BIW 30503 : WEB PROJECT MANAGEMENT

1. BIW 30503: WEB PROJECT MANAGEMENT Chapter 3: PROJECT CLARIFICATION

2. PROJECT CLARIFICATION • Importance of High Quality Project • Discover, Refine and Define • Commercial Requirements • Creative Requirements • Technical Requirements • Content Requirements • Schedule, Cost and Resources

3. Introduction • What next steps should be? • Who will be taking the plunge with? • Aim : • to get team spirit going • to begin to get the feel for a common purpose and goal.

4. Introduction • Full understanding of • client’s commercial goals, • financial, technical, creative, resourcing context in which those commercial goals need to be set • Asking questions to client • Understand client’s operating environment • client’s motivation • level of thinking.

5. Fundamental Questions

6. Introduction • Two-way knowledge transfer process. • ignorance to knowledge • Team >> client’s business environment • Client >> team’s particular skills, working practices and online expertise

7. Deliverables at the Project Clarification Work Stage • A project brief – details the business, creative, technical and content requirements. • An outline of a budget, schedule, resources plan for the project. • A full preproduction budget, schedule and resources plan.

8. Where the Project Manager Fits In • Phase is crucial to the success of the project >> most experience people. • Ensure the project gets off to a good start + follow the best possible development path. • Most senior project manager will coordinate this phase. • Input from the client + consultant

9. Project Manager Fits In • Understand how it came into being + what it hopes to become >> easier to understand the project + make sure it meets its higher objectives • High degree of commitment  involved + consulted at the early stages.

10. Importance of High Quality Project • Successful web site  reinvention and extension of the existing business. • Draw the best of the resources that reside across potentially all departments of the company. • Need the authority and support of a high-level project sponsor. (At least COO)

11. Importance of High Quality Project • Reason for high-level support: • maximize speed of critical decision making • ensure budgetary control. • Longer key decisions made  larger the organization + by committee. • Rare for a project to cost less than originally predicted. • Room in schedules + budgets = overrun.

12. Importance of High Quality Project • More money >> communicate with someone from top management. • Seen as an important project. • Have the full attention of the necessary high-level people.

13. Opportunities – 1st Work Stage • Commitment • Trust • Relationships • Scope and budget • Inspiration • Protect yourself • Education • Working Practices

14. Opportunities - Commitment • Involving people in the project > build commitment to it. • Start to generate momentum and enthusiasm.

15. Opportunities - Trust • Excel  create trust between client and project team. • Invaluable to upcoming work stages. • Increased scope for friction and unexpected issues. • Important thing to develop – first impressions count >> make a good start.

16. Opportunities - Relationships • Develop working relationships. • It sets the tone for the rest of the project. • Creating new relationships and new working groups. • Getting to know and work with new people, seeing new faces and doing new work. • Key to developing new business opportunities.

17. Opportunities – Scope and Budget • Initial expected scope and budget for the project. • Opportunity to sell the client on upgrading the project to the bigger picture. • Possible if more budgets and resources are available. • Strong arguments for chasing these opportunities.

18. Opportunities – Inspiration • Have specified the project  more about doing than thinking. • Creative and commercial insight. • Opportunity to be inspired. • Inspired client confidence, trust and admiration.

19. Opportunities – Protect Yourself • Negative way of stating what is a much more positive element. • Responsibility needs to be shared. • Lead to a much better quality end results. • Avoid the fingers of blame. • Clear – opportunity and responsibility. • Opening the project up to a wider group of people.

20. Opportunities – Education • A lot is learned during a Web project by all involved. • Learning can be a very positive experience. • Nature of the work involved + importance of it + the opportunities it brings. • Asking the appropriate questions. • Giving reasons for the questions.

21. Opportunities – Working Practices • The first contact with each other. • Chance to set expectations and standards in terms of working practices. • It gets people used to how documents will be presented, how meetings will be run and etc. • Next work stages  already project protocol established.

22. Discover, Refine, Define • Known as the discovery phases. • Discovering and uncovering all available information that will inform your approach. • To reach the point at producing the deliverables for the project – discover, refine, define.

23. Discover • Attempt to discover as much as possible about what it is the client thinks they want and why. • Any supporting rationale, documents, projects and other work that has gone into the project to date should also be collated and reviewed at this stage. • Conducting a knowledge and resource audit.

24. Discover • Conduct workshops and interviews to access current aspirations. • Analyze the organization’s technology and business infrastructure to access the opportunities and limitations associated with the project.

25. Discover • Determine what personnel and other resources could be leverage to the benefit of the project. • Discover what you need to know, you need to ask.

26. Refine • Available facts, figures and information  begin to refine the proposed project. • Proposed project  suggesting other opportunity, suggesting alternative options and investigating the client’s assumptions. • Best of what offered by client and match with expertise.

27. Refine • Respect the client. • Add value to the ideas by your experience. • Not really proposing a solution. • Suggesting alternative ways of doing things.

28. Define • Clear on the project requirements and scope  Define = What work is required to make it happen. • Confident of putting together a budget an schedule for the next 2 work stages. • Feel of: • How much the entire project will cost? • What resources will be needed? • How long it will take?

29. Define • Not yet in a position to start building a web. • Although much clearer about what you want, not necessarily sure about the best way to do it. • Work are still not carefully defined to have a meaningful contract or resources to implement the works.

30. Commercial Requirements • At this stage, find out • What the client is hoping to achieve • How align is it to the business objectives. • What the competitors are doing? • What the aims of the current site? • Client’s aim • “The leading web site in X business sector”.

31. Commercial Requirements – Questions in general commercial area

32. Commercial Requirements – Questions in general commercial area

33. Commercial Requirements – Questions in finance area

34. Commercial Requirements – Questions in marketing area

35. Commercial Requirements – Questions in marketing area

36. Creative Requirements • Creative concept  creative skills • Existing site, logo, brochures and etc  Creative treatment • Corporate design guidelines. • Justify to the clients – if cannot follow the design guidelines. • Help the creative process  as much visual material

37. Creative Requirements questions

38. Creative Requirements questions

39. Creative Requirements • Producing communications brief  creative team. • Communications brief  creative resources. • Creative resources  Conceptual and information base to work and think from. • Visual material + design guidelines. • Information  target audience, technical restraints, competitor activity and etc.

40. Creative Requirements • Client – review this brief. • Approve the designs developed in the next work stage? • How and why ? • For creative team

41. PROJECT CLARIFICATION • Importance of High Quality Project • Discover, Refine and Define • Commercial Requirements • Creative Requirements • Technical Requirements • Content Requirements • Schedule, Cost and Resources

42. Technical Requirements • Know more about client’s current server and hosting arrangements • Strong preference? – ISP, server hardware and software. • Web related skills currently exist – • updating and maintenance mechanisms • Client’s standard corporate desktop machine  OS + web browser + etc

43. Technical Requirements - Questions

44. Technical Requirements - Questions

45. Technical Requirements • Technical brief –captures all of the required information for technical consultant to define the optimal technical solution for the project.

46. Content Requirements • Good content - expensive to create or to buy. • Web content – early days + now • Client would supply the content • Sites having to offer increasingly deep, wide and functionality rich content to retain the customer.

47. Content Requirements - Questions

48. Content Requirements – Questions

49. Content Requirements – Questions

50. The Project Brief • Summarize the findings of the project clarification phase. • Enable to work on devising the best solutions possible. • Knowing all that needed to know. • Hashed out any thorny issues. • Come to an agreement on the way forward.