Here are some guidelines to follow if you are a project manager involved in more complex projects requiring a phased approach.

Team Concept
Every successful project is a team effort.  The most successful projects involve active participation on the part of the client.  Available resources include: project managers, developers, graphic designers, QA testers, and IT professionals.

Planning and Coordination
Projects fail in most cases not because of developers, but because of a lack of communication.  Effective and timely communication is the single most important factor for a project completing successfully on time and within budget.

Let's take an ecommerce project integrating with other third party systems (i.e. ERP, CMS, CRM, etc.) as an example.  For such a project, a considerable amount of time needs to be spent upfront to gather requirements and generate wireframes.  Deliverables are important - diagrams, project plans, requirements documents. And once these deliverables are acceptable and customer signoff has been received, then we are ready to proceed to the next step.

Finalizing Data Model
An accurate data model is the foundation of any site since everything related to finding a product and filtering search results hinges upon it. Because many medium to larger enterprises have disconnected systems scattered throughout the organization, devising an accurate data model is critical to the success of a project.  

Custom Development
This step in the methodology is the most variable in its duration.  Every customer has very specific technical requirements based on their unique business needs.  From a B2B portal with specialized pricing discounts based on login credentials, to modifying the order management in the back-end admin site, the range of customizations is limitless.  

QA Testing
No matter how successful a project is through the development phase, unless you spend an adequate amount of time for quality assurance, the project will seem like a failure if bugs surface after the site is launched in production.  A thorough, quality assurance period is time well spent and will reduce costs to the customer in the long run.

Don't Forget: Things to Keep in Mind Before Site Deployment

  • Will you run the site internally or will you go with a hosting facility?
  • Redundancy or fail-over, web-farm configuration (if necessary)
  • Do you have a support process ironed it if you encounter bugs on the site or the site goes down?
  • Service Level Agreement - what is acceptable to the client?