Have you ever been involved with a project that didn’t have project management? Have you ever had a client insist that they didn’t need project management, or that they had a project manager on staff who could manage your team of engineers? We have experienced all of these scenarios at WebDevStudios (WDS), and we know first-hand why project management is critical to the success of a website project, be it media, eCommerce, or a website for a university.
Project Managers are typically thought of as overhead to the website project. False. Project Managers are key in organizing the project, communicating between various stakeholders, overseeing the project from initiation to completion, and ensuring budgetary and quality compliance.
Let’s break this down even further. Here’s what our Project Managers accomplish at WDS:
- Initiate and organize the project up front
- Based on the proposal, define a plan and deliverables
- Organize all deliverables into milestones
- Outline a project timeline based on milestones
- Create tasks within the project management tool for the engineering team
- Manage standard outlines of time, delivery, user story and acceptance testing per task
Project Managers are the main point of communication between the customer and development team. They also provide thorough oversight throughout the project life cycle, including:
- Scheduling any necessary meetings with stakeholders, team members, etc.
- Creating agendas for meeting agenda and managing minutes
- Coordinating and staying on top of all milestones and tasks throughout the project life cycle
- Handling communication among team members, such as executives, developers, etc.
- Managing timeline throughout project development
Project Managers are responsible for budgetary compliance and supporting quality control compliance. We achieve this by:
- Managing the client’s budget from initiation to completion
- Planning resources based on budgetary expectations
- Managing change requests that fall outside of project budget and scope
- Scheduling and overseeing the quality assurance process, reviewing the completion of milestones against the defined project scope
Having a strong skill set is important for a Project Manager and key to the success of your website project. At WDS, we have a team of Project Managers who are highly-skilled leaders, communicators, and problem solvers. We are motivated by our team of engineers and clients to achieve success on each unique website project that we manage.
Does your organization have project management? If so, what do you value most about your Project Managers? We invite you to leave a comment below. We’d love to know your thoughts on project management.