The rest of the pages and sub-pages go under that.
Organization requirements are items like “HR needs to be able to manage the open positions section of the website.” Each department will have their own requirements and your outline should capture all these requirements.
Technical requirements are items like “The website needs to enter leads into our
SalesForce.com implementation.”
Make a complete list of your requirements first without thinking about how much time and energy it will take or if it’ll even be done in the first few phases.
Step 2: Rank your Requirements
We call this process the “Complexity/Value Assessment.” Here you’re going to re-visit your requirements list and rank the technical and organization feasibility of each item. If an item is easy to do technically and easy to implement organizationally, then you rank it a 5. If its hard to do technically and difficult to implement organizationally, then you rank it a 1. The easiest thing to do is to generally give each item a separate organizational and technical ranking and then take an average of the two. This number tells you how hard or easy an item will be to implement.
Go through your requirements list one more time and set a value on each item. Use High, Medium, or Low for value. Consider short- and long-term value for each item.
Step 3: Map your Requirements
Number each item on your requirement list and map the numbers on a Complexity/Value Chart. Here’s what the chart should look like.
The Y-Axis represents the “Value” of the requirement and the X-Axis is its “Difficulty of Implementation.”
You can now visually see the “low hanging fruit” in the top right quadrant. These are all the items that are easy to implement and have a high value.
Step 4: Phase it out.
Phase I generally consists of all the items in the “green band.” These include the “low-hanging-fruit,” items that are of high importance and perhaps diffi cult to do, and items that are easy to do but may be of low value. Be aware that some items in the green band might depend on items in the yellow or the red bands, and those will have to be dealt with in the detailed project plan. This tool will only show you, at a very high level, the distribution of requirements. Review all the items in Phase I and give it a wishful completion date.
Phase II generally consists of items in the “yellow band.” Review the items to and give this phase a wishful completion date.
Phase III. There are items in the red band. They are hard to do and of low value. We generally never get to them.
Step 5: Setup a Timeline.
This is a simple process of setting up a high-lev el project plan with names of responsible groups…. This is not a detailed project plan yet. Use this as a communication tool rather than a project management tool. When the project is approved, off and running, you can add details to this plan and use it as a project
management tool if you like.
In the process of completing these steps, you have now defined the scope of the project, documented the requirements, ranked requirements by priority, assessed the feasibility of each requirement technically and organizationally, phased out the development plan, and you have created a high-level timeline for the project. You are now on the right path to a successful completion for your project.
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