The start of a new project is a lot of fun. You set up all sorts of new things in hopes of using them to create something great. There are meetings, new ideas, new designs, and a whole lot of possibilities.

Most projects start with things up in the air: what platform are we going to use? Are we going to use this feature? How will we take donations online? It’s very easy to come up with questions. It is far more difficult to settle on an answer. The problem is, for large and small projects taken on by Catholic schools, there is no set way to make those decisions. It is just assumed that they are going to be made somehow.

Suddenly, you have too many cooks, and all of them can put an ingredient into the soup if they want. How do we stop this? Luckily, it can be pretty easy.

Create a Process

There is a familiar scene at meetings about design and function of websites. Someone has an idea, and to resolve it and move on to the next topic, the people who will ultimately implementing that idea say “that’s a good idea, we’ll do that”. Obviously this ends up creating a seemingly endless string of design changes and features, because everyone in the school has been trained to think that their idea can be easily incorporated. The project gets bloated, slows down, and things don’t happen.

An effective way to deal with this is to set up a formal process for evaluating and implementing new ideas. With a tool like SuggestionBox.com, you can tell everyone at the meeting that ideas should be added directly via the web solution you’ve chosen, and that’s the only way to get consideration from the web decision team.

It may be easy to blurt out something in a meeting, but to go and submit it and write it out is going to separate the ideas on a whim from the ideas that have some thought behind them and might be worth considering. As an added bonus, you get a way to organize ideas.

Follow Through on that Process

No web team is an island, and the ideas and input from people in your school are at times essential to creating a great site. That’s why it’s important to follow through on the process that you’ve decided on for taking in ideas and issues.

For instance, if you’ve received an idea about a new feature, but have decided that it isn’t in the best interest of the site right now, a good idea is to send that person an email or call them up and tell them. It’s extremely important to let people know that you appreciate their ideas and take them seriously. Giving a reason for rejecting an idea shows that you’ve given it some thought.

Define Your Decision Team

Notice how in the previous examples I am implying that there is some sort of decision hierarchy in place. Somewhere along the line, someone can say yes or no, and that makes it final.

Some of you reading might think that this only exists in some fantasy land, and that in real life people in meetings assume or cede authority at whim, creating an inevitable chaos.

That is why it is incredibly important to define a decision making team at the very onset of the project, and (this is very crucial) tell everyone about it. A decision team doesn’t make any sense if nobody knows about it. The ground rules should be made clear: the buck stops at us. Why? Because to keep a project moving, that’s the only solution that works.

Who is On Your Team?

This can be a hard decision, but here are some things to consider:

• Your team should be five people. Three is a clique, seven is too much, and even numbers can result in ties.
• Your team should not be made up of people from the same department.
• Team members should be educated in some degree on some web topics (maybe send them to this blog, hint hint). A team member who doesn’t know what they are talking about makes the point of having a decision team moot.
• Pick people you trust.
• Although its tempting, a “dream team” with a member from each department has its drawbacks. Each person will become an advocate for their department, naturally, but will feel a sense of pressure from other people in the department to make things go their way.

Conclusions

Having a knowledgable, involved decision making team that treats everyone with respect and dutifully considers ideas through a set process is a ticket to making the development process of your website as smooth as you can. There will be bumps in the road, yes, but at the very least, you’ll have a great system to deal with them.

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Tags: feedback, process, team

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Implementation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.