Project Management

Without an understanding of how factors interrelate, you can easily slip into a reactive mode, constantly responding to the crisis of the moment. Once these three factors are understood and appreciated, however, they become the reins of control by which you can effectively manage the development and maintenance of a complex website.
These three factors of time, task, and resources constantly interact in a Web project, changing priorities and fluctuating in importance as the project advances. Understanding how they interact gives you a valuable and objective perspective that helps demystify the development process. The project manager must juggle these factors and make decisions about tradeoffs and compromises along the way.
In Dynamics of Software Development, Microsoft’s Jim McCarthy writes: ‘As a development manager, you’re working with only three things: resources (people and money), features (the product and its quality), and the schedule. This triangle of elements is all you work with. There’s nothing else to be worked with.’ These three factors can be represented as the three points of a triangle.
The project management can be represented as a triangle: time, task, and resources.

Time

For the purposes of a website, the available time is indicated in the project schedule-specifically, the period from start date to completion deadline; that is, when the site is to ‘go live.’ The schedule relates to the nature of the task (as designed) and the available resources (people and equipment). As a rule, the more resources available and the simpler the design, the faster the task can be accomplished, but only to a point. One might suppose that a project that takes one year with only one person working on it would take six months with two people and one month with twelve. In practice, however, adding more people does not reduce the amount of time at the same rate; a point of diminishing returns occurs when the overhead of communication and administration to coordinate the myriad of people and activities negates the increased work actually being performed.
Some tasks, by their nature, take longer and depend heavily on the talent, skills, and experience of the individuals performing them. Software programming is the best example, where the effectiveness of different programmers can vary by several orders of magnitude. An experienced, creative programmer may complete a task in a few days, whereas another programmer lacking experience or motivation may need several months or may be incapable of completing the task at all. Even a particular individual’s temperament may be more or less well suited for a particular task. In some situations, a programming task can be speeded up considerably by hiring the right programmer, or slowed down a similar amount by adding several inappropriate programmers.
Occasionally, the fastest way to complete the project is not to change anything. Even though progress may appear to be going exceedingly slowly, maintaining the existing situation may be the most efficient option.

Task

The task refers to exactly what is being built. Task expresses the scope of the work to be performed: the magnitude, complexity, and design of the project. For a website, this consists of the site design, including quantity of content and programmatic features. This definition of the end product determines the number of people necessary to produce the site, the skills they must have, the kind of equipment they will need, and how long it will take them to complete the first version of the site.

Resources

Resources refer to the funding for the project and all that it purchases in terms of people’s time and services, materials, and equipment. In general, more funding enables a faster development schedule (time) or a more complex, higher-quality site; however, as noted earlier, if a project has fallen behind schedule, adding resources (people and money) does not always speed it up. Adding people to a project that has fallen behind schedule can cause it to fall even further behind if the wrong resources are added or are added at the wrong time. When more highly skilled and specialized resources are needed, they should be added early or not at all.