Evolving Project Management for Evolving Website Technologies

Submitted by Brett on Wed, 07/28/2010 - 7:47am.
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Steve Backman, Database Designs

Websites have changed a lot over the past few years. Content management systems (CMS) have transformed standard expectations -- about posting news and updates without web design skills, managing donors and other constituents, opening up sections of your site to your community, tracking results, and more. And open source systems such as Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, and Plone have brought these features within reach of organizations with limited budgets and staffing. 

Yet, when it comes to organizing the redesign or replacement of an older-style site, many organizations expect to manage the process much as they had the last one. To get the most out of a modern site, however, you need to have a different kind of project management approach.

Matching Planning to Site Goals

Some things, quite naturally, remain the same, like having clear goals and good planning. Other things have changed with the technology, such as maintaining flexibility throughout the project. Getting these things matched up correctly can make all the difference in managing a successful web project. 

Interactive and decentralized are the two adjectives that best characterize what’s different, or can be different, in the best sites today.

To oversimplify a bit, modern web sites can be more interactive. They don’t have to be, and not surprisingly, "interactive" runs a continuum, but essentially, this means more staff or volunteers with wider skills can report, write, edit, and publish news and other articles; it doesn’t just have to be a technically trained communications specialist. But interactive also means members, donors, supporters, and activists can do things on their own that build up your organization and its causes. Not everyone wants, or needs, the same amount of “interactive", but it sets the tone for many web planning conversations these days.

To oversimplify again, modern web development technologies are also more forgiving of changed minds, evolutionary thinking, and learning from experience. You still pay a steep price for not planning and organizing, but your site may not need the extensive linear calendar and preordained centralized decision-making that dominated web project management for many years. 

Not every site can or needs to balance these changing expectations the same way. What can be challenging for the strategist is when someone says something like, "Our new site should have a 'members only' section." The organization may not have much consensus about the goals, planning, and staffing they need to match expectations. It's all about getting things into the right balance.

Here are five thoughts and lessons to consider:

  1. Escape the linear calendar. Older-style traditional sites pretty much required a progression that ensured the design work was done first. For some projects, that may still make sense. With a modern CMS, however, you can create the basic framework of the site independently of the visual design and then layer that in later as part of “theming” the site. It really depends on what will best serve your goals. A project can proceed in traditional phases, which might run along the lines of: overall goals and features, sitemap, wireframe, visual design, customized features, initial content, training, building out the rest, converting data, and finally, launching. Or it may proceed iteratively, with traditional processes overlapping and the site launching in a limited way and then undergoing progressive refinement and expansion. Modern CMS tools make it possible to update and build out a lot of content relatively independently of selecting and refining a site's visual design theme. Should you do this? It may help you meet overall schedule deadlines and help your team refine its decisions about the site. In other cases, it may confuse reviewers to see the content without the design. The point is, you have choices.
  2. Build the project team around program staff and other “content specialists”, not just around those with traditional technical skills. Modern web projects should take advantage of staff with design skills, including Dreamweaver, Photoshop and the rest; work with those tools still plays an important role. But the overall success of a CMS-based web project will depend less on them and more on ensuring that the broadest possible team is ready to contribute content in a timely way. It may be a marketing and communications team; it may include an Executive Director’s personal blog; it may be rotating news from program staff; it may be volunteer commentators from the board, key activists, and allies. The project plan needs to focus on defining who will provide the content and ensuring it plays out that way much more than was the case five or ten years ago.
  3. Be realistic about time from organizational staff. Potentially at odds with the last point, just because the new tools lower the barrier for organizational staff to participate and contribute doesn’t mean they will have the time and internal support to do so. If an outside developer’s budget gets trimmed based on the expectation that organizational staff will build out content, create the CSS, or perform other essential activities, the team needs to be sure those staff members will have time within the project schedule.
  4. Monitor and look to integrate the interactive features, don’t add them a la carte and leave them to fend for themselves. Interactive tools for donations, event registration, email sign-up, polls and surveys, contacting your legislator, commenting on blogs, linking to social media -- these have all been around for a while. Picking and choosing among tools from the digital buffet table today may end up confusing your constituents and frustrating your executive leadership. Since every organization now has access to these types of tools, it makes sense to focus on those that really make a difference -- for your organization -- and that you can collect and compare numbers (metrics) for. This works best when you can integrate those tools with each other and a single back-end contact database -- the CRM (contact relationship manager) -- alongside the CMS.
  5. Using interactive tools won’t automatically substitute for staffing and organization. Understaffed organizations and under-organized ones that want to use a lot of decentralized, community-oriented tools may find that their new site slips away into fuzzy messaging and co-option by partners on the fringe. More likely however, it may just fizzle away entirely, those on-line community features -- commenting, discussion forums, petitions, surveys, take action -- sitting there underutilized. You still need things like the circuit e-mail -- and now social media, outreach, lively web landing pages, and staff monitoring of your interactive features.