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How Many People Work in Your Internet Department?
WorkinTooHard asks: "Two years ago, I took the job of Internet Marketing Manager for a international company, with a crazy idea that I could convince senior management that the internet wasn't a fad. The only problem was that I didn't expect a (respected) mid-level manager to be the road block. We are in the middle of a major website redesign (the current site has not been updated in over 8 years) and everyone is asking why it takes so long to complete, and almost daily I have to explain that I do not have enough manpower. Of course, I can't prove ROI until the new site is launched (a great Catch22). How many people do you have working in/on your company's Internet/Intranet and Extranet sites and applications? How many full-time web-application developers, content providers, analytics people, UI designers, email marketing people, and so forth?"
"Please note that this includes anyone who works directly in building and maintaining your companies current website, electronic marketing and Internet applications. If you can, include the size of your company, number of employess, the number of active products being sold/supported, and how much outsourcing you do? The company I am currently working for has over 13,000 active products and over 30,000 products which need to be supported. We do no outsourcing, have over 900 employess in North America (over 8000 worldwide) and a total of 2 full time web developers, 1 part time developer/SQL guru and 1 content/data person as well as two people in our MarCom office which periodically write copy."
I'm not sure whether to answer the actual question asked, or the implicit call for help....
Anything that people don't understand, they tend to generalize and make higher level models of the underlying processes. I think it'd be beneficial for this manager to sit in on a couple design meetings and/or code reviews so that he can get a feel for all that is involved.
I think you're going to see wildly varying answers regarding sizes of teams, depending upon site complexity, etc. The real issue here is that it looks like you need to learn to push back.
Your posting sounds more like a distress message than an actual question. If you feel you're understaffed and you're feeling heat from the top, look these guys straight in the eye and say "If you refuse to offer more staff, we can only reasonably expect to complete around this date", and don't flinch. They'll respect you more in the long run and know you mean business.
Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- Exercise, Web 2.0 style.
Is an "Internet" department?
Too often you will never have enough people to get the job done, or you will have too many people to get the job done. But you will never have the right number of people to get the job done. Everybody still expects the project to be done on time and under budget.
This is why being a project manager at any level can suck at times. What I learned over the years is either to make do with what you got or just walk away because some projects aren't worth sacrificing your time and effort.
You need to think like your managers think (I know, THE HORROR!!!). They can't *prove* any of the projected ROI numbers on any of their other projects, and you aren't expected to either.
You need to make a reasonable educated guess based on similar implementations. Talk to people who have done similar projects for similar companies and get their actual ROI numbers. Take a good look at that, then guess. That should help with the justification.
Oh, and to answer your question -- there's 1 in our company.
Try and see how much the problem can be broken down. Chances are, it is possible for you to release more functionality over time, and get something out the door soon. There is probably something you could do that would get you ROI pretty much tomorrow.
SSL Certificate
If your site go 8 years without an update, your obviously not a tech company... it may seem like a shock to some, but not evey business has more need for a website than using it as a contact page or simple "who we are".
Who are your customers? are they interent users?
1) convince your trouble maker and turn him into an ally and use him as a buffer against those above him.
2) convince those above him what's right|wrong and leave your immediate troublemaker in the cold.
3) continue to bang your head against the the wall until you reach brain or they send you out the door with a patch of skull missing.
4) You realize this is an intractable situation and high-tail it out of there while you still have the ability to do so on your own terms.
There are subtle nuances, but unless you are adept at pulling a rabbit out of the hat, I'd vote for #4, regardless of how long you've been there. People understand bailing out of failing situations.
Maybe it is time to give them a demo. Not necessarily a functioning demo, mock-up screens will do. You'll give them an idea of what exactly you're trying to do and if they think you're on the right track you'll get more funding for new hires.
-----
One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
Especially for a large company. I'll bet you don't develop your own advertising, you don't do your branding and identity development internally. Why on earth would you tackle this internally? Do you have a Marcomm Agency Of Record? If not talk to your advertising AOR and ask them for help. Really, this isn't a DIY project.
Triply so if it's been 8 years.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I'd be a little worried if I were asked to show the ROI of any web site that wasn't specifically for an on-line retailer. How did you show the ROI on a large, wooden, hand carved sign in the 1600's?
A web site (as simple or complex as it may be) is a marketing tool for a business. And anyone with an MBA or equivalent experience will tell you that developing an ROI on a marketing campaign is nearly impossible, at best.
As for "how many" developers it's going to take... Check out today's story, 60% Of Windows Vista Code To Be Rewritten, which has some great advice about how to get 9 women pregnant and have a baby in 1 month. (Or was that "getting 5 Jazz players pregnant"? I don't remember...)
I work for a retail electronics company that has 32 stores accross muliple states in the US. I'm the only App and Web(intranet -php/mysql / internet -jsp/Oracle) developer, one of two DBA's, one of two business analysts for my department, only technical point on contact for department, and basic bitch.
currently I'm creating a custom ticketing system for our call center, I've been given 10 days, to design, develop and roll out the application. Needless to say some of what I have to do is hacked together.
and now all of my complaining leads on a question.
What do you do when you feel burnt out at work?
Personally, I've started drinking during lunch, not the best thing, but it seems to help.
I'm the lone developer in my state agency's "website department". We have over 250 employees and huge information publishing needs. Like the submitter, we are in the midst of a website redesign using a commercial CMS. A county spent 6 months with a staff of four programmers to build their site with the newer version of this software. I was asked to do it in 3 months by myself. I'm spending entire weekends and nights in my cubicle coding this thing in JSP. No overtime pay. It's a month past deadline and if I don't finish it by the end of next week, I'm fired.
Morale to this story: working for the government sucks as much as people say it does.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
It sounds like you have made the classic mistake of ripping out and replacing something that worked simply because you wanted to do something better. That's almost always a bad idea without buy in from the highest levels.
Sure, the old site is crufty, but it is paid for, and the stuff you are doing is not. If you don't have the political pull to spend money at will it is almost a better plan to find minor changes that can be done inexpensively but that yield proportionally large benefits. Once you have a few visible "successes" under your belt then you can start trying to change the world. Until then, promising the moon without being able to deliver is simply a full-proof way to fail. If you have undertaken a project that you can not complete with your current staff and management is starting to question the viability of your project then you probably had better start thinking about plan B. Plan B probably should not include "industry statistics."
Seriously, you need to deliver something. Not complain about needing more help.
Sounds like reason #65536 to never launch a "major redesign" of anything....
Isn't there some way this could be broken down into steps that could show actual day-to-day improvements (even if only very minor ones?)?
This does sound like a plea for help as much as anything, but gathering information is your first step in fixing a situation.
:-)
Here are some comparisons from my recent past. Currently, I'm the only tech guy, and I do everything. But that's because I just left my last job to found a start up
Prior to that, I was one of three developers in a department that also had a designer, a writer, and a project manager. That was to service an organization of ~1,100 people. Some departments also had their own techish people who'd do departmental sites and the like. We did no ecommerce at all nor any desktop support, just interweb stuff (we wrote and maintained a fairly sophisticated Struts-based CMS system), and we were stretched way thin -- there was a greater demand for our services than we could reasonably comply with. We were also a non-profit, which meant more people wasn't a realistic option.
Before that I worked for a company with ~30,000 employees worldwide, and while I was there we were just rolling out ecommerce. We had three dedicated developers, a DBA, a network guy, two support people (just for the web site, they didn't do desktops) and two managers. That was some years ago, I believe they've grown since then. This was mostly to maintain a site -- the design and development of it has initially been outsourced. This felt like reasonable manpower, but again, we were doing incremental change on a project that had been built by a larger team. And the pace was, shall we say, bureaucratic.
It's possible to educate managers about what resources are required for a given volume of work, but you'll have to communicate well and be direct when you know you're right. Good luck.
I've been involved with web development since 1996. I've worked at a half dozen small, medium and large web sites.
Basically, it comes down to:
1. Understanding of the final product or content
2. How much you interconnect with backend data providers, and if you require filtering.
3. Your team's experience in the language and dev environment
4. The speed at which those languages lend towards the final development.
Note about languages -
My experience is that Java is by FAR a slower dev environment than PHP, Perl or Ruby. The whole compile cycle and the complexities of app servers make for a much more complicated project. The exception to this is JSP - which comes closer to Perl - but entails it's own complexities in getting at databases, etc... Plus, java makes no wins in uptime, speed, or clustering compared to Perl (utilizing mod-perl), or PHP.
Yes, I have been on the large person java team that architected the connections between the three largest online travel providers - don't whine at me.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Hiring may not necessarily be the answer. You need manpower, but once the site is up-and-running, you may not need as many people onboard. Could you accomplish the same goals by maybe hiring another key person but getting contractors for the rest of the work? Or maybe hiring someone (or some company) to oversee certain aspects of the site temporarily?
For example, a programmer or designer is pretty flexible. After the site is done they could work on other projects, update manuals, internal programs, media kits, etc. But what would, for example, a UI designer do? I'd also shy away from having an "email marketing manager" because almost all the professional marketing emails I get are usually handled by a company that's not the one advertising everything.
Of course, a couple of things need to be noted. First off, if they have not updated their site in 8 years and the internet is vital, how come they are still in business? Who are some competitors with a terrific web presence and how has that affected their business? I've seen plenty of cases where a very high investment has not really resulted in any new business. Or, the new business can't be tied to the site, eventhough the site is generating new business. (Build this into your proposal so if there's an increase, it can be directly attributed to the project you spearheaded!)
I have a friend who is a procurement specialist for a pretty big consultancy, with clients being a lot of Fortune 500 companies. Anytime he needs to compare commoditized products or services (say, plastic sheeting, wires) he always has a very big list of companies to contact. The easiest way he cuts that down from 100 companies to 30 or 40 is by eliminating ones with bad or non-existent websites. To an extent, it is a reflection of the professionalism and thoroughness of any company.
That being said, if your employer is afraid of new ideas, doesn't want to understand them, and doesn't see the benefit if a clear, realistic plan to great ROI is laid out in front of them, that company is a sinking ship. It that's the case, it wouldn't hurt to take your good idea and see if a competitor will do it instead (with you overseeing the project at a vastly higher salary, of course).
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
"How many people do you have working in/on your company's Internet/Intranet and Extranet sites and applications? How many full-time web-application developers, content providers, analytics people, UI designers, email marketing people, and so forth?"
Every time I see something like the text quoted, (and this is the 3rd time in about as many weeks that I've seen such questions here -- not to attack the Slash Staff, btw...) I feel like it's a probe question. I wonder if it's well-crafted and paid for so that the readers get all riled up and reply. Like the people with nicknames, but personal web pages. You then go on to say how many MySQL devs, and so on you have, trying to help out this guy. For all you know, it could be post-worthy by Slashdot staff standards, but the poster or piece-writer could be looking for sales avenues leading to sales revenues.
Some of you guys out to be wary of being "taggable" while disclosing what products you use. You never know: that could be Oracle or ms digging for treasure. If your company is susceptible to discounts and promises of upgrades and marketing dollars, YOU could be out of a job if they replace YOUR tool of choice...
Just some thoughts...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
The trick is not to do ROI - instead you do risk analysis of not undertaking the project.
You mention that the current site is 8 years out of date. In your risk analysis, state that prospective clients that view the website will see that information is outdated and will look elsewhere. This qualifies as a cataclysmic severity since it means no inbound customers (as they are more attracted to some webpage that is moderatly up to date.)
Just remember one change you have to make in your risk analysis: s/risk/certainty/g.
If the manager insists on ROI, head to the advertising department and ask them for their figures. As you know, a website is merely another way of advertising, and no advertising means no business - in fact, advertsing may give you advise on working around your roadblocks as necessary (or otherwise work on your behalf.)
simple.
Do I have some customers? Did they find me becasue of my sign? there is your base for an ROI.
Of course, no one did it because it was pretty obvious you needed a sign.
For a web site, yiour ROI is generated traffic, as well as removing costs from other places of business. For example, can a support web site save you money in man power? telco costs? Does it have a marketing value? Does it have a sale value?
That like saying yu ca't get some ROI number friom a tv commercial, which you can.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This isn't the 1600s and a website isn't a wooden sign. In this day and age, all marketing tools are expected to prove that they were worth the investment. Why do you think so many questionaires have that "How did you hear about us?" question at the bottom. The guys at the top want to make sure they aren't wasting their money on advertising that doesn't work.
I think your understanding of ROI is a little narrow....Yes, in many cases it boils down to who bought your product in the long run but it's not always that simple in the short term and reporting aspects. What you track to prove ROI depends on the company and for a website it's definately not always "customers bought an average of 500 more [PRODUCT] on our site per month since we launched the new site design."
For example, on a new car dealership site you usually don't expect to sell the car online. You use it to get qualified leads. Get the prospective customers information and decide if they're worth the manhours it would take to close the sale in person. Schedule test drives and leave it up to the sales guy at the dealership to close the sale. He'll spend less time talking to people who aren't really serious and (if everything works properly) end up with more commissions and make more money for the dealership. The number of people referred from the site is something you CAN track as well as the percentage of them ended up being successful sales. Compare that to the number of people who wander in off the street and what percentage of them are successful sales and you have your proof that the site was worth the $$ spent.
Arsenic is natural. Hemlock is organic.
Here's a simple concept that he could have learned from playing The Sims for half an hour:
Your Sim is miserable in his apartment. He has a crappy TV that doesn't make him very happy. You are confident that a big plasma TV would make him much happier and thus he'd work harder, get promoted, and earn far more than the cost of the TV back.
Sensible person's approach: Earn what you can. Upgrade the TV for a slightly better one. Earn faster with the better TV. Upgrade once you can. Repeat until you have the plasma TV.
Idiot's approach: Sell the old TV. Afterall, it sucks. Go to buy a plasma. Discover you don't have the money to buy the plasma and now you can't even afford to buy back the crappy TV. Watch your Sim get depressed, skip work, and get demoted, earning less.
Yes, a wholly new website would be spiffy and, quite possibly, keen too. But there's not enough money for a wholly new website that proves the shining vision of the net as somewhere to invest.
A sensible manager - or a ten year old kid who's played The Sims - will thus not try and gut the whole damn thing. They'll take a week, a month, whatever period they figure they can handle and do the best job they can on one small part. They'll then use that success to argue for better resources to work on a bigger part next. In time they'll have proved repeatedly that money spent on them is a good investment, be doing large chunks at a time, with a well resourced team - and all those small parts will add up anyway.
If I walked up to my CEO and said, "I need 8 server side engineers, 4 html guys, 3 artists, 2 content writers, 2 sys admins, 3 db guys and two secretaries, can I have a $2.4m budget please?" I would damn well expect to get laughed out of his office.
On the other hand, if I took myself and the one other guy I had and proved a $100,000/year return on investment from our first $25,000 of work, I'd expect a much easier time of justifying an extra head count to hire on maybe an artist. The next project spends say $40,000 and makes $150,000 extra a year and I can likely get a dba. Repeat enough times, consistently giving the company more than it pays and I'll get my 24 person team. Ask for all 24 of them all at once and I should absolutely expect to get laughed out of the office and then fired for being an utterly clueless manager.
...of a manager's role.
He's a manager, not a coder. He doesn't need to push back, he needs to spend his time managing.
What do you think management is if it isn't "pushing"? This fellow is managing a major web development project, and resource allocation (resources being time, money and people) is an essential, unavoidable part of the process. Unless you are a "supreme manager" who answers to nobody, like a president or COO or something, then it is this guys job to estimate as accurately as possible what resources are required to achieve the goals of the project.
Market the idea to the rest of company. Sending out mockups and ROI case studies of other companies can entice your manager and/or his manager
If this guy was already tasked with managing this project and already has coders working on it, the appropriate time to obtain buy-in has long since passed--his employer has bunged things up big time if there is no buy-in now. In my place of employment, it is NOT the job of project managers to sell the project (whether it is internal or external)--there are other people to do that ("business development specialists" for external projects and committees for internal projects).
Use your budget more effectively.
I'd say that you should remove the first two words...this guy should "budget more effectively" and have a strong argument to back those numbers to his superiors (this is where the "pushback" comes into play). If your superior is not convinced then you must compromise on your deliverables/goals. If this guy cannot get enough of a budget to hire more coders then examine outsourcing/contractors. If the budget is still too lean, make do with the meagre number of people and revise the schedule, and be firm to superiors about that schedule. If the schedule is too long then cut down features/scope. If you are still not in a good place then push to have the project cancelled entirely. That'll get the big bosses attention and if it is as important as your company's online presence that is 1990s stale then the guy being the roadblock will have drawn a lot of negative attention to himself.
Build trust. You need to gain a reputation as someone who gets things done, and can be trusted with a task.
Not just getting things done...getting them done on time and within budget. Even Larry the Cable Guy can "git 'er done". To garner a reputation of trust you must set attainable goals and meet them reliably. You won't get respect by throwing together your online store in record time if it is full of bugs, awkward to use and has a dumb security hole like SQL injection that lets a hacker clear all passwards or steal customer purchasing information..even though you "got things done".
Don't make excuses. Learn to put a positive spin on timetables, instead.
Not always possible to put a positive spin on scheduling things (I wonder how positive BillG or ballistic Ballmer felt when they learned Vista was pushed back to January 2007). And there are always valid excuses--I prefer to call them "reasons". You just have to acknowledge when you are responsible for them and make sure people know when THEY are responsible for them. And don't dewll on the excuse, concentrate on the solution.
Don't commit to a project unless you and your superiors are agreed on the timetables.
If your employer is as screwed up as I suspect this guys was, it is possible that he wasn't voluntarily committed to the schedule. In fact, he might not have even been given a specific schedule or had much cooperation in defining the goals or the design. In that case there will never be an end. He says his employer's site has been stagnant for eight years...back in the 1990s it was the thing to do to put "under construction" on a site. I'd bet that this site might still have those nasty little notices on it.
I got into the same deal, but with a much larger monster of an organization, with lots of developers, thousands of servers, and endless financial resources. Here's what I learned: two passionate and committed coders with a clear understanding of their company's business and customers can produce more than an army of egos, project managers, analysts, disengaged sponsors.
I suggest you pick a target that the two of you can hit in 30 days, communicate that goal to your boss's boss, bust your asses to hit the target in 20 days, then spend the next 10 days figuring out your next 30 day trick. Rinse and repeat.
As you complete these little projects, you will A) gain the trust and confidence of the guys with the money, and B) increase your own confidence in your team's abilities. Yes, there will be bugs and system-wide FUps, but that's the price of playing the game with 2 guns in a 4x6 cube.
With time you will learn to identify the low-risk opportunities for investments, where the ROI is high and the time to execute is low. Some of these investments might be adding new features, others may be in hiring a new person. Management will come to respect your judgment.
The point is to run your shop like your own business and spend your time and money as if it were your own. If you're not making money for the company, and seeking ways to make even more, then they don't need you. Yes, having a few more people sounds appealing, but you need to have a direction to send them first.
Since you took the job, I am not going to comment on that decision. And I am not going to go over what you should have done before you started the project either. You said it was a mid-level manager that give you grief. Can you convince people higher up that you need more resources and time ? If you can, you can try that trick. If not, it is too late to convince these mid-level people you need more resources and time. You have to win their trust first. Your best bet now is to see whether there is any quick fixes you can deliver and can make measurable changes to the business. If you can, focus on delivering these little system changes that make big business change. Don't try to do a complete and perfect job. You don't have the time and resources, remember ? With these new changes, implement them, and measure. Show them how much business change you have achieved, you may be able to win their trust, and convince them that you need more resources. If these fails, open the third envelope.
Big
The only problem was that I didn't expect a (respected) mid-level manager to be the road block.
One of the most important issues when you plan a project is to analyze the environment of it (i.e. the environment in which the project is run) and make a list of all (potential) stakeholders. There are potential stakeholders who will definitely try to block or even sabotage your project - but there are also stakeholders who could possibly help you.
In order to have a successful project, it's not enough to specify what has to be done, when and with whom but also in which environment the project is running, what was before the project started, what will be after the end of the project, what is part of the project and specifically also what is NOT part of the project.
I am not sure if the manager you mention above existed already before you started that project, but having learned lots of lessons from all my projects, I even suggest for planning for potential roadblocking middle managers.
Planning in this sense means specifically to try to figure out who the stakeholders are and what you as a project manager (or project team member) will do ("Actions") to get the stakeholder on board or to make sure he/she cannot hinder your job (i.e. make a list of all actions/activities against your potential "foes" and a list of actions/activities to support your "friends").
A friend of mine wrote his Master Thesis specifically on "Why Projects Fail" (unfortunately it's only in German) and the main reason is usually not bad budgeting, insufficient staffing or moving targets. Of course, those reasons are valid, too, but the main reason is that Project Managers fail to account for stakeholders.
Which brings me to the subject "Project Marketing". Someone above said that "Selling the project" is not his job as Project Manager since there a "Business Development Managers" and such. That's exactly the opposite. Selling the project (inside and outside of the company) is one of the core tasks of a Project Manager. I am not talking about "Selling a Service" or "Selling a Product", i.e. I am specifically not talking about selling the Project Result but the project itself. So, it is of utmost importance to keep doing project marketing in order to gain support or keep support and in order to prevent road-blocks such as your middle manager.
We are in the middle of a major website redesign (the current site has not been updated in over 8 years) and everyone is asking why it takes so long to complete, and almost daily I have to explain that I do not have enough manpower.
This is a big mistake. Where's the Project Marketing? Where is Project Status Reports? If people do ask, then use it as an opportunity to sell the project to them. I mean, come on, when people ask - especially on a daily basis - it means, they are interested and you mus, as a good Project Manager, seize the opportunity to market your project.
Marketing a project also means gaining support from managers, making people interested in your project to project champions, your evangelists... If only you could convert those people interested in your project to your evangelists, you wouldn't have that much of a problem gaining support and probably getting more people then.
It might even help you in pushing aside the road-block. Even if he/she is a respected middle manager, he has probably lots of friends - if you could only get one or two of them to become your evangelist...
Of course, I can't prove ROI until the new site is launched (a great Catch22).
A NO-NO!! If you haven't proven the business case of your project beforehand why start it in the first place?
I am sorry, but this is a wh
The website development and graphics are all contracted out. Only the content is developed in-house, by a scientific writer, so that we can be sure that it is both correct and well written. We can't ask web developers to check the content. I assume the legal department also checks it for any statements that various regulatory authories might object against. (Or adding SEC-required disclaimers etc.) I think that this in itself is a good model.
The biggest potential problem that I see is a tendency of upper management to try to influence detail design, and their unfortunate tendency towards glitz: Flash animations, rolling menus, ticker bars, high-resolution graphics, and the like. These might consume a lot of time and money and only rarely contribute to a good website. (One of the few happy exceptions I have seen is Nikon's microscopy training website, which is great.) But my personal preference would be for a site that is styled in a minimalistic way, light and fast.
1) What is the priority of your project?
2) Based on #1, ask for resources based on apparent priority.
If they do not meet your requests for item #2, kill the project. Otherwise it will just drag on as a zombie and suck your life away.
To kick start the project, try to find an upper manager who is enthusiastic about the project. In project management lingo this is called a 'sponsor'. This person will politic with the rest of management to keep the project alive, a high priority and lobby for money.
If you cannot find a sponsor, kill the project. Use your budget and personnel where they can have an impact, not on a zombie project.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
32 retail electronics stores? My guess is Fry's.
I always thought Fry's web site looked like their web staff was pretty much one guy.
With a drinking problem.