Balancing a web teams’ efforts between site maintenance and new features is a very important issue, but not one that will be discussed in this post (you’ll have to wait for that one). What will be discussed is one way to ensure you can understand where a web team actually spends most of its efforts.

Invariably for most sites there are maintenance jobs – fixing typos, updating links, replacing old content, etc. Good content management and tight QA will save your web team maintenance time, but there will always be updates to content and corrections to be made.

On the other hand, successful websites also need to keep evolving. Competitors release new features, users’ expectations change, new technology becomes available and new campaigns come along. This is most web teams’ raison d’etre.

Consistently monitoring how much effort your web team spends responding to these two challenges will mean you’re in a good position to ensure the web team’s efforts are aligned with your strategy.

A recipe for monitoring a web team’s efforts

Ingredients

  1. A web team
  2. A web site
  3. A web server running php and mySQL
  4. dotProject (free open source software)

If the web server and dotProject are not feasible, there are a multitude of other ways of doing it (but they’re not covered in this post - drop me a note if you want to find out more). Keep reading anyway as there is a demo at the end and you’ll get to see the ‘precooked’’ version that is used to monitor underthenavbar.

Method

Separate between the two types activities. Useful terminology may be “projects” and “jobs”. Jobs are maintenance activities, usually requiring minimal design skills. They are normally short (anything from 10 minutes to a couple of days) and plentiful (maybe several per day depending on the size of your site). Projects are your new features, or enhancements to the site. They usually have briefing, design and build phases, as a minimum, and can take several weeks or many months.

  1. Install dotProject on a web server available to all the web team.[May require some technical assistance]
  2. Install the HelpDesk and Time Card modules for dotProject. You’ll need to access themodules through the dotmods CVS. [May require some technical assistance]
  3. Customise dotProject to your needs – focus on turning off inappropriate modules and relabelling some of the system values. [May require some technical assistance]
  4. Add each member of the web team as a user to the system.
  5. Use the HelpDesk module to track jobs and the Projects module to track projects.
  6. Enter each and every job into the system no matter how small – it gives you a good idea of how much work is involved in the maintenance of a job.
  7. Tasks within projects can be as high level or as granular as you like. You may want the web team define their own level of granularity with each member adding the appropriate tasks for them.
  8. Resume business as usual, but get the web team to enter in any time that they spend on either jobs or project tasks.
  9. Add any new projects or jobs to the system as they arise.
  10. Use the Time Card reports analyse how much time is being spent on each type of activity.

This is a very high level recipe, and it’s really meant as a taster for what you can do. It tends to work better than spreadsheets or communal inboxes - a couple of the common methods in use.

And here’s one prepared earlier

To see a set up in action, have a look at the one used for underthenavbar. It’s not a great demo as the team consists of only one individual (that’s me!) but it is a realistic picture of how you can use this software to monitor your resource expenditure effectively.

Go to the another demo over at the dotProject site (minus the HelpDesk and Time Card modules).

If you are wondering why I use it to manage this site, its because I maintain this site in my spare time and my time is about the most important thing I have, so I want to be as efficient as I can be. Having said that it is a little out of date (I’m definitely human).

If you’d like to know more about dotProject, head over their website – as a tool it’s a little quirky at times, but as a freely available piece of software it is quite remarkable and gives some of the professional solutions a run for their money.

Once you’ve seen the demo, you’ll appreciate that there is much more to it than I have described. It can be used as a relatively complete production schedule and project management tool. If there are two main downsides to the system I would say the interface can be clunky at times requiring a number of clicks to complete certain tasks and that it doesn’t show resource allocation. However they are very minor quibbles given what you get.

There are also a number of other project management, issue tracking and time tracking software solutions that are comparable in terms functionality, but this post isn’t about them, and most aren’t as adaptable to this way of working.

If anyone is interested in finding out more about this set up, please leave a comment below – depending on how many people are interested, follow up posts may be an option.

Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 7:43 am | Categories: web teams

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