Introduction

Is This Guide for You?

This guide was written for those who will manage or fund technology projects with budgets between $25,000 and $500,000. Our goal is to provide a quick-start guide for professional, smart, competent people who are new to web project management, or who need some guidance on how to manage a web project.

• This guide offers a practical, step-by-step project management process. While it is adapted from best practices in the technology industry, this guide recognizes the differences in the size, scope, and cost of projects. Project management techniques that may work perfectly for a 3-year, $10 million project may be overly burdensome for a smaller but still important 6-month, $500,000 project.
• This guide generally focuses on web application projects. A web application is a software application that is accessed using a web browser over a public network, such as the Internet, or a private network.

If you are a project manager, this guide provides specific techniques and methods you can use to make your projects successful.

If you are a project sponsor or funder, this guide helps you plan for the types of work products you might expect to see during the course of your project. It also enables you to assist your team in developing practical and useful documents that keep your project moving in the right direction.

How Is This Guide Different?

Many books and guides espouse well-documented techniques for managing larger technology projects with budgets exceeding $1 million. Likewise, there are several excellent how-to guides for managing small web site development projects with budgets of less than $25,000.

Most projects, though, fall somewhere in between. The techniques, documents, and tools recommended for the highly ambitious projects—while impressive—are often impractical, and require far more overhead documentation than a midsize project of more than $25,000 and less than $500,000 is likely to need. In theory, many of the techniques applicable to small web site development projects also apply to midsize projects. However, techniques for small projects tend not to scale well when there are more than two project team members, and these techniques frequently do not recognize the complexity involved in a more challenging midsize project.

This guide is about how to manage a technology project with a budget generally between $25,000 and $500,000. It includes

• Examples from the authors' personal experiences;
• Examples of documents from real projects; and
• Immediately useful techniques that will translate to your own projects.

This guide is not an overview of popular project management methodologies and frameworks such as Agile and Waterfall, although we do touch on these topics.

Ultimately, we want this guide to serve as a reference that will help you to solve problems quickly and efficiently—problems that will inevitably arise in your own projects.

About the Document Examples

All of the example documents in this book are real, created by the Urban Insight team while working on projects for our clients.

Many examples are taken from a project with USC called the Annenberg Social News Platform (ASNP). The Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California in 2009 decided to use the Drupal web content management system as the infrastructure for school-wide web publishing, student e-portfolio, and interactive media projects to provide real-life, hands-on journalism and communications experience to students.

The pilot news site for the ASNP is Neon Tommy. Neon Tommy is a web-only, Los Angeles-based news source sponsored by the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism via the student-supported incubator program known as Annenberg Digital News. Neon Tommy offers news coverage about issues of concern to Southern California residents, but its audience is worldwide.