Managing your web site
– posted June 23rd, 2006 by John Wood No comments
I see that Shane Diffily of the ESB in Ireland has published an excellent article entitled How to Plan Manpower on a Web Team. Following the links through to Shane’s website, I found another really interesting article called Who’s in charge here? Why your website needs governance. It was great to see that Shane has given the subject of web site management some serious thought, because dysfunctional or non-existent web site management is the root cause of so many of the problems that organisations face online.
I like Shane’s Manpower article a lot, it provides a handy rule of thumb for calculating how big a team needs to be and what sort of skills the team requires. But the management team Shane proposes in Who’s in charge here? seems too high level. It sounds like a policy forum rather than a team who will get things done effectively. In fact, Shane states:
As a general rule, a WMT [Web Management Team] has little operational involvement in the sites for which it is responsible. This is because such activities are best left to experts in the appropriate teams.
The problem with this approach is that the joined-up thinking on the web site occurs at too high a level to make a real difference. All of the people who contribute content, have first-hand experience of service provision or first-hand customer contact are in local teams with only indirect access to the decision making process around the web site. Web sites don’t need a representative democracy, they need cooperation from the workers at the coal face.
We’re not talking about a worker’s soviet here, though. Clearly, the web site must reflect the business priorities of the organisation and the team will need senior management clout to get anything done. So you need a team that has a hands-on approach to the web site while remaining responsive to the broader objectives of the organisation.
To address this, we’ve been recommending a slightly different form of web management team to our clients. It consists of stakeholders that represent the technical and content partners in the organisation as well as the communications or marketing departments. But the difference lies in who we recommend is delegated to the team and the role the team plays.
We recommend that this team is comprised of web champions rather than being made up of policy makers. These are people who care enough about the website to learn some useful skills and to take a proactive interest in managing and improving the web site. These people need to be given time in their schedules for this work and provided with the skills and training they need to do an effective job. They report to their line managers and represent the interests of their departments on the web teams.
The Web management teams we recommend are not talking shops, though. The members plan web content, edit and approve content, maintain standards and provide training to staff. They receive direction from senior management, often from board level, and are responsible for reporting to management on the effectiveness and return on investment of the web site. We recommend that they receive training in writing for the web, usability, accessibility and web analytics so that they can manage the web site scientifically and professionally.
So far, this approach has worked rather well, although it is not without it’s faults. The key problem is the part time nature of the work, which can lead to a drop in the effectiveness of the team if their regular jobs are too demanding. In these cases, we recommend that a dedicated web editor is appointed to the team to look after the website and chase up those day-to-day matters that the other team members cannot manage.
So that’s where my thinking is at currently: have a web management team that is operationally focused and support them with a dedicated resource if need be. But I’m interested to hear your perspectives. How is the web site managed in your organisation at the moment and how well do you think it is working?
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Categories Web Site Management
