Strategy & Project Management

There was an interesting article on ClickZ announcing Razorfish's formation of an agile practice.

He who fails to plan, plans to fail

A journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step. But if you don't plan properly you may end up 2,000 miles from where you wanted to go.

Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.

Most web site development projects fail through lack of communication during requirements gathering. A disconnect between clients and programmers often occurs due to software being an intangible object. Unlike purchasing a car, developing software relies on clients describing desired functionality and programmers interpreting that description to create a tangible product.

Whether your company is launching a new product, is changing its name, is repositioning or has merged with another company, branding plays an important role in building awareness and extending customer loyalty. While many people think of their brand in terms of identity, brand is so much more.

Everyone at LevelTen is extremely excited about attending DrupalCon San Francisco. Last year only two members of the team were able to attend DrupalCon in Washington, DC, but this year we’re sending out a pretty diverse group. Two of us have previously lived in the Bay Area (Brent in Oakland and myself in San Francisco), while others have never had the pleasure to step foot in California. It will be a great experience for all of us.

If I had a dollar for every time a potential client told me how easy web development is, or asked me to estimate the re-development of a Facebook-like website after a ten minute phone call I could travel around the world for a couple months. It it was easy to estimate and develop web applications (or any IT project for that matter) over 60% of projects wouldn't fail.

Time and time again, we get the horror stories from companies who have started a web project with the best of intentions only to see it end in disaster. A successful project is not something that can just be lucked into; it takes various components that all must be managed properly for execution. No matter what the size of the organization, everyone struggles with the same problems; using our internal team or hiring a partner, how much budget is there for the project, when can we expect to see the end product, and array of other questions that all have to be answered.

Hopefully, if you’re making a decision on re-designing or building a new website for your company at least one of the criteria for selecting an agency is; 1. “Doe's the agency’s own web site reflect the same kind of results that are being proposed for your new website?" In other words, doe's the website design company or agency practice what they preach?

As Drupal becomes more popular and grows its open-source development community, more websites are turning to it as a solution for creating extremely powerful online communities, allowing users to submit their own content to a community hub. The power of these hubs is obviously their users and creating an organized, easy to use interface can be the difference between failure and success.

I have been working on a new whitepaper about how to become an online leader. One of the cornerstones is to use a strategic, agile process. While agile is not for every project, often it is by far the optimal process for web development. While many large development organization such as Microsoft, IBM, Google and Yahoo! use agile, very few companies that don’t do software development for a living are using it – particularly small and midsized businesses.