There is only one main priority and it is the web team

If you manage a website, that headline should be your mantra. Why? Because your website is only as good as you web team. And your web team is the only asset you have that can adapt itself to change.

Management guides have long highlighted the importance of people to an organisation, especially retaining talent. There’s nothing new in this, but what many people don’t appreciate is that its importance is proportional to the rate of change in an industry. Web has, and continues, to move at such a rapid rate that if you want to be successful tomorrow you have to focus on your web team today.

It’s very easy to get distracted by technology, or responding to your competitors’ new features, or to obsess over metrics…

But the quality of your web team must come first.

Don’t get me wrong, those are things you need to think about, but not at the expense of your web team. Ultimately, they are the ones who are the strongest influence on those elements. As the saying goes, “look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves” – look after your people and your site will look after itself.

It may seem like common sense, but ask yourself these questions:

Do you have a strategy for keeping the technology you use up to date?
Do you have a strategy for keeping the web teams’ skills up to date?

Do you know what your customers think of your website?
Do you know what your web team thinks of you?

How much are you investing this year in developing your site?
How much are you investing this year in developing your web team?

When was the last time you did benchmarking against competitors sites?
When was the last time you benchmarked the web teams’ salaries?

When was the last time you looked at the website to see how it was going?
When was the last time you sat down with a member of your web team to see how they were going?

When was the last time you got external advice for your website?
When was the last time you got external training for a member of the web team?

Anyway you get the idea.

So how did you go? Are you comfortable with your answers? For those of you who are not convinced, Tom Peters has a very succinct way of putting it, and a very simple solution (slash 5-10 percent of your capital expenditure and channel it back into your people).

If you’re not in control of the purse strings, there are still ways you can ensure you are getting the most out of you web team:

• Allow team members the time to keep up with the new developments (suggested 1/2 day a month).
• Ensure each member of the web team has a personal development plan looking specifically at emerging technologies and where they should develop their knowledge.
• Go to web conferences (there are usually a number of free ones in most major metropolitan centres).
• Encourage individuals to make suggestions and to experiment on your site (within reason of course).
• Encourage your web team to get actively involved in the local web community (again most major metropolitan areas will have some sort of web/technology/social network – try the geek dinners, BarCamps, Wiki Wednesdays, Computer Associations, Usability Associations, etc). Or, failing that, start your own.
• Encourage healthy peer-to-peer critiques and reviews between team members.
• Recognise and celebrate when work is delivered above specification or under challenging conditions.

So keeping in mind that it doesn’t have to be time consuming or resource intensive, repeat after me “There is only one main priority and it is the web team.”

Now spend 5 minutes thinking about how you could improve how one of your web team members feels about their job.

Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 1:30 pm | Categories: web teams

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