Project Management Tips for Successful Web Development Projects

Are you in charge of managing web development projects? This can be a very stressful job and this is particularly true when you work with outsourced staff. With people working remotely and sometimes even across different time zones, it can be a challenge to keep track of where everyone is and ensure that projects are delivered on time and with a high level of quality.

To overcome these problems, as the project manager, you need to ensure that there is a good system in place to deliver these projects. Here, we are taking you through our top tips for how you can painlessly and efficiently manage web development projects.

Use Kanban Board

Most of you have already heard of the Kanban system as it has become a hugely popular way to manage projects, staff, and workflow over the past few decades. Essentially, with this type of management board, you can assign tasks to people working for you both in the office and in remote locations and keep track easily of where they are at and how the web development project as a whole is coming along.

This ensures that you, as the project manager, stay on top of things and can instantly identify areas that may need a little extra help to keep the workflow moving smoothly. This also means that you can get rid of email as trying to keep track of a project through email is a recipe for disaster and it becomes impossible to indicate what’s where in the project.

Create Subtasks within Kanban

What’s great about Kanban system is that you can zoom in on different areas of your web development project to find out more. This system gives you constant collaboration capabilities and clients enjoy it better as they have a good understanding of what stage exactly their project is at. Try and delegate out subtasks and provide specific instructions with these to ensure that the work is carried out to your specifications.

Ensure Due Dates Are Clear

One of the crucial responsibilities of a project manager is ensuring that the project is delivered on time and that there are no delays. It is vital that your team is aware of these deadlines and that everyone knows when each of their individual deadlines is due. This also gives you a clearer understanding of the workflow and you can see what subtasks have not been completed and why there is a lack of progress there.

Organize Tasks in Logical Order

When you are assigning tasks to employees on the Kanban board, it is important that you assign things in order of priority. Any tasks on your to-do list that are extremely urgent need to be completed first so you can get it out of the way and then focus on other tasks. Have a chat with the clients and find out what their priorities are and then you can organize Kanban boards around this. These tasks also need to have deadlines attached to them so that you can ensure that you are meeting client expectations.

Put Milestones in Place

After you have organized tasks in order of priority and each of them has respective deadlines attached, it is then time to create milestones for this work to keep the whole team motivated from the start to the end of the project. There are lots of different ways that you can set up milestones on Kanban boards so choose the one that best suits your business and what you have to offer. This ensures that no deadlines are missed as you will easily be able to see what stage you are at in the project and if there are areas that are falling behind.

Keep All Project Resources and Conversations in One Place

When you are leading a project involving a large team, it is easy to lose track of where you have put certain resources or you can get confused with different communication channels – email, Skype or Kanban boards. This is why it is so important to the success of your web development project that you keep everything in one place so that all files and information are readily accessible to all members of the team. Then, there are no excuses if someone cannot find important information that should be available to them.

Are you ready to take on your next web development project? Use our top project management tips to ensure that it is a success.