Smart Cookie: Project Management
Making it happen (and making the tea)
In any successful web project, the project manager is the glue. Understanding a little more about what they do can help deliver the best possible results for your new site, says Fortune Cookie PM Dan O’Connell…
Project managers do what it says on the tin. We take responsibility for planning and delivering the projects in our care. We make sure everything happens on time and on budget, and to the highest standards of quality. We see to it that the client we’re working for, and the team we’re working with, are happy, happy, happy.
And sometimes, depending on our mood, we’ll even make the tea.
To show how a project manager adds value to a web build project, here are some of the key elements and principles of our role…
The vision thing
At the beginning of any project, it’s vital that we define and agree with you exactly what that project is and – just as importantly – what it isn’t. Asking a few key questions way before anyone even thinks of firing up Dreamweaver will help us build up a clear picture of the project vision, and should save some headaches later.
Typically we’ll look at key defining questions like:
- When does it need to be done by?
- What do you need it to do?
- Who is it aimed at?
- How much would you ideally like it to cost?
Visioning the project is about getting a clear picture of what’s expected, and whether these expectations are realistic. We work with you to agree an achievable vision and so create the conditions for successful project delivery.
The planning stage
Once everyone is comfortable with what needs to be done and when it needs to be done by, it’s time to get down to the project plan. The aim here is to work out what the individual tasks that need doing are, when they need to be done by, and who’s going to do them.
Typically projects divide into three phases of roughly equal length – design, production, and testing. But every project is different, and to make sure yours stays on track, it’s vital to keep referring back to the vision.
Risky business
You’ll often hear project managers talking about risk. Quite simply, a risk is anything which could stop you delivering the project according to plan.
With your help we’ll collect a list of these risks at the beginning of the project. We work out what can be done to stop them happening, and what we can do if they happen.
Keeping on track
Now we all know what we need to do, and how we’re going to do it, we come to the hard part. Doing it.
To keep on track during this part of the project, it’s good to keep referring to your plan at regular intervals. At Fortune Cookie, we hold weekly meetings to review the progress of the projects we’re working on, looking at where we are against the project plan and budget, any new risks or problems, and what needs to happen this week and the week after to keep us on track.
This is a great discipline to get into, as it keeps everyone focused on the project and allows us to make any adjustments to your plan as we go to keep things realistic and achievable.
No loopholes
One of a project manager’s most important responsibilities is to work closely with you to keep you in the loop on the project at all times, always making sure that you’re happy with the way everything is going.
At Fortune Cookie we provide you with scheduled weekly updates on project progress, letting you know where we are against the plan, presenting the work we’ve done since the last update, and – crucially – letting you know what we need from you in the coming week.
We think of you as just another member of the project team, because you are just as vital to the success of the project as the designer or developer.
Bringing it all home
With a realistic vision, an achievable plan, an eye on risk, and regular reviews of all of these, we’re on track to deliver a successful project.
At the outset of the project we define acceptance criteria with you, which are reviewed at the completion stage. This is a useful planning tool and ensures that all agreed deliverables are … delivered.
Princely process
Successful projects don’t happen by accident. At Fortune Cookie, we’ve developed a strict project management process that provides us with a framework that we can rely on to work, time after time.
Our bespoke process is based on Prince2, a popular project management methodology favoured by government and other large organisations. But it also incorporates lessons and insights we’ve gained from over a decade of creating findable, accessible, beautiful websites for some of the UK’s best-known brands and biggest public-sector organisations.
And at the end of every project, we always review the whole process so that we can learn from the experience and feed that knowledge into delivering even better projects in the future.