Creating an Intranet using Lotus Web Content Management Introduction Part 2 Project Planning Many projects have failed due to poor project planning. The following article gives an overview of the typical phases of a wcm project and what items should be considered when implementing a project plan. Some of the reasons it is important to plan for your web project are: To define and manage the scope of the project To break the project into manageable chunks To define milestones and deadlines To track progress and control the project To identify the necessary resources To manage risk Typical Phases of a WCM Project The above are typical phases of a wcm project. These streams of activity overlap and can be run concurrently. Everything is iterative ensuring experience gained is fed back into the design, development, testing, tuning, training, etc. Regular drops of the site should be made onto the servers and tested repeatedly. It is also important that the client is involved during all phases and not only at completion.
Project Planning Tips Requirements Look at the requirements and try to rate them to the strengths of the product or the risk in implementing them. If possible change requirements to utilize the out of the box features of the product. Eg. Try to make your navigational metaphor meet what the wcm navigators can do. Try to define menus based on the search and sort criteria available in menu components. Minimise the use of JSP components This does not mean you cannot do these things. Understand that they increase the technical risk of the project. They move away from the most common deployment models. This means that you are more likely to have to write code, you may hit unexpected limitations in the product and could possibly have performance problems. Technical Risk Technical Risk is not necessarily something that must be avoided at all costs but it must be managed. Ensure that the project plan allows for time for things to go wrong and don t schedule the most risky items for the end of the project, put them as early as dependencies allow, or do prototyping if dependencies force it. What the WCM team have learnt from other projects Running projects in small iterations, with constant customer feedback and continuous testing, will greatly increase the chance of success During development, plan proper unit test frameworks, performance testing frameworks, profiling of code for performance tuning, continuous integration practices, etc Build sites following best practices and utilise product features appropriately Follow iterative development and use the latest development practices Start maintenance immediately, ensuring the launch is on up-to-date, well-tuned software, and maintenance procedures are rock solid If possible, don t commit to the project plan until the requirements gathering is complete. It is almost impossible to plan and estimate for a project when you don t know the detailed requirements
The Project Plan Analysis The following are some of the tasks and milestones that might be included on your project plan along with an idea of when they can be performed. Include some time for this even if the client tells they have already done it. They may not have covered everything required for a wcm project and at a minimum, time is required to review and understand what they have done. Kick off meeting Business Analysis Focus Groups Requirements gathering High level capacity planning Information Architecture Preparation of Analysis Document Reviews and updating of deliverables Analysis Document Signed Off IA Signed Off This is usually the first stage of a project Creative This will most likely be done by a dedicated creative company or an in-house creative department. Find out what they are delivering and incorporate their milestones if possible. If an existing creative design is being used ensure there is a task to source the existing graphics and style guide. Creation of concepts Key page treatments (Eg. Home page, menu page, landing page, search) Creation of production graphics Creation of style sheets and possibly the html (Sometimes this is done by the company producing the graphics and sometimes as part of the technical build) Testing and validating the html
Reviews and updating of deliverables Concept agreed on Graphic treatments Signed Off Production Graphics Created Style sheets and html complete and tested (if being delivered by external company) After the analysis has been completed and signed off. The creation of concepts could possibly run in parallel with the analysis phase. Technical Design Solution Design Capacity Planning Technical Architecture Portal and WCM Technical Design Reviews and updating of deliverables Technical Design Document Signed Off After the analysis has been completed and signed off. Some of it can overlap with the creative Test Plan Development Draft a UAT test plan Draft plans for performance and scalability testing Review and update test plans UAT Test Plan Complete
Performance and Scalability Test Plan Complete After the analysis is complete. It can run in parallel with the technical design. It is important to start thinking about testing early in the project and not just before launch. Implementation WCM Build (Eg. Build presentation templates, components, workflows etc) Portal Build (Eg. Portal pages ) Configure Search Unit Testing Creative QA Setup Development, staging and production environments Implement security Technical Build Complete Unit Testing Complete Development complete Staging Environment ready Production Environment ready Ready for UAT. After the analysis and technical design are complete. Some aspects of the build will depend on the creative also being complete but some can be started without it. Setting up the different environments should happen as soon as possible after design is complete so there is plenty of time for testing and resolving any performance or capacity problems early Testing User Acceptance Testing Performance testing System integration testing
Syndication testing Long run testing Failover testing Test maintenance procedures Bug fixing Regression testing UAT Complete Performance Testing Complete Site ready for launch Testing should run throughout the project so any problems can be dealt with long before the launch date. Prepare to keep testing during project and re-iterate / retune. UAT can begin as soon as representative content has been entered into the site. Content Content development Content Creator Training Import of content Content entry Content QA Content entry complete Ready for UAT As soon as the site is ready to accept content, content should start being entered. To validate the design it is important to get content in early for performance testing, test of security etc. It doesn t matter if some of it is dummy content if the real content is not available. If importing take the time to make the import as seamless as possible. Test the import with a few documents and check for problems or aspects of the import than can be improved. Fix the problems and import again. This iteration may happen many times during the project life cycle but it will mean the final import may require a lot less manual manipulation of the imported content. Don t leave the content entry to the very end!
Training Prepare customized content creator training course Run Admin Training Courses Run Content Creator Courses Customized content creator training course complete Training complete Administrator training can generally run at any time during the phase of the project. Content Creator training can be run at any time if the standard course is being used. If the course is being customized for the client then the training will not be able to run until the course material is ready and there is a site ready to use for content creation. Ideally the content creation training should run right before the content entry is about to commence. This means it is still fresh in the minds of the people who are entering the content.
Roles on a project Different types of users are responsible for different tasks when deploying a Web Content Management system or when creating and managing Web sites and Web content. For more details on the different roles refer to the Info Centre page: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wpdoc/v6r1/index.jsp? topic=/com.ibm.wp.ent.doc_v615/wcm/wcm_scenarios.html Some of the roles that you might find on a WCM project are: System Roles Technical architect Database architect Database administrator WebSphere Portal administrator Security specialist Performance engineer Data analyst WCM Roles WCM Administrator WCM Developer Java Developer Content Author Content Approver WCM Tester Project Roles Project Sponsor Business Analyst Project manager Information Architect
Usability Specialist Graphic Designer User Acceptance Tester Website viewer (The end user) Copywriter Legal consultant Librarian Trainer Conclusion Make sure that all of the project tasks are understood and documented in a project plan. Ensure that the relevant, experienced resources are identified and available. Ensure that there is a project manager who is managing the project plan through out the project duration.