Overcoming project barriers for website project managers

As any project manager will tell you, when you work with a group of individuals there are always project barriers or obstacles involved. It can be very difficult to work with a diverse group of people and give them the right leadership to work together as a cohesive team. Although it is easy to learn the theory of doing this, putting it in to practise in real life is often somewhat harder.

This can seem particularly true for any project manager who finds themselves working with a web team where there is a requirement to coordinate between the workloads of the creative designers who work in a very visual manner and the technical expertise of the programmers and developers. In order to be an effective website project manager there is a need to be able to understand the different personalities, knowledge bases and styles that your team have in order to manage these effectively to get the required results from your project.

Managing a diverse website team

It is fair to say that there are few website project managers with a huge amount of experience of managing a web design/development team. This is because web teams simply haven’t been around for that long. So in order to be effective a project manager will need to draw on any experience that they have. This might have been learned from other teams that they have worked with in other industries that might help them. For many this can prove something of a steep learning curve so there is definitely some benefit from using the accumulated knowledge of a range of different project managers from a number of different industries. This is where taking a project management course that covers a project management Body of Knowledge such as that from the APM or PMI can help. There will not necessarily be a “one size fits all” approach to getting over the hurdles that you might face so you may need to find several methods that work for you. It can be a good idea to use a mixture of best practises supported with new knowledge.

A balancing act

The type of projects that a website project manager may find themselves facing may well be tough ones that involve developing new web interfaces in order to boost revenue, create better accessibility of even increase a company’s online sales. These are not small undertakings and there are a number of ways in which they can be approached. Knowing how to analyse the project that is in front of them and then create an effective plan in order to reach a successful outcome is a major job and one which any website project manager will need to approach carefully. The type of people that they have on their team will come into play when considering which approach to take as well so there will be a significant level of planning involved in order to get the best results possible from the available resources and overcome any project barriers. This no easy task and can often leave a project manager treading a very fine line in order to find the right balance. However, with the right project management skills and leadership qualities, it is possible to find that balance.