Launching a new website is exciting, but it is far from the end of the journey. Developing and maintaining a website can be seen as a continuous process, meaning you cannot simply develop the site once and expect it to generate traffic perpetually. You have to add new content, keep the site up to date, and do general maintenance to keep users happy.
Developing and maintaining a website is actually a series of projects and tasks, one after another. For the site to be successful, you have to invest time, money, and energy into developing it further. This is where good project management comes in handy. When you can manage site maintenance and update tasks efficiently, growing your site becomes less challenging.
So, what is good project management exactly? How can site development and maintenance tasks be simplified? The tips and tricks we are about to discuss in this article will help you answer these questions and more.
A Project Management Approach
Since we are talking about website development and maintenance, it is only natural that we look into the agile methodology as a way to organize projects. Agile has been used in website and app development projects for many years, as a way to turn the linear process into a cycle.
Agile principles are more aligned with website development goals than you think. There are 12 Agile principles that can help the process of developing a site, with principles such as continuous delivery and maintaining a sustainable working pace making the whole process more manageable. To implement Agile effectively, you can use digital Kanban platform such as Kanbanize.
Break Tasks Down
Sticking with the Agile principles, the next thing to keep in mind is the importance of breaking tasks down to manageable chunks. Instead of having one task that takes three to four weeks to complete, it is much better to divide the task into smaller parts that can be completed in only one week.
Breaking tasks down allows you to do two things. First, you can release updates faster and improve the site continuously. This leads to higher user satisfaction and more positive user experiences. Secondly, you also have the ability to assign different tasks to team members, shortening the time required to complete them by a substantial margin.
With team members focusing on smaller tasks, managing workload and maintaining work pace are also easy to do. Smaller tasks are also easier to manage in terms of resource usage, so you can keep your website maintenance routine efficient.
Avoid Open-Ended Tasks
Each task on the Kanban board needs to have clear deliverables. At the same time, you want them to have clear KPIs to measure success. These two components help you avoid open-ended tasks. Each task can be completed in a timely manner when the KPIs and deliverables are clear.
The one thing you want to avoid is having some tasks stay on the Doing part of the Kanban board for too long. That is actually a sign of a bottleneck and inefficiencies. It is the kind of issue you want to solve as quickly as possible.
Fortunately, the visual nature of the Kanban board allows you to spot potential bottlenecks early. For example, you can avoid updates from getting pushed back by longer-than-usual content writing. When you see the Copywriting card not moving fast enough, you can choose to direct more resources to the task.
Measure Often
Taking a website to success is as much about listening to user feedback as it is about adding new features and updating it regularly. With every iteration you push to the production server, gather insights from analytics tools and measure user satisfaction.
Measuring often gives you the ability to adapt to market changes faster. You can maintain a positive user experience without having to do a lot of guesswork. The frequent evaluation also leads to a more efficient Agile cycle, can implement changes and revise processes faster than before. There is no need to wait until a big update is released to implement those changes.
This is a big advantage you don’t want to miss. Since you don’t have to wait until the end of a long process to introduce changes, you also have the ability to be more agile as a site owner. The next time a hot topic hits the market, you are more than ready to produce relevant content.
Improve Processes
As you can see from the previous tips, the implementation of Agile for project management allows for faster reaction times and better project management. However, those aren’t the only benefits to gain from implementing the approach.
The more cycles you complete, the more information you gain regarding the processes themselves. It doesn’t take long before you start noticing ways to optimize site development and maintenance. For example, you can immediately automate things such as posting to social media. You can also identify other repetitive tasks and find ways to automate them.
Improving the processes within the cycle leads to better utilization of resources. Rather than having a team member work on social media posts, you can automate the tasks and reassign that team member to working on website content or engaging with users directly.
Resource Management
Website development and maintenance has always been a balancing act. You want to deliver the best user experience and the most valuable content to a wide audience segment, but you have to choose between investing time, money, and energy in the process.
Better resource management is the final benefit of good project management. You know exactly when to enlist the help of third-party service providers and whether to invest your money in ads as tasks get completed. Gaining traction isn’t a difficult thing to do when you can manage your resources meticulously.
Project management is a skill that every business owner must have. With the tips and tricks that we discussed in this article, you can implement good project management immediately, integrate the right approach and tools to simply website development and maintenance, and produce a greater impact in a competitive internet landscape.
