This is part 2 of a series focusing on the different approaches to a successful digital project. Cameron Walker writes from the technical viewpoint and how to deal with big requirements.

At Areeba, we do a lot of web projects.  Big ones.  Building websites from the ground up, or completely reorganising and redeveloping them.  Web site (re)development projects are a specialised flavour of IT project, and a project that most organisations don’t often undertake, so driving the process to help deliver the best website solution is a key part of what we do for our clients.

In this post I will highlight some areas to understand when approaching your web project  Structuring your thinking and approach like this will, I believe, greatly improve your chances of success!

1) Know your goals for the project

A web site doesn’t operate in a vacuum.  It needs to align with the short-medium term goals of your organisation.  Once these goals are understood, the goals for the project can be established.  The project goals will be the primary force which shapes your new site, so this is a key step.

Project goals for web site projects are often some combination of:

• Generating revenue
• Increasing awareness of the organisation or a key message
• Increasing engagement with customers
• Driving down organisational costs through automating services

For each one, it is also important to be able to have a way to measure the success of the project against the goals outlined.  For example if increased engagement with customers is a goal, an increase of the time spent on the website per visit of 50% might be a target.  This would need to be supported by a web analytics tool to measure this on both the old and the new site to confirm whether the project was successful in meeting that goal.

This approach allows you to review the decisions made on a project and work out how to approach subsequent releases more effectively.

2) Know your constraints

Whilst project goals point towards a best case solution, the opposing force on your project are the constraints within which the solution needs to fit.  These generally start with the obvious ones:

• Budget
• Time-lines

Apart from that there are some other key areas where constraints often come into play:

• Organisational policy – these are generally business rules that can’t be changed and which could impact decisions on the project.
• Platform – including technology stack, hosting environment, integration needs and non-functional areas like availability and performance

Objectives and constraints together create a framework within which decisions on a project can be sensibly made.  The target solution for your web site project should be one that fits within your constraints and maximises return against your project objectives.

3) Know your audience

Although the objectives of the organisation are the key driver behind a website project, it is important to be aware that the audience for your website is usually not the organisation itself, but rather key segments of the general public.  Understanding who your audience is and how to structure your site and target your content to those audience groups is a subject in itself, best left to a future article by our digital strategists.  Suffice to say that knowing who your users really are and why they are visiting your site is a key underpinning requirement for user centred design, and a usable website will always contribute to your success.

4) Understand the big picture

Rome wasn’t built in a day.  Similarly attempting to conceive of, build and release a website in one big bang is likely to cause at the least a lot of waste, and at worst a complete project failure.  A better approach is to break down your development into a program of smaller releases.  Spend a part of your overall budget to release an initial core of content and functionality, and then gather information about how it is performing, so that evidence based decisions can be made about what to include in further releases building upon that initial core.

As our MD pointed out just the other day – whilst waterfall approaches with big requirements up front are generally instituted as an attempt to gain greater control over the development process, in actual fact you end up losing a lot of control because you can’t easily tune the project once it is underway.  Instead try to focus on the delivery of a core set of content and functionality which addresses your objectives and meets your constraints, keep it simple and resist the temptation to include something in your site just because it is the latest cool thing.  Not every site has to be Facebook!

Once you have this baseline in place, validate against the measures for success that you have – letting you know whether you are on the right track with your approach before you spend a lot of time, effort and money on something that isn’t working as you expected. You can then use this extra information to take an evidence based approach to future phases of the web site development.  This approach of iterative refinement gives you back your control over the development process, and ensures that every dollar you spend on your web site is being targeted efficiently towards your objectives.

The best way to organise and run your website is to consider it to be an asset, with regular minor releases through-out it’s active lifetime.  This will help to ensure that effort is targeted and efficient, and will also help if keep fresher for longer.

Conclusion

So there you have it!  Once you understand these four areas, you should be well on your way to completing a successful web site development.  You might not get what you thought you wanted, but this approach will maximise your chance of getting what you need!

Thanks to our image source: http://fav.me/dzvhww

Find more in your workshop for a successful digital project:

Part 1 – taking an operational strategy approach: 6 Steps To Your Successful Digital Strategy
Part 3 – the project management part to it: 6 Rules To Avoid Killing Your Web Project
Part 4 – the creative brief: 5 Principles To Effective Web Design
Part 5 – a take on methodologies: 7 Reasons Why Waterfall Methodology Stinks