Bringing your ideas to the web. Now, that’s what I call a challenge… (part 2 of 4)
Back to our series on bringing your ideas to the web. So far we have focused on planning, analysis and overall thinking about it. Basically you must think, think, think and then think a bit more.
In this part we will try to shift to operational issues. By now you have done all the thinking. You know what you want, you know how to get there. So let’s put things in motion.
4. Don’t try to do it all by yourself. You can’t do it!
This is a relative assumption. Remember we are talking about the web. I’ve worked around the web for sometime now and I can tell you I am yet to meet someone that can successfully plan, develop, implement and sell a web project all by themselves. Usually everyone ends up asking for the help of a friend, a group of friends, a community or even a company. Of course this means you have to reconsider money issues, ownership, etc. But, trust me, it’s all for the better.
So, first things first. What is your area of knowledge? Are you a manager, a marketeer, a (web) designer, a developer, a sysadmin, a overall geek or a hard hacker? That should be the area for you to focus on. And start looking for people to fill the voids.
Ok, now you’re probably thinking I am crazy because you need money to hire people and the objective is to make money, not spend it. Well, there are other ways. You can bring in a couple of friends and share your ideas. If they are in sync with your vision, you can offer them partnership. You can apply for government financial aids. You can take your project to a startup investing company. You can even spend you own money if you want to. But you will have to make an investment. If not a financial one, at least a human resources one. Only by doing so you can asure you can get all the pieces of the puzzle to fit properly. And that’s only the beginning of it.
Next up? Team and Project Management. Everything you do has to have some sort of management behind it. Projects don’t grow on trees. Projects don’t take care of themselves. Projects need to be taken care of. Here’s where it can get a little tough specially if you’re more of a “tech” person and couldn’t care less about management issues. Gladly there is a lots of info widely available and with few effort you can easily begin to grasp the concepts. There are several Project Management tools, techniques and standards. The better known are PMI, Prince2, Agile. However, these are NOT variations of the same. PMI is an international institute that published what is known as the PMBoK (Project Management Book of Knowledge) which contains a set of guidelines, techniques and overall good practices. Prince2 is a UK Government related set of standards on processes and Agile is a project Management methodology.
Yes you can succeed without a formal project management team, but you probably won’t if you don’t have some sort of project management. Think about it. Basic info is available online and it will make a huge difference. Related reading: Which Life Cycle is Best for Your Project?
5. Don’t believe your eyes. Test and test again.
You now have your project going. You even have a neat Gantt chart with all your tasks laid out and your team’s. You planned the whole project to take a couple of months but as the deadline approaches you find yourself in a tight spot with the possibility of failing it horribly. What has happened, you wonder? Many things can occur but you probably overlooked a couple major issues being one of the most common testing and changes in your plan. Have you forecasted a period for testing? Did you plan for changes? There is not a single project out there that hasn’t some sort of change. And there is not a single project out there that has survived without a proper test plan. Better yet, if you opt for some sort of Agile methodology you’ll have to do a lot of testing.
Remember, plan for change, plan for testing. Hopefully the more you’ve planned, the less you’ll fall off your wagon.
6. Even if I manage to do something good, how will the world know about it?
The next issue you have to deal with will be marketing and selling your product/service. There are many ways to achieve this and most of them rely on your ability to plan. Once more, plan. This is usually denominated the Communication Plan and yes, it also is a part of Project Management. But before you start asking yourself if all of this is just a series of pretextes to promote Project Management I must tell you… yes… and no…
Project Management is fundamental in every project, whatever type of project you may think of. But you really have to know what to do with it. However, even with the best laid out plans and with the best professionals involved a project can go awfully wrong if you don’t include a solid communication plan. This can be done as a part of the whole Project Management workflow or you can do it separately, depending on how you proceed regarding the project life cycle. Nevertheless you have to include a whole lot of info, from your objectives to your goals.
Here is a couple of items to remember:
A communication plan is a written document that describes
- what you want to accomplish with your association communications (your objectives),
- ways in which those objectives can be accomplished (your goals or program of work),
- to whom your association communications will be addressed (your audiences),
- how you will accomplish your objectives (the tools and timetable), and
- how you will measure the results of your program (evaluation).
Communications include all written, spoken, and electronic interaction with association audiences. A communication plan encompasses objectives, goals, and tools for all communications, including but not limited to:
- periodic print publications;
- online communications;
- meeting and conference materials;
- media relations and public relations materials;
- marketing and sales tools;
- legal and legislative documents;
- incoming communications, including reception procedures and voice mail content;
- committee and board communiques;
- corporate identity materials, including letterhead, logo, and envelopes;
- surveys;
- certificates and awards;
- annual reports;
- signage;
- speeches; and
- invoices.
This info has been copied from “How to develop a communications plan?”
Further more, while developing your project, you should consider SEO, Microformats and/or RDF, Usability and Accessibility. These are tools that will improve greatly your visibility whether that may come from your web presence per se or from allowing more users to access you product/service/website. We’ll discuss them in detail on part 4 of our series. For now, here are couple of hints.
SEO – Search Engine Optimization is a way to improve your website visibility in search engines through “natural” or “unpaid” search results.
Microformats – Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.
RDF – a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata data model. It has come to be used as a general method for conceptual description or modeling of information that is implemented in web resources, using a variety of syntax formats.
Usability – the study of ease of use, of how quickly someone can understand how to use a particular human-made object and how easily they can use it.
Accessibility – Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are part of a series of Web accessibility guidelines published by the W3C‘s Web Accessibility Initiative. They consist of a set of guidelines on making content accessible, primarily for disabled users, but also for all user agents, including highly limited devices, such as mobile phones.
Hopefully by now you’ll be at least intrigued and eager to read the rest of our series. Stay tuned. Thank you.
Coming up next:
Get down to the specifics. What really is Project Management?
Which Web if right for me? A world of opportunities.
What if there is another “pop” and the bubble bursts again?