When your firm is a division of a Fortune 500 company or not, it should be easier to avoid mistakes in crafting a corporate e-commerce site.
First, several development firms will want to grab your contract. Judging them solely on the merits of a (low) bid and making that selection generally gets what one pays for with that bid.
The project will be completed, most likely, but possibly without features the company really needs. If a business has to have a specific feature for e-commerce and the developer has agreed in writing to create it, any obstacles to getting that done need to be faced immediately.
Second, diagram the site frequently. The single best friend developers can have on a project will be the nicely-rendered, regularly updated UML document showing the whole flow of a transaction. Each stop on the workflow should note which site components handle that step in the process.
Despite the dependence on computers that developers have, do not underestimate the power of a printed diagram to make it easier to explain to non-techs the bottlenecks and problems with the developing site.
Third, a project manager should be responsible for exactly that: managing the development of the website project. This means the manager needs to have the technical chops to understand, at least at a high-level overview, what the project is doing.
There are plenty of nice marketing people in the world. That doesn’t qualify them to build or supervise a web project. They will be needed when it is time to promote the new site, so keep them in the loop on progress.
Fourth, internal IT staff needs to be part of the process. This does not entitle them to play obstructionist roles, but their feedback should be solicited and encouraged. If a firewall is going to be a problem when it comes to passing Oracle traffic, for example, the person who can fix it should be informed that the site requires such traffic to travel through the gateway.
Fifth, invest in internal and external support for a site. One person cannot, and really should not, be required to carry the weight of site support. Train the internal people and get them talking to the outside tech support, and make sure they can contact each other when necessary.
Sixth, backup is your friend. Just like learning in your very first computer class to save a program often, the same applies to website and application code. Version control, application installation CDs, and storage repositories will mean the difference between fifteen minutes of downtime, and hours of it while the contracted developers kick back at an hourly rate during a painful restore process.
These are steps that a firm can control. It would be inexcusable not to utilize them during a project, no matter how much faith management has in its developers, whether they are employees or contract workers.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
