Nowadays there are many companies who do website development to rake in the revenue for their respective firms and keep on the figures moving in the balance sheet of their company. Many of the companies in software export zones rake in the money by solely getting orders for website development from Countries like Africa, USA, Australia, UK and the gulf countries. The model of the business process of these companies are the same although it varies from SME’s to large companies. The web team roles included are the project stakeholder, the producer, the editor, information architect, graphic designer, HTML developer, the developer, tech lead, database administrator, quality assurance engineer.
The role of the project manager in small and medium enterprise companies like website designing is limited to replying to mails and coordinating with the onsite people based in other countries. In the 5 process groups of Project Management Processes he is limited to initiation, little bit of Planning process group and monitor and control part only. The project managers duty in a Indian website development company includes creating work break down structure, reporting day to activities of the development team in the form of templates in excel sheet designed by the project manager on the break up of each project , there is not much activity in controlling costs and budgets the only thing the stake holder expects is that the projects are delivered on time and on schedule.
Planning: A key outcome of planning process is the project schedule which specifies the duration of activities and when they will begin. I Ideally recommend Microsoft project 2013 but many SME’s use open source software like Dot Project or their in house developed project tracking software.
After the designers do the initial stage of web designing it goes to the stakeholder for approval and after approval of the design the HTML Conversion begins which later goes into development and testing stages and further release of the website to the customer. In scenarios noted there are scope changes and scope creep in occurs which has to be dealt by very carefully as some customers are aggressive and don’t want to freeze the scope of the project.
So as to conclude the project manager of Indian website developing companies working offshore are not involved in the entire cycle of project management processes but of communication from offshore and if it is a functional organization his role is very limited.
The author(Suresh Menon) is a subject matter expert on ERP and has also worked in various Capacities as Project Manager, ERP Consultant, Implementation Manager, Test Manager he can be contacted on suresh@digitalstream.in for queries and Comments.
